Google's response to the U. S. Department of Justice demanding disclosure of two full months’ worth of search queries that the company received from its users, as well as all the URLs in Google’s index:
"Google is, of course, concerned about the availability of materials harmful to minors on the Internet, but that shared concern does not render the Government's request acceptable or relevant. In truth, the data demanded tells the Government absolutely nothing about either filters or the effectiveness of laws. Nor will the data tell the Government whether a given search would return any particular URL. Nor will the URL returned, by its name alone, tell the Government whether that URL was a site that contained material harmful to minors.
"But, the Government's request would tell the world much about Google's trade secrets and proprietary systems."
This response exemlifies all the types of things government departments get wrong when they issue subpoenas towards institutions that operate in technical niche industries. By being so general in stating the reasons why they need the subpoena, government ministers play into the hands of the employees who spend twenty hour days and six day weeks operating the intricacies of the industry.
The same thing has happened a number of time in obscure areas of the financial markets: bureaucratic departments bark out demands which highly-paid quantitive employees of the banks cooly refute, phrase by phrase, until it is legally irrefutable that any of those demands be met.
Comments