As part of an eight-year old battle over a federal law designed to shield children from online pornography, the US Justice Department has subpoenaed 4 major Internet companies for data on what people search for on the Web.
The subpoena was first issued last August, and while three of the companies; America Online, Yahoo and MSN have responded to some degree, Google has insisted on resisting the government's demand.
Now a federal judge has been asked to compel the search giant to turn-over a week's worth of search queries - tantamount to billions of search terms, as part of the government's effort to uphold the federal law on online pornography.
The subpoena also seeks a random sample of 1 million Web pages that can be searched in the vast databases maintained by Google, whose stated corporate mission is to "organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful".
Google says that the subpoena is unnecessary and overtly broad, and that complying with it would jeopardize both the company's trade secrets and sensitive user information.
Also, privacy advocates are seeing this as an attempt by the Bush administration to gain access to data showing how much pornography Google users seek in their Web searches. Many of them say that although they do not object to government subpoenas in criminal cases, the latest demand is so broad that it almost amounts to a fishing expedition.
However the US Justice Department asserts that the data will help estimate both the prevalence of online material which is deemed harmful for minors, plus the effectiveness of filtering software in blocking such data.
