Google and Porn

the New York Times reports:

Kathryn Hanson, a former telecommunications engineer who lives in Oakland, Calif., was looking at BBC News online last week when she came across an item about a British politician who had resigned over a reported affair with a "rent boy."

It was the first time Ms. Hanson had seen the term, so, in search of a definition, she typed it into Google. As Ms. Hanson scrolled through the results, she saw that several of the sites were available only to people over 18. She suddenly had a frightening thought. Would Google have to inform the government that she was looking for a rent boy - a young male prostitute?

Ms. Hanson, 45, immediately told her boyfriend what she had done. "I told him I'd Googled 'rent boy,' just in case I got whisked off to some Navy prison in the dead of night," she said.

Ms. Hanson's reaction arose from last week's reports that as part of its effort to uphold an online pornography law, the Justice Department had asked a federal judge to compel Google to turn over records on millions of its users' search queries. Google is resisting the request, but three of its competitors - Yahoo, MSN and America Online - have turned over similar information.

Whatever you think of the propriety of the government requesting this kind of information, and the companies providing it, I think these types of concerns are misplaced. The results returned from a Google search of the term "rent boy" are hardly the stuff of child pornography or criminality. Googling "rent boy" doesn't constitute proof that one is looking to hire a hooker, any more so than googling cocaine proves that one is looking to snort some blow.

Show me a lawyer who thinks you are trafficking in cocaine because you Google that term, and I will show you an incompetent lawyer who should be disbarred. The vast majority of people who search for things on Google don't do so to engage in criminal activity, even if the thing they are Googling happens to be illegal.

That said, I do think the government's request is an inappropriate one, and the companies that have been served with such subpoenas should ignore or fight them, but not capitulate.