Privacy Issues and the affect on daily lives

Is the Bush Administation, destined to be the worst presidential administation in history, using the issue of Child Porn to violate civil liberties?

A recent article that my partner ran across explains how the Bush Administation is trying to force Google, the internet search engine, to comply with a subpoena to turn over records of searches. Their claims are that they are attempting to defend the "Child Online Protection Act". But to me, it seems more like yet another violation of civil liberties, privacy and the operations of a legitimate business.

Google is, in fact, fighting the subpoena by stating that the request is "over reaching" because is not part of any lawsuit relevant to the case itself. I tend to agree.

In a previous article, I had spoken bluntly about child porn and how it seemed the world was not listening. Still, as time passes, I'm still not being heard on this at all. Still, articles online don't read like it's all about child porn. Instead, Google was asked to turn over records of one million random searches to show how often people search for porn, legal or not. It has almost become a predictable nature for this Administration to not do it's own research and instead, violate the privacy rights of American Citizens... Law abiding or not.

Consider how often search engines are used on a daily basis, for homework, celebrities and research on porn, by those who want to violate our first amendment rights to look at legal pornography. Now consider the deep desires for privacy. What would happen if nobody trusted search engines anymore. Would they go belly up? Hell yes.

Just the fact that anti-porn advocates actually look up porn in search indexes would put them right along with everybody else who may search for anti-bush sites or frequently read blogs that point out the illegal activities of the Government. Are we to be afraid to excercise our rights as Americans? Is paranoia patriotic?

Also, needing to be pointed out, what about those people who end up clicking one link and finding themselves at a totally different site that does contain adult material or even illegal material. You can't expect everybody to know about pop up blockers or site blockers. Remember, there are still a lot of people out there that would not be able to read Email if it wasn't for the pretty little icon on their desktop.

However, there is always the opposite. There are people out there so internet savvy that they can find anything, and they usually get caught when they look up illegal materials. Even so, random use of search engine for adult material is still protected under our rights to privacy, civil liberties and basically being adults. Hell, if they won't even let us look at naked people, then why do they let us drink, smoke, gamble, get drafted, die in wars and own property? Come on you idiots, you are systematically taking away everything that it means to be a free citizen of this country.

We either need to impeach or have a new revolution via the voting booths.

Yes, I do believe something needs to be done about child porn. Yes, I think that ISPs should be made aware of child porn sites and block them at the server, giving no access to the clients. Yes, I believe that parents should monitor their children's internet habits. But I do not believe that the governement has any right to know what legal things we do online or subpoena a search engine to hand over results that could violate the privacy of the search engine's protected ways of doing business.

Ready or not, we may have to fight for our rights.