Judge: Google Required to Turn Over Some Data

In the war on pornography, the Department of Justice wants to know what folks are searching for online. Three major search engines -- Yahoo!, Microsoft, and AOL -- have already handed over requested data. Google fought back, but Tuesday, US District Judge James Ware said he will require Google to hand over at least some of the data requested by Justice, but he did express concern about search companies becoming surrogate government snoops.

The Bush Administration is trying to defend the 1998 Child Online Protection Act [COPA]. The ACUL sued and contends the law would criminalize information that is "acknowledged as valuable for adults but judged 'harmful to minors."

COPA has never been enforced. After it was signed, the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), the ACLU, and the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) sued on free speech grounds. The Philadelphia federal district court and a federal appeals court judged COPA unconstitutional. In 2002, the Supreme Court remanded the case to the lower court; in 2004, it upheld the ban on enforcing the law.

After remand, the District Court of Appeals ruled as summarized here:

On remand, the Court of Appeals upheld the injunction again, holding that: (1) the plaintiffs had established substantial likelihood of prevailing on claim that COPA was not narrowly tailored to achieve the Government's compelling interest and therefore failed the strict scrutiny test under the First Amendment, and (2) the plaintiffs had established a substantial likelihood of prevailing on their claim that COPA was unconstitutionally overbroad.

In its 2004 decision, the Court directed the Philadelphia district court to "determine whether there had been any changes in technology that would affect the constitutionality of the statute."