Last month I wrote a blog entry suggesting that Americans ought to think a little harder before they let the government invade their privacy with wiretaps. I had some responses that took the position that if I was against government wiretapping without warrants then perhaps I was for the terrorists. Today I am going to suggest that issuing a subpeona to Google to turn over its searches on a random basis is another step down the slippery invasion-of-privacy slope. No doubt this time I’ll be accused of being pro child pornography.
I don’t want the government to know what sites I am looking at even though my searches are perfectly innocent, or at least they appear that way to me. Sometimes I’ve been searching for a specific thing, maybe as a fact for a blog entry, and I’ve ended up in some odd places. It’s not always easy to tell what you’re going to get. The government claims that it’s not going to connect individuals to their searches. But given the recent trend, I’d rather not test that assertion.