Google rejects DOJ bid for search info

Reuters - Google Inc. on Friday formally rejected the U.S. Department of Justice's subpoena of data from the Web search leader, arguing that the demand violated the privacy of users' Web searches and its own trade secrets.

Responding to a motion by U.S. Attorney General Alberto Gonzales (see "Update: Feds wrestle Google over search records"), Google also said in a filing in U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California that the government demand to disclose Web search data was impractical.

The Bush administration is seeking to compel Google to hand over Web search data as part of a bid by the Justice Department to appeal a 2004 Supreme Court injunction of a law to penalize Web site operators that allow children to view pornography.

Google is going it alone in opposing the U.S. government request. Rivals Microsoft Corp. and Yahoo Inc. are among the companies that have complied with the Justice Department demand for data to be used to make its case.

Google's lawyers said the company shares the government's concern about materials that could be harmful to minors, but argued that the request for its data was irrelevant. They offered a series of technical arguments why the data was not useful.

The Mountain View, Calif.-based company said that complying with the U.S. government's request for "untold millions of search queries" would put an undue burden on Google, including a "week of engineer time to complete."

"Algorithms regularly change. The identical search query submitted today may yield a different result than the identical search conducted yesterday," attorneys from Perkins Coie LLP, the company's external legal counsel, argued in the filing.

Complying with the Justice Department request would also force Google to reveal how its Web search technology works -- something it jealously guards as a trade secret, the company argued. It refuses to disclose even the total number of searches conducted each day.


Google's resistance contrasts with a deal the company has struck with the Chinese government to censor some searches on a new site in China, a move that has drawn sharp criticism from members of the U.S. Congress and human rights activists.

"Google users trust that when they enter a search query into a Google search box ... that Google will keep private whatever information users communicate absent a compelling reason," attorneys for Google said in the filing.

The legal spat comes amid heightened sensitivity to privacy issues by the company as it recently began offering a new version of its Google Desktop service that vacuums up data