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What’s a girl to do???  I’m getting frustrated.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/20/technology/20google.html?
ex=1138424400&en=e24b8d95eaafc40a&ei=5009&partner=MSN_NYTHOME

By KATIE HAFNER and MATT RICHTEL
Published: January 20, 2006

SAN FRANCISCO, Jan. 19 – The Justice Department has asked a federal judge to compel Google, the Internet search giant, to turn over records on millions of its users’ search queries as part of the government’s effort to uphold an online pornography law.
Google has been refusing the request since a subpoena was first issued last August, even as three of its competitors agreed to provide information, according to court documents made public this week. Google asserts that the request is unnecessary, overly broad, would be onerous to comply with, would jeopardize its trade secrets and could expose identifying information about its users.

The dispute with Google comes as the government is moving aggressively on several fronts to obtain data on Internet activity to achieve its law enforcement goals, from domestic security to the prosecution of online crime. Under the antiterrorism law known as the USA Patriot Act, for example, the Justice Department has demanded records on library patrons’ Internet use.

Those efforts have encountered resistance on privacy grounds.

The government’s move in the Google case, however, is different in its aims. Rather than seeking data on individuals, it says it is trying to establish a profile of Internet use that will help it defend the Child Online Protection Act, a 1998 law that would impose tough criminal penalties on individuals whose Web sites carried material deemed harmful to minors.

The law has faced repeated legal challenges. Two years ago, the Supreme Court upheld an injunction blocking its enforcement, returning the case to a district court for further examination of Internet-filtering technology that might be an alternative in achieving the law’s aims.

The government’s motion to compel Google’s compliance was filed on Wednesday in Federal District Court in San Jose, Calif., near Google’s headquarters in Mountain View. The subpoena and the government’s motion were reported on Thursday by The San Jose Mercury News.

In addition to records of a week of search queries, which could amount to billions of search terms, the Google subpoena seeks a random list of a million Web addresses in its index.

Charles Miller, a spokesman for the Justice Department, said on Thursday that three Google competitors in Internet search technology – America Online, Yahoo and MSN, Microsoft’s online service – had complied with subpoenas in the case.

Mr. Miller declined to say exactly how the data would be used, but according to the government’s filings, it would help estimate the prevalence of material that could be deemed harmful to minors and the effectiveness of filtering software. Opponents of the pornography law contend that filtering software could protect minors effectively enough to make the law unnecessary.

The government’s motion calls for Google to surrender the information within 21 days of court approval.

Although the government has modified its demands since last year, Google said Thursday that it would continue to fight. “Google is not a party to this lawsuit, and their demand for information overreaches,” said Nicole Wong, Google’s associate general counsel, referring to government lawyers. “We intend to resist their motion vigorously.”

Philip B. Stark, a statistics professor at the University of California, Berkeley, who was hired by the Justice Department to analyze search engine data in the case, said in legal documents that search engine data provided crucial insight into information on the Internet.

“Google is one of the most popular search engines,” he wrote in a court document related to the case. Thus, he said, Google’s databases of Web addresses and user searches “are directly relevant.”

But Danny Sullivan, editor of SearchEngineWatch, an online industry newsletter, questioned the need for a subpoena. “Is this really something the government needs Google to help them with?” he said.

As for Google’s rivals, MSN declined to speak directly to the case but released a statement saying it generally “works closely with law enforcement officials.”

Mary Osako, a Yahoo spokeswoman, said the company complied with the subpoena “on a limited basis.” And Andrew Weinstein, a spokesman for AOL, said that company gave the Justice Department a generic list of anonymous search terms from a one-day period.

Susan P. Crawford, a professor at the Cardozo School of Law in New York, said she could understand why the companies complied. “There’s this real perception that if you’re not with us you’re against us,” she said. “So the major companies will cooperate with enormously burdensome requests just to avoid future vengeance being wreaked on them” by the Justice Department.

In its brief history, Google has made “Don’t be evil” an operating principle, even as it has come to endure scrutiny and criticism over its increasing inroads into a variety of businesses beyond Web searches, from advertising to mapping.

And Google and its rivals have been criticized for their business practices in China, where Google and MSN have filtered keywords like “human rights” and “democracy” out of their search-engine results. Last fall, it was revealed that Yahoo had cooperated with authorities seeking the identity of a Chinese e-mail subscriber who had distributed a government warning about protests; he is now serving a 10-year prison term.

While its court filings against the Justice Department subpoena have emphasized the burden of compliance and threat to its trade secrets, Google also pointed to a chilling effect on its customers.

“Google’s acceding to the request would suggest that it is willing to reveal information about those who use its services,” it said in an October letter to the Justice Department. “This is not a perception Google can accept. And one can envision scenarios where queries alone could reveal identifying information about a specific Google user, which is another outcome that Google cannot accept.”

For its part, the Justice Department said the data received from Google’s rivals showed that the search query information did not contain “any additional personal identifying information” and that trade secrets would be protected under procedures at the trial court.

“Google thus should have no difficulty in complying in the same way as its competitors have,” the government’s motion said.

Critics of the effort to subpoena Google say the immediate issue is not pornography or privacy, but whether the government has established its need for the information.

“The government’s attitude, apparently, is that it’s entitled to information without justification,” said Aden Fine, an attorney for the American Civil Liberties Union, which has led the fight against the 1998 pornography law. “Like everyone else in litigation, they need to justify their request for information.”

Even as the government has yet to put the 1998 law into effect, the pornography industry has faced a legal offensive on other fronts. Congress in recent years has increased the resources and sharpened the laws available to the Justice Department to go after makers of hard-core videos and other content.

At the same time, though, the industry is booming, recording $12.6 billion in revenue in 2005 from distribution of sexually explicit content, and from other forms of entertainment, like strip clubs. A big reason for the growth is technology, with sales from Internet distribution hitting $2.5 billion in 2005, according to testimony given to the Senate on Thursday.

American Web sites that show explicit content get as many as 60 million visitors a day, according to testimony given to the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation by Paul Cambria, general counsel for the Adult Freedom Foundation, an organization that represents the interests of the pornography industry.

In fighting the 1998 law, the civil liberties union has argued that whether or not pornography is available on the Internet, the law is unconstitutional because it will limit the distribution of acceptable forms of free speech. Under the law, Web site operators face criminal charges for publishing sexually explicit material unless they have a way of verifying that viewers are over 17.

Whatever the courts ultimately decide on the pornography law at issue, however, Tim Wu, a professor at Columbia Law School, said the Google case pointed to a larger struggle for the identity of the Internet.

“Search engines are at the center of that battle, both here and in other countries,” said Professor Wu. “By asserting its power over search engines, using threats of force, the government can directly affect what the Internet experience is. For while Google is fighting the subpoena, it’s clear that if they lose, they will comply.”

The words aren’t mine but the sentiment is.

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Arrested Development: The tragedy of Michael Jackson.
By Jacob Weisberg
Posted Tuesday, June 14, 2005, at 3:35 PM PT
I’ve never believed Michael Jackson was a pedophile. To begin with, he doesn’t fit the profile. Child abusers tend to do the same thing again and again. According to one study, the average molester of boys commits 280 crimes over a lifetime. Yet despite the lure of getting rich by making accusations against Jacko, only two alleged victims have ever come forward with detailed allegations.

What’s more, those two accusations, separated by 10 years, don’t conform to a pattern. Not to put too fine a point on it, but the accuser in the recent case—the cancer victim—alleged groping by Jackson. Jackson’s previous accuser, whose family settled a civil suit in 1993 for $20 million, accused the singer of more extreme abuse, including oral sex.

But the main reason I never bought the prosecutor’s depiction of Jackson as a premeditating sexual predator “grooming” his victims is that it doesn’t ring true in psychological terms. Whether or not he has ever touched a boy inappropriately, Michael Jackson seems too emotionally stunted to act in any grown-up way, including a deviant
sexual one. Naive, juvenile, and terribly damaged, he seems pathetically incapable not just of criminal intent, but of adult consciousness.

People tend to throw up hands at Michael Jackson’s multifarious bizarreness. But is it really so strange? The boy was forced to work by a cruel and physically abusive father starting at the age of 7. (If he’d been sent into a factory or coal mine, instead of onstage, we’d have more compassion for him.) As a boy, he was denied what even most abused and underprivileged children have: school, friends, and play.

Instead, Michael was made into a performing sexualized freak, a boy whose soprano voice kindled passion in grown women. He was made to witness adult sexuality at an age when it can only have been terrifying and incomprehensible to him. By 10, he was performing in strip clubs and hiding under the covers in hotel rooms while his older brothers got it on with groupies. At 11—the age at which his psyche seems frozen—he was a superstar. “My childhood was completely taken away from me,” he has said. Almost everything that seems freakish about him can be explained by his poignant, doomed effort to get his stolen childhood back.

To describe the world Michael Jackson has created around himself as a childhood fantasy isn’t quite accurate. Thanks to wealth and celebrity, he has been able to live as a superannuated child. With the help of plastic surgery and dramatic affectation, he has made himself look and sound pre-pubescent. He amuses himself with fancy toys, fantastic pets, amusement park rides, and a personal magician.

What emerged at the trial wasn’t the picture of a man playing with children in order to seduce them. It was the picture of a man playing with children because he sees himself as one of them. He and his friends in the “Apple Head Club” stayed up all night playing videogames, watching television, and eating popcorn. In the absence of parental authority, they would sometimes drink wine out of Coke cans, make crank calls, look at dirty magazines, and try to gross each other out (head-licking, anyone?). A child in his own mind, Jackson sees all of his behavior as completely innocent. It was a sleepover party, not a seduction or even the sublimation of one. Hence his sincere-sounding admission to Martin Bashir, the British filmmaker whose 2003 documentary Living With Michael Jackson initiated his recent troubles, that sleeping with young boys is loving, and not sexual. Jackson appears not to comprehend adult sexuality enough to get why people might divine a more sinister intent.

There is, of course, a literary precedent here. “I am Peter Pan,” Jackson told Bashir. Even without his cosmetic remodeling as Mary Martin, this identification would be hard to miss. At the Neverland Ranch, as in the Darling nursery, the boys all sleep in the same room. Michael, like Peter, casts himself as father, big brother, and ring-leader. He takes his lost boys on romps and adventures. Girls are not welcome. One of the few exceptions was his sister, whom he calls “Tinkerbell.” But as Jackson knows, Peter Pan is not entirely a happy story. The boys will return from Neverland and grow into adults. Peter cannot.

A more interesting comparison may be between Jackson and the author of that fantasy, J.M. Barrie. Like Jackson, Barrie suffered from a kind of arrested development, brought on by the death of his beloved older brother when he was 6. According to Andrew Birkin’s book J.M. Barrie and the Lost Boys: The Real Story Behind Peter Pan, Barrie’s marriage remained unconsummated, while his deepest relationships were with the Llewelyn Davies brothers, the five boys he met in Kensington Gardens in London who formed the basis for the characters in Peter Pan. Barrie performed tricks for the children, played with them, more or less moved into their home, and fantasized, in print, about sharing his bed with them. But there is no evidence of any physical involvement. The best guess is that Barrie was celibate or asexual.

Today we find the idea of nonsexuality more bizarre than deviant sexuality. But in Michael Jackson’s case, it seems more plausible than any other explanation. All of Jackson’s oddities seem to be reactions to what he suffered as a child. Manhandled by strangers, he became a mask-wearing, gloved germophobe. Tyrannized and abused by his father, he turned hyperbolically gentle and generous to children. Terrified by adult sexuality, he froze in pre-adolescent immaturity.

“I haven’t been betrayed or deceived by children,” Jackson once said. “Adults have let me down.” Kudos to 12 in Santa Barbara, Calif., who didn’t.
 

I love this stuff! The world is a weird wacky place to be.
A man (identified in court papers as John Doe), who suffered injuries and sexual dysfunction 11 years ago when a woman unexpectedly changed positions during intercourse (and fell on him and fractured his penis), was again turned down in his attempt to sue the woman. The Court of Appeals of Massachusetts said in May that it would be impossible for a judge or jury to decide which movements in consensual sex were legally reasonable or unreasonable. [ABC News-AP, 5-16-05]

http://www.msnbc.com/comics/nw.asp?vts=62220052210