Search Engines: Template Letter to Department of Justice
January 25, 2006It’s unfortunate that Yahoo!, MSN and AOL decided to cave in to the Bush adminstration’s vain request for a week’s worth of search engine search terms with which to resurrect a failed case to uphold a 1998 child porn law. Here’s how I think the search engines should have responded (and how I imagine Google ultimately responded) to such a request:
Dear U.S. Department of Justice,
Thank you for your request for data from a week’s worth of search terms used on our search engine.
It appears as though you’re looking for “evidence” to reopen a case you thoroughly lost a few years ago on a child pornography law. Looks like your present case for reinstating that law is pretty bleak to non-existent.
Just to let you know: we are not a free data gathering service for the Bush administration. The results of our search engines belong to us, not to glorified overzealous prosecutors such as yourselves looking to undertake a fishing expedition to resurrect a dead case.
Unless you have a search warrant signed by a judge, we kindly ask you to bugger off. If you don’t like it, then please go ahead and sue us.
We’ll see you in court and good luck getting a conviction.
Sincerely,
{Fill in search engine name here}
