March 30, 2006 | More DOJ Subpoenas

The Justice Department made a bit of a splash in January, when Google's opposition to a Justice Department subpoena for its entire index and months of user search queries became public. Now, according to documents unearthed via FOIA by InformationWeek, the feds issued subpoenas to at least 34 companies, ranging from Verizon to Symantec.

Google won its battle eventually, when a judge forced the company to turn over just a wee bit of information.

The Justice Department issued that subpoena, and AOL, Yahoo and MSN soon copped to having been served themselves -- though none fought the subpoena in court. The subpoenas are part of a long running battle by the DOJ to have the Child Online Privacy Act okayed by judges. (The 1998 bill, which was immediately deemed unconstitutional by the courts, mandates that commercial providers of material deemed harmful to minors have to find some method, such as credit card verification, to keep minors off their sites)

Specifically, the DOJ is trying to prove that filters don't work well to protect kids and it turns out that it didn't just want info from search engines. According to InformationWeek's Thomas Claburn:

[T]he Department of Justice disclosed that it has issued to subpoenas to a broad range of companies that includes AT&T, Comcast Cable, Cox Communications, EarthLink, LookSmart, SBC Communications (then separate from AT&T), Symantec, and Verizon.

Asked which companies objected to, or sought to limit, these subpoenas, Department of Justice spokesperson Charles Miller declined to comment because the litigation is ongoing. He also declined to comment on the utility of the information gathered by the government.

The documents presented to InformationWeek reveal that some companies did object to the government's demands. In an E-mail sent to the Department of Justice last July, Fernando Laguarda, an attorney representing Cablevision Systems Corp., characterized some of what the government was asking for as "overly broad, vague, ambitious, and unduly burdensome. [...]

The bulk of the subpoenas were directed at Internet service providers and makers of content filtering software. The effectiveness of filtering technology is a critical issue in the COPA case. If the Department of Justice can prove that filters fail to shield minors from explicit material online, COPA may well be reinstated.

Full Story.

Highlights of the subpoenas, as well as a .zip file of all 54 documents can be found here. (Hat Tip to Richard M. Smith for the last bit of info.)

Posted by Ryan Singel at March 30, 2006 12:07 PM

Trackback Pings

TrackBack URL for this entry:
http://www.secondaryscreening.net/cgi-bin/mt-tb.cgi/275