Support Google Against Big Brother

There’s been a lot of rhetoric from the Bush Administration about promoting freedom & democracy abroad – overlooked perhaps is what a lousy job they are doing here at home with these lofty goals.

The most recent example of their real commitment -- to move this country towards dictatorship – should be headline news, but it isn’t. We learned on page nine of most newspapers (page 23 of many others) that the Department of Justice is demanding millions of records of search engine queries by ordinary Americans. We only know about this bizarre big-brother request because Google – the nations most popular search engine – has refused the government’s request. (Wimpy MSN, Yahoo & AOL already quietly complied. Since there’s a Chinese dissident doing hard prison time because Yahoo cooperatively turned over his name upon request to the Chinese Communist totalitarian regime last year, we should not be surprised that Yahoo is doing its part to promote civil liberties at home.)

Why does our federal government want these search engine records? The official reason is because they are trying to protect children from online pornography by studying the way Americans use search engines. Do you believe that? Even if you were duped into the belief that Saddam was ever really a threat to America’s safety and security, I’m sure you’re smart enough to recognize a steaming pile of bullshit when it is left out on a hot plate on a sunny day. Maybe not, though. Americans have been so brainwashed as of late that they are in constant danger from vague, murky, unknown enemies that they seem willing to see threats that don’t exist and accept that only the Bush boys can rescue ‘em from the bad guys. In fact, I’m certain that if you confronted one of the key Bush boys face-to-face about their plans to monitor your search engine records, they would sneer at you in accusation: obviously you don’t want to protect kids against internet pornography, do you?

The implication of course, is that you are either a terrorist, a supporter of terrorism or just plain unpatriotic – like virtually any American who opposes any policy of the right-wing extremists that have gotten control of our country!

These guys at the top are pretty good at generating fear, and 9-11 was the perfect club for them to wield against the anesthetized forebrains of the average American every time he or she questioned another curtailment of our rights to privacy. There are all kinds of threats that Americans don’t even know they face, and the Bush White House will keep manufacturing them weekly and shit-for-brains commentators like Rush Limbaugh will keep marketing them daily –numb American minds, preoccupied with Lindsay Lohan’s latest misadventures, will buy into the bullshit, if only because that is easier and less threatening to their reality of what is really going on behind the scenes. Remember the grand liberal conspiracy to overthrow Christmas that was so big last month? There are lots of people who actually believed that one!

Nobody wants their kids browsing porno sites on the web, but how big of a danger is porn to American kids? Not very big, I would suggest. The biggest threats to American children are war, disease, poverty and ignorance, in that order. And there’s a whole lot more before we get to little Billy stumbling upon Jenna Jameson on the web. The guys at the top actually sing the praises of war and ignorance as virtues every day and the average American mind goosesteps to the tune.

You would think there would have been universal calls for Bush’s impeachment when we learned a few weeks back that the President had authorized ongoing spying upon Americans without warrants, ostensibly to protect us against terrorist threats. This is just the kind of Big Brother government surveillance that the old right-wing of the Republican Party has been warning us about for three generations. (I guess it is okay if a right-wing administration does it!) But only the ACLU seemed to recognize this for the criminal act that it is. Even a close friend who opposes most Bush policies seemed to think I was exaggerating the threat: “I agree with what he did to protect this country from terrorists,” he emailed me. “I am sure that you or anyone you know is not or never will be on the list of people to spy on … I am not a Bush supporter in any way, but I would not say that he is doing anything wrong …”

Well, my answer is: DON’T BE SO SURE YOU WON’T BE ON THAT LIST!

Search engine records falling into government hands is perhaps the greatest threat to our freedom thus far in the millennium. We randomly type all kinds of things into search engines all day. Some of these have little relevance to anything but our current flight of mental fantasy. Letting others, especially the government, peruse our search engine queries is like letting them read our thoughts. This should be repugnant to all Americans, regardless of their political party or political ideology. Who knows who might come to power down the road and how this information could be twisted and used against you?

Fortunately, Google is standing forehead-to-forehead with the Brown Shirts at the Justice Department (justice, ha!) and refusing to comply. According to a recent news story on the web: “Google - whose motto when it went public in 2004 was ‘do no evil’ - contends that submitting to the subpoena would represent a betrayal to its users, even if all personal information is stripped from the search terms sought by the government. ‘Google's acceding to the request would suggest that it is willing to reveal information about those who use its services. This is not a perception that Google can accept,’ company attorney Ashok Ramani wrote in a letter included in the government's filing.”

Google’s brave stand will come to nothing if YOU don’t get outraged and speak up! The right wing always talks about appeasement in all the wrong ways. For them, it is always about Neville Chamberlain giving in to Hitler. What about the internal political appeasement in Germany and Austria in the 1930’s? It was that kind of appeasement that let the Brown Shirts come to power in the first place and solidify their absolute control over the state. Then it was too late to fight back.