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Google is rebuffing the Bush administration’s demand for a peek at what millions of people have been looking up on the internet’s leading search engine — a request that underscores the potential for online databases to become tools for government surveillance.

Google has refused to comply with a White House subpoena first issued last summer, prompting U.S. Attorney General Alberto Gonzales this week to ask a federal judge in San Jose, California for an order to hand over the requested records.

The government wants a list of all requests entered into Google’s search engine during an unspecified single week — a breakdown that could conceivably span tens of millions of queries. In addition, it seeks 1 million randomly selected web addresses from various Google databases.

In court papers that the San Jose Mercury News reported on after seeing them Wednesday, the Bush administration depicts the information as vital in its effort to restore online child protection laws that have been struck down by the U.S. Supreme Court.

Yahoo, which runs the internet’s second-most used search engine, confirmed Thursday that it had complied with a similar government subpoena.

Although the government says it isn’t seeking any data that ties personal information to search requests, the subpoena still raises serious privacy concerns, experts said. Those worries have been magnified by recent revelations that the White House authorized eavesdropping on civilian communications after the Sept. 11 attacks without obtaining court approval.

“Search engines now play such an important part in our daily lives that many people probably contact Google more often than they do their own mother,” said Thomas Burke, a San Francisco attorney who has handled several prominent cases involving privacy issues.

“Just as most people would be upset if the government wanted to know how much you called your mother and what you talked about, they should be upset about this, too.”

The content of search request sometimes contain information about the person making the query.

For instance, it’s not unusual for search requests to include names, medical profiles or Social Security information, said Pam Dixon, executive director for the World Privacy Forum.

“This is exactly the kind of thing we have been worrying about with search engines for some time,” Dixon said. “Google should be commended for fighting this.”

Every other search engine served similar subpoenas by the Bush administration has complied so far, according to court documents. The cooperating search engines weren’t identified.

Yahoo stressed that it didn’t reveal any personal information. “We are rigorous defenders of our users’ privacy,” Yahoo spokeswoman Mary Osako said Thursday. “In our opinion, this is not a privacy issue.”

Microsoft’s MSN, the No. 3 search engine, declined to say whether it even received a similar subpoena. “MSN works closely with law enforcement officials worldwide to assist them when requested,” the company said in a statement.

As the internet’s dominant search engine, Google has built up a valuable storehouse of information that “makes it a very attractive target for law enforcement,” said Chris Hoofnagle, senior counsel for the Electronic Privacy Information Center.

The Department of Justice argues that Google’s cooperation is essential in its effort to simulate how people navigate the web.

In a separate case in Pennsylvania, the Bush administration is trying to prove that internet filters don’t do an adequate job of preventing children from retrieving online pornography and other objectionable destinations.

Obtaining the subpoenaed information from Google “would assist the government in its efforts to understand the behavior of current web users, (and) to estimate how often web users encounter harmful-to-minors material in the course of their searches,” the Justice Department wrote in a brief filed Wednesday

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.

Complying with the subpoena also wound threaten to expose some of Google’s “crown-jewel trade secrets,” Ramani wrote. Google is particularly concerned that the information could be used to deduce the size of its index and how many computers it uses to crunch the requests.

“This information would be highly valuable to competitors or miscreants seeking to harm Google’s business,” Ramani wrote.

Dixon is hoping Google’s battle with the government reminds people to be careful how they interact with search engines.

“When you are looking at that blank search box, you should remember that what you fill can come back to haunt you unless you take precautions,” she said.

On Thursday, The Mercury News reported that the Justice Department has subpoenaed search-engine records in its defense of the Child Online Protection Act, or COPA. Google, whose corporate credo famously includes the admonishment “Don’t Be Evil,” is fighting the request for a week’s worth of search engine queries. Other search engines have already complied.

The government isn’t asking for search engine users’ identifying data — at least not yet. But for those worried about what companies or federal investigators might do with such records in the future, here’s a primer on how search logs work, and how to avoid being writ large within them.

Why do search engines save logs of search terms?
Search companies use logs and data-mining techniques to tune their engines and deliver focused advertising, as well to create cool features such as Google Zeitgeist. They also use them to help with local searches and return more relevant, personalized search results.

How does a search engine tie a search to a user?
If you have never logged in to search engine’s site, or a partner service like Google’s Gmail offering, the company probably doesn’t know your name. But it connects your searches through a cookie, which has a unique identifying number. Using its cookies, Google will remember all searches from your browser. It might also link searches by a user’s IP address.

How long do cookies last?
It varies. Yahoo sets a cookie that expires in June 2006. A new cookie from Google expires in 2036.

What if you sign in to a service?
If you sign in on Google’s personalized homepage or Yahoo’s homepage, the companies can then correlate your search history with any other information, such as your name, that you give them.

Why should anyone worry about the government requesting search logs or bother to disguise their search history?
Some people simply don’t like the idea of their search history being tied to their personal lives. Others don’t know what the information could be used for, but worry that the search companies could find surprising uses for that data that may invade privacy in the future.

For example, if you use Google’s Gmail and web optimizing software, the company could correlate everyone you’ve e-mailed, all the websites you’ve visited after a search and even all the words you misspell in queries.

What’s the first thing people should do who worry about their search history?
Cookie management helps. Those who want to avoid a permanent record should delete their cookies at least once a week. Other options might be to obliterate certain cookies when a browser is closed and avoid logging in to other services, such as web mail, offered by a search engine.

How do you do that with your browser?
In Firefox, you can go into the privacy preference dialog and open Cookies. From there you can remove your search engine cookies and click the box that says: “Don’t allow sites that set removed cookies to set future cookies.”

In Safari, try the free and versatile PithHelmet plug-in. You can let some cookies in temporarily, decide that some can last longer or prohibit some sites, including third-party advertisers, from setting cookies at all.

While Internet Explorer’s tools are not quite as flexible, you can manage your cookies through the Tools menu by following these instructions.

Have search histories ever been used to prosecute someone?
Robert Petrick was convicted in November 2005 of murdering his wife, in part based on evidence that he had googled the words “neck,” “snap” and “break.” But police obtained his search history from an examination of his computer, not from Google.

Can I see mine?
Usually, no. But if you want to trace your own Google search histories and see trends, and you don’t mind if the company uses the information to personalize search results, you can sign up for Google’s beta search history service.

Could search histories be used in civil cases?
Certainly. Google may well be fighting the government simply on principle — or, as court papers suggest, to keep outsiders from using Google’s proprietary database for free. But a business case can also be made that if users knew the company regularly turned over their records wholesale to the government, they might curtail their use of the site.

A related question is whether Google or any other search engine would fight a subpoena from a divorce attorney, or protest a more focused subpoena from local police who want information on someone they say is making methamphetamines.

What if I want more anonymity than simply deleting my cookie when I’m searching?
If you are doing any search you wouldn’t print on a T-shirt, consider using Tor, The Onion Router. An EFF-sponsored service, Tor helps anonymize your web traffic by bouncing it between volunteer servers. It masks the origins and makes it easier to evade filters, such as those installed by schools or repressive regimes.

The service has its drawbacks. While it can be very useful for a journalist in China, data services can be slower or have greater latency due to the extra stops the data makes, and a general dearth of servers.

Is Tor perfectly anonymous?
No. Computers leak data. Tor, combined with the Privoxy proxy server (which comes bundled with Tor), reduces some of that leakage, but still isn’t foolproof. But when used with Firefox, Tor and Privoxy can provide a mostly-anonymous web browsing experience.

Are there other options?
Anonymizer offers a limited free browsing service and sells software, both of which are supposed to protect your anonymity, but have had serious performance issues. There are other proxy servers on the internet, but you have to judge for yourself whether you trust them, and some websites actively block anonymous browsing.

Answers were compiled with the generous assistance of security consultant Adam Shostack and hacker Jacob Applebaum.

According to the San Jose Mercury News, The Bush administration wants access to Google’s huge database of search queries submitted by users to track how often pornography is returned in results. This information would be used for Bush’s appeal of the 2004 COPA law, targeted to prevent access to pornography by children. The law was struck down because it would have restricted adults access to legal pornography. Google is promising to fight the release of this information.” From the article: “The Supreme Court invited the government to either come up with a less drastic version of the law or go to trial to prove that the statute does not violate the First Amendment and is the only viable way to combat child porn. As a result, government lawyers said in court papers they are developing a defense of the 1998 law based on the argument that it is far more effective than software filters in protecting children from porn.

The infamous and controversial domain Sex.com has officially been sold to Boston-based Escom LLC for a reported $14 million. Sex.com owner Gary Kremen was unavailable for comment, but a source from Kremen’s company, Grant Media, told XBiz that sales for the famous domain name will still be handled through Grant Media’s San Francisco offices. While other terms of the acquisition remain unknown, XBiz was able to locate information on the deal through a company called InternetRealEstate.com, which shares office space in Boston with Domain Name Acquisition Group (DNAG), a company that was involved in a lawsuit surrounding the Sex.com domain in September.

At half-past noon on Jan. 9, cable TV contractors sinking a half-mile of cable near Interstate 10 in rural Arizona pulled up something unexpected in the bucket of their backhoe: an unmarked fiber-optic cable. “It started pulling the fiber out of the pipe,” says Scott Johansson, project manager for JK Communications and Construction. “Obviously, we said, ‘Oop, we’ve hit something.’”

As the fiber came spooling out of the desert soil like a fishing line, long-distance service for millions of Sprint PCS and Nextel wireless customers west of the Rockies blinked off. Transcontinental internet traffic routed over Sprint slowed to a crawl, and some corporations that relied on the carrier to link office networks found themselves electronically isolated.

In the end, a hole dug out of a dirt road outside a town called Buckeye triggered a three-and-a-half hour outage with national impact. It wasn’t even a very deep hole. “We ran into their line right away,” says Johansson.

Experts say last week’s Sprint outage is a reminder that with all the attention paid to computer viruses and the latest Windows security holes, the most vulnerable threads in America’s critical infrastructures lie literally beneath our feet.

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