The Hindu Business Line : A tricky balance

Protecting the individual's right to privacy, and promoting security, call for a fine dance of balance in cyber policing, as the Google vs US Government row highlights.

SEARCH engine giant Google is yet to give in to the US Department of Justice (DoJ) subpoena of last August that had sought from it substantial online information.

As a hard-boiled policeman, I am surprised at the valiant fight that Google is putting up against it. In all such encounters, where community interest is dominant in a law enforcement directive, and there is little to suggest of any arbitrariness or personal vendetta, courts normally do not support negative responses.

Google has a declared commitment to the commendable operating principle: "Don't be evil". Nevertheless it has taken the stand that the DoJ directive was flimsy and endangered visitor privacy as also the company's own trade secrets.

This is a position that had become somewhat untenable after rivals Yahoo, America Online (AOL) and MSN had complied without much of a fuss. You must remember that in China, after an initial resistance, Google had to fall in line with others in agreeing to government censorship through applying filters that scouted for words such as `democracy' and `human rights'.

I will not be surprised if ultimately Google eats crow and volunteers the data that the US DoJ had sought. The matter is to be heard by a Federal Judge in San Jose (California) on February 27, 2006.

The interesting battle is not without relevance to all of us who, at the drop of a hat, go into Google for ferreting out information that we badly need in a contingency. There are here both security and privacy concerns, something that we can ignore only at our peril.

It is easy to be smug because an overwhelming majority of us surf in honest academic pursuit of knowledge. We do not, therefore, care very much for any loss of anonymity while surfing. Unfortunately, however, there are some — especially those with an undisputedly sick mind — who need an inexhaustible supply of pornography. Paedophilia, perhaps the lowest form of adult depravity, flourishes in cyber space and the tribe that indulges in it is, by all accounts, growing. Governments are, therefore, at their wit's end on how to combat the menace.

The contentious subpoena issued by the DoJ demands from Google logs showing search terms used by visitors to its site. Also sought is a list of Web sites indexed by the search engine. Google's exercise, if it submits to the subpoena, will involve identifying and passing on search data worth a week and names of about a million Web sites.

It is quite probable that the Google resistance is partly derived from the enormity of the task imposed on it. The DoJ believes that there need be no privacy concerns, because what it wants is just a list of Web sites and not who accessed it and when.

The intention is said to be one of proving how easy it is for a Google visitor to consciously gain access to or for a child to stumble on Web sites that carry prurient material.

According to many critics, the DoJ is using this avenue to defend the Child Online Protection Act (COPA) 1998 that had been blocked by the Supreme Court. This Act has the laudable objective of protecting children from the smut that many Web sites carry.

Can any reasonable man object to the Act or the present subpoena that has the ultimate aim to get the Supreme Court release the injunction against using this particular law?

The fear of Google and many others in the business is, however, that if they yield to this request, it will open the floodgate of demands that will impinge on privacy, which many visitors to the search engine treasure.

Incidentally, Google attracts 500 million visitors each day and about one billion searches! Interestingly, one survey shows that more than 50 per cent of Americans want Google to stick to its guns and not provide the information.

There are a few who question Google's own practice of collecting and storing data of those who visit its site. Google logs all the searches made and records information on computers from which searches were initiated and which technology was used. It has installed cookies for this purpose and uses hard disks to retain the particulars so obtained.

Google maintains that such information is strongly protected, and there need be no fears of a leakage or misuse. How far is this assurance of privacy real? Those of us who have some knowledge of the vulnerability of online information and data transferred to hard disks do not set much score by this assurance.

The whole debate brings us back to the old question: how do we balance the needs of freedom and privacy with the security of the community, especially children? If you come to truce with an autocratic government such as China, what is the big deal in accommodating requests from a democratic regime?

More than the rival merits of democracy and authoritarianism, what should agitate you and me as Internet users is that many Web sites are thriving on sleaze.

According to a New York Times report (January 20,2006), the pornography industry in the US netted $12.5 billion during 2005 from distribution of sexually explicit material and other forms of entertainment, such as strip clubs.

Also, Web sites pandering to sexual tastes receive as many as 60 million visitors a day! I don't know how many of these are from India.

With the growth of technology that can effectively mask such Web sites from law enforcement monitoring, we need to ponder where we are heading. Parents and social action groups fighting child abuse should be particularly excited about the Google vs US Department of Justice conflict. The outcome of the legal wrangle should arouse the interest also of India's law enforcement agencies. The Ministry of Information Technology and Communication and the CBI have a responsibility for studying the problem of online pornography and come out with measures that will ensure that young citizens of the country are saved from rapacious individuals and organisations who unabashedly abuse cyber space to disseminate positively harmful material. Policing the Internet, however undesirable it may be, cannot any longer be a low priority.

The writer is a former CBI Director who is currently Adviser (Security) to TCS Ltd.

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