Feds pursuit of phone records is only the latest fishing trip – MarketWatch
Dvorak’s column asks an obvious question: Why ask for records when you can look at the results yourself with a bot?
Many suspect that this isn’t about child porn or any sort of porn, but an attempt to track the public, possibly for political market research — or worse, domestic spying. It’s plausible, for one good reason. The government doesn’t need to get Google records to get the Google search results.
You simply go on to Google and do a search yourself! Is it that hard for these folks?
The Justice Department has access to dozens of quality programmers any of whom could write some robotic code in a few minutes that would slam the Google search engines as much as needed to develop real-time up-to-date search patterns and search engine results. Isn’t this what they want? Then why don’t they do it?
Wanting old results from a million random public searches has got to be an analytical nightmare if they are trying to find some connection to porn and Google. It sounds more like a fishing expedition.
The fact that they do not want to do directed searches themselves — where they could get real first-hand proof of any problem — is the hint that there is more to this request.