Working Hard, Hardly Working

I just got two press releases from local art galleries, and I wouldn't have noticed anything special about them had they not arrived one after another—but come on, people! It's Friday, 4:30 p.m., and no one has done anything more productive than reading the 24 forum. Don't junk the news 'cause you're trying to get everything off your desk before happy hour.

And speaking of 24, as we ever so coincidentally were, make sure to check in with Mr. Drezner before you leave the office. On the Department of Justice 's demands of information from Google:

The DOJ wants to show that online searches lead to inadvertent stumbles into porn. It is true that the best way to show this would be to retrieve a sample of searches. However, almost as good would be for the DOJ to commission some social scientist to do the research for them. It would not be hard for a researcher to run an experiment to gather this kind of data, and the results would be just as useful to the Department of Justice.

There's something else that disturbs me about this request. If Yahoo! and other search engines have already complied, then the DOJ doesn't really need Google's data. . . . So why continue to press Google?

I see one of two possibilities:

1) The data they have doesn't support the administration's supposition, and they're hoping Google will bail them out;

2) They don't care about the data for this case as much as they do about establishing a legal precedent and/or intimidating Google into compliance.

Did door number two send shivers down your spine? Mine, too. I think it was one of the Crooked Timberites who said that he intentionally diversifies his media providers—e-mail by Google, search by Yahoo!, that sort of thing—so as not to become too beholden to any single company's liability or dominance.

Usually, with these kind of things, I try to remind myself: why assign malignance when incompetence will do, and is in such abundance? After all, the man who previously sat in Alberto Gonzales's chair used the office to conduct the War Against Statue Boobs. Not exactly Dr. No we're talking about.

But if that was an aesthetic departure from the normal day-to-day over at the Dee Oh Jay, then this is curiously legislative one. These data—if the DOJ in fact played nice and did not use them to ID millions of users—would tip the Department off on all sorts of ways that people might find illegal pornography in the future. Based on my watching The Wire (three seasons, multiple viewings), I don't quite see the criminal threat that warrants the use of the federal subpoena for a massive cache of privately owned data, one which they've already been given more or less by another company. But I don't really know what I'm talking about here, and I'm sure I'm out of touch anyway—I can nearly hear the defenders of the Unitary Executive, Scalia-Thomas-Roberts-Alito: "I'll allow it!"

Back to speaking of 24: I haven't watched much of the series, but judging from the first two episodes of this season, it's clear that it's a proven predictor of U.S. political trends. Last season? Torture. Everyone, for any reason, you looking at me?, time bomb's a-tickin'—just willy nilly. Season 5: data mining. Data mine that phone call, damnit. I couldn't data mine this morning's Sudoku. Marion Berry, caught data mining the rock again! Don't know whether "data mine" is different from "look into" or "read" in any sense whatsoever, but it looks like it might be hard to remember how things ever got done before.

I know when it's time to strap on the tinfoil before tuning into TiVo, so I'm keeping my eyes peeled. If I see Jack look something up on Baidu, I'm going to call that a spoiler for 2006–7.

Posted by Kriston at January 20, 2006 5:27 PM