This morning's Times frontpaged chilling anecdotes on the Justice Department's demand for Google search records.
NY Times
"Kathryn Hanson, a former telecommunications engineer who lives in Oakland, Calif., was looking at BBC News online last week when she came across an item about a British politician who had resigned over a reported affair with a "rent boy." She suddenly had a frightening thought. Would Google have to inform the government that she was looking for a rent boy - a young male prostitute?"
Or how about this one on the flip.
Jim Kowats, 34, a television producer who lives in Washington, has been growing increasingly concerned about the government's data collection efforts. "I'm not a conspiracy theorist, I just feel like it's one step away from ... what's the next step?" Mr. Kowats said. "The government's going to start looking into all this other stuff."
Until last year, Mr. Kowats worked at the Discovery Channel, and a few years ago, in the course of putting together a documentary on circumcision, he and his colleagues were doing much of the research online. "When you're researching something like that and you look up the word 'circumcision,' you're going to end up with all kinds of pictures of naked children," he said. "And that can be misconstrued."
Now some like Josh Cohen of Chicago are not alarmed.
Mr. Cohen said he doubted there would be much compromising of his individual privacy because the amount of data collected by the government was so voluminous. "My rationale tells me that with close to 300 million people in the U.S., and about 45 to 50 percent of households having Internet access, that I don't need to be too concerned with my search engine behavior," he said.
Well to those who are not concerned, let me tell what this one intrepid Google User can do right now. Using a basically free search-engine tracking software, I can tell almost to the name, the person who just clicked on my website. I can tell what time they visited, what key word search they used, and then with a little investigation I can determine exactly how many seconds they paused on each of my web pages. Depending on this, I can usually narrow the searcher down to 3 degrees of separation. Oh, I forgot. I can also tell the domain name from which they searched my site such as hp.com, ibm.com or tinasflowershop.com
Now this is what lil' ol' me can do. If I automated the process and churned it through an NSA mainframe, I could create a treasure-trove of personal information that is fully cross-referenced. For example, when you visit the internet -- do you usually go to just one site? Or do you visit multiple sites within a very short period of time? I suspect the latter.
If you made a purchase during this time on the Web (Ebay, Toys R Us), do you think I could know about it. Quite honestly, yes -- (You paused on my e-commerce page for an inordinate amount of time) From there, I could track you down to the park bench your sitting on right now.
So all of you Intrepid internet users. Don't be alarmed. This is all about national security and pornography. There is absolutely no way to find out personal information or that you like to look at monkeys in dresses.