DOJ sent subpoenas to 34 companies

InformationWeek did a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request and discovered that the Department of Justice sent subpoenas to 34 different companies:

The full list of companies subpoenaed by the Department of Justice includes: 711Net (Mayberry USA), American Family Online, AOL, ATT, Authentium, Bell South, Cable Vision, Charter Communications, Comcast Cable Company, Computer Associates, ContentWatch, Cox Communications, EarthLink, Google, Internet4Families, LookSmart, McAfee, MSN, Qwest, RuleSpace, S4F (Advance Internet Management), SafeBrowse, SBC Communications, Secure Computing Corp., Security Software Systems, SoftForYou, Solid Oak Software, Surf Control, Symantec, Time Warner, Tucows (Mayberry USA), United Online, Verizon, and Yahoo.

I did a declaration in this case, so I won’t comment. Read the article for more details.

28 Responses to DOJ sent subpoenas to 34 companies (Leave a comment)

  1. Oh man..

    Freedom of Information under attack!

    And all that reminds me of the dark days of the devil Soviet Union (:(

  2. Great heads-up Matt. Who would have thought that protecting data from the US government is going to become such an issue in the years ahead. This is one area that google need to look really, really closely at.

  3. That list just makes it seem weirder that they didn’t ask Ask…

  4. I’d love to give the US government info where a search for a well known education college in google shows a obvious porn site as the 2nd result with moderate filter on.
    This is the info, it seems that the government is after.how easy it is to access porn sites while searching google for mainstream terms.Google fails in this area.

  5. why don’t they just search google for this info themselves?

    The fact that they can so easily obtain this information about people should be sending up red flags everywhere… but alas, we have jobs and american idol to tend do, so we don’t care.

    It’s a circular formula… Orwell perfeceted it as far back as animal farm.

    1. Totalitarian Govt
    2. Revolution
    3. Create common enemy
    4. Instill patriotism
    5. slowly take away rights while using patriotism and common enemy to justify
    6. declare all objectors unpartriotic and in league with the common enemy
    1. Totalitarian Govt
    .. Rinse, Repeat..

    America is somewhere in late stage 5.

    Who was it that said “when facism comes to america it will be draped in the flag and carrying the cross”? They forgot to add “hunting terrorists, and screaming ‘protect the children'”

  6. Just one point Ryan. Your #1 on the list never happened to the U.S., so if it ends with a totalitarian government, it’ll be the first time 😉

  7. “Totalitarian democracy is a term made famous by Israeli historian J. L. Talmon to refer to a system of government in which lawfully elected representatives maintain the integrity of a nation state whose citizens, while granted the right to vote, have little or no participation in the decision-making process of the government. The phrase had previously been used by Bertrand de Jouvenel and E.H. Carr.”

    Yeah I think we’ve had a couple of those in the last 200 years.

    “Moreover, a different aspect of totalitarian democracy is portrayed by powerful states that function by democratic principles internally, but act with force and hegemony outside their borders. Both the former Soviet Union and the United States have enjoyed so-called “superpower” status and both have had a long, well-documented history of acting both overtly and covertly outside of their borders to “protect the national interest.” The United States espouses and prescribes the adoption of its own internal democratic principles by other nations. But even should all nations develop and embrace standardized democratic principles and practices, some academics think that because whatever nation has the military or economic capacity to set expectations for the behaviors of other nations has historically chosen to do so, modern democracies will continue to do so in the future. This is a rather common external interpretation of American policy, a view which holds that America’s Dulles-Kennan-influenced social, military, and economic foreign policies are equivalent to hegemony, and bear no relationship to the internal democratic processes by which the US elects its representatives.”

    * Wikipedia

  8. PhilC, it happend a LONG time ago..

    America used to be colonies, controlled by the king… they then had a revolutionary war…

  9. >

    I agree Andrew. Obviously there is a problem out there with some really sick people raping children and streaming it over the Web. Law enforcement is only trying to do police work and track these sick-o-s down.

    Where I do have a problem with this is when they start looking at this data for everything….For instance, if the DOJ wants specific information to terms searched and what IPs were related to a search that was conducted to find video streams of infants being raped, I don’t care about.

    I do have a problem if they are given all the data, instead of specific search data related to a specific investigation.

  10. in other words Bryan, privacy is only important when there’s no “bad guy” or it affects you personally?

    To me privacy and freedom are all or nothing concepts. You either have them or you don’t.

    Just because they have good intentions doesn’t mean it’s ok for them to do it..

    Look at the good intentions behind the crusades.

  11. *Look at the good intentions behind the crusades.*

    Exactly! Bush already has so now he has launched the *Bush Crusades* to save the world from themselves. God told him to.

    The problem is, the World needs saving from Bush!

    This whole DOJ was a Bush idea. Their ultimate goal is to be able to censor the Internet and rid it all things deemed “non-Christian”.

    Unfortunately for us in the US, Bush is the worst type of Christian. An alcoholic who is “born again” and he feels everyone should have the same morals and values that he does. It has nothing to do with saving the children.

    God forbid parents actually took an active role in monitoring what their kids on are doing on the Internet. Oh wait, that’s called parenting. Can’t do that, we need big brother to tell us what to do and how to do it.

  12. I am getting very tired of our current leaders believing that the ends justify the means. Seems like they keep telling us “don’t worry about what we are doing we promise we are only doing good.”

  13. Way to go Matt, you started a political revolution :).

    SpamHound, I’m not sure I agree with you on that. Bush is just the puppet and people like Cheney are the ones pulling his strings, telling him these are good ideas. Think about the debates back during the 2004 election – wasn’t it Cheney that looked like an evil robot?

    David, I couldn’t agree with you more. Things like extending the Patriot Act and invading our privacy on the internet is something they were saying is “needed” but in reality it’s just another way for them to monitor our behavior. Maybe it’ll all end up like 1984 🙂

  14. Cool…so it was not just Google that was picked on by DOJ,

  15. Fishing expeditions by the government are never good. They go on their witch hunt to find enough information to incriminate or prove a point that can’t be made otherwise.
    Unfortunately, they have limitless cash to spend in the DOJ (our tax dollars) so it makes it hard for the small or spineless to resist….

  16. IMO, sheilding from porn, is the job of the parent(s). There are already more than enough ways to stop porn being accessed.

    You Yanks crack me up 🙂

  17. Personal / parental responsibility? What’s that? are those even words?

  18. Who wrote those words?

  19. The full list of companies should cover quite a bit of ground.

    I’m ambivalent about the whole debate over the Department of Justice’s subpoenaes. Sounds to me like they feel it’s due time to take out some of the trash themselves.

  20. Cudos to Google for standing up to this unwarrented abuse of power by the US DOJ.

    On a side note;
    I wonder how long it will be before the DOJ starts going after Anti-Christian sites based inside the USA…

  21. I’m so glad Google didn’t bend over and take this one.

    Ryan, your list is right on … too bad more Americans don’t see it.

    Maybe Dubya is upset that a search for ‘miserable failure’ returns an image of him and a link to his bio.

  22. Hmm, it’s better than an MSN search for Matt Cutts at least…

    Seriously though, Kudos to google for saying no.. and boo to the companies who didn’t bother to fight. I especially liked the one who opposed, but tacked on “only because it’s my job”. If that’s not real fear, I don’t know what is.

  23. Ryan, making a joke about the quality of MSN search results isn’t the direction that I would have gone for April Fools. But okay. 🙂

  24. actually it’s an MSN sponsored april fools joke.. I just put your name into it. Scoble did one for himself and actually edited the jokes. It was quite amusing.

    I’m greatly anticipating Google’s take on april fools this year… But I doubt it can top PigeonRank.

  25. Thanks for the heads up!

  26. PhilC had a good point above!

  27. Speaking of MSN search results; it’s getting worse every day now……

  28. Let’s subpoena the biggest, shadowiest company of them all: the US government!

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