Google This....

Imagine you're writing a fiction piece concerning a terrorist attack on, say, Denver. Tom Clancy has already nuked the city once so we may as well do it again. To do so, you need information on construction and materials used to build a dirty bomb. This being the Information Age, what do you do? You go to one of the many search engines out there and type in the phrase "dirty bomb". Two weeks later you can't get on an airplane.

This scenario, to my knowledge, hasn't happened but with another Bush attempt at grabbing absolute power in progress, it could. See, the Justice Department is trying to get Google's records in an attempt to gather data on visits to pornography sites after the Supreme Court overturned a 1998 anti-pornography law. Or so they say. So far we know that Yahoo has caved in to the Government's demands. MSN refused to comment, indicating that they, too have given records of what you're searching for to the benevolent eyes of the Bush Administration.

Google, to their credit, is resisting. The Justice Department, of course, is attempting to get their hands on the information. What happens to this data once the Government gets their hands on it? It isn't a search, it's data mining. Once again the Bush Administration is engaging in domestic spying on a scale that would have made Nixon blush. Once the Government establishes precedent that they can subpoena search engine records for any trivial purpose, a major tool in the development of the Internet becomes, effectively, Government property, to be used against its citizens at will. Orwell, are you spinning in you grave? In effect, granting Government access to this information without strict limits on what can be done with it is granting them unlimited power to spy on its citizens in a way that make illegal phone taps look tame.

Although this case is not directly concerned with the war on terrorism, rather the fight to make a Christian theocracy out of the country by restricting us heathens' access to information they find offensive, the next case, or the next will be. The endless war against nebulous enemies called the War on Terrorism will be another excuse for infringements on our civil liberties and unwarranted searches into our private lives. And the power will be abused, as the Government has abused its powers already in this so-called war against a tactic. The important thing to remember is that the war on terrorism (when did we drop the 'ism' and make it a war on terror) by definition will never end so neither will the wartime powers of the President. And as long as we have an abuser of power like Bush in office, neither will the indignities and the losses of liberty imposed on the American people in the name of a war largely fought in the minds of the paranoid.