For Your Own Good

I'm glad to see Google resisting the Justice Department's subpeona for search records. I'm curious why they went through the trouble to get a subpoena when they could have used Google's publicly available Application Programming Interface (API) to program their own custom search for a million random urls from Google's search index. And the search terms they wanted, they could use their imagination to see what they might find. I guess the "Just-us" department wanted to see if Google is "with us or against us".

So now we see the gloves starting to come off. The Bush Administration says that preventing children from accessing pornography on the internet is their aim. But the subtext is that they are really going after people who want to access child-porn. True enough that these child-porn lovers are sick and need a 12-step meeting at a convenient location.

But the Administration has proven itself time and again to favor punishment over help. Here, the cure is worse than the disease. Cast a wide net, catch who we can, and if anyone comes up innocent, we'll pay them off, bury them in prison, and/or bury the story in the metro section of the paper.

Now here is an interesting parallel: what if the administration is using it's so-called "war on terrorism" to identify, locate, undermine and eliminate political opposition? What if the war on terrorism is a pretext for maintaining and consolidating power?

Remember, these are the same guys who engineered 11-hour waits at the polls (in Blue states), the implementation of Diebold voting machines and Arnold (I'll never vote without protection again) Schwartzenegger's election here in California.

For them, it's a religious war, and if God is on their side, then everything is fair game.

Mr. Scott