THE GOOGLE SUBPOENA--UNCONSTITUTIONAL OR JUST PLAIN LAZY?

So the Department of Justice wants to subpoena a randomly chosen week full of Google's data, so they can figure out the chances that an ordinary person searching for anything other than porn will be led into a porn website by Google. This is part of a larger project involving other search engines who have already given DOJ what it wants. The point of the whole thing is to support the government's case for the necessity (and therefore the constitutionality) of a law restricting online pornography.

The proposed law, of course, is a crock. I applaud Google for refusing to give DOJ what it wants. I am not going to do any more of my searches on Yahoo until they grow a spine.

But what piques my curiosity at the moment is why DOJ feels it needs a subpoena (and a subpoena against a third party not involved in the proposed legislation at all) to do this research. If I were trying to get information like this for a client, I wouldn't subpoena a bunch of search engine proprietors, I'd just hire a bunch of ordinary people to run one search after another on the various search engines, and keep track of the results. If I had the resources of DOJ, I could hire a lot of ordinary people to do a whopping lot of searches and get a statistically significant result. So far as I can see, the only reason DOJ chose to use a subpoena is force of habit--if your primary research tool is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.

And frankly, I don't want the government to get in the habit of using a subpoena every time some flunky in DOJ wants to get the phone number of an attractive person s/he met in a bar last night.