News surfaced today that the Bush administration, in its misguided War on Porn, asked a federal judge to force Google to comply with a subpoena requesting a "random sampling" of 1 million search queries submitted over the course of a week.

The Bush administration claims that the information will be used to see how often users search for pornography. Unsurprisingly, Microsoft, AOL, and Yahoo readily complied with similar subpoenas. Only Google went to court to challenge its subpoena.

The Justice Department is trying to defend 1998's Child Online Protection Act [PDF]. The act was challenged by the ACLU in Pennsylvania in 2000. The Third Circuit Court ruled in favor of the ACLU. COPA prohibits web publishers from allowing minors access to obscene material, but the Supreme Court -- which heard the case in May, 2002 (Ashcroft v. ACLU, 535 U.S. 564) -- sent the case back to the Third Circuit Court for further review. The obscenity standard takes into account "contemporary community standards" in determining what is obscene, but what is such a standard on the Internet? The Supremes didn't answer the question of whether or not COPA was overbroad; rather, they sent the case back to determine "whether COPA suffers from substantial overbreadth for reasons other than its use of community standards, whether the statute is unconstitutionally vague, or whether the statute survives strict scrutiny." The disputed section of COPA is known to history as 47 U.S.C. 231.

The Bush administration argues that COPA is "more effective than filtering software in protecting minors from exposure to harmful materials on the Internet." CNet reports, "Records from search logs would help to understand the behavior of Web users and estimate how frequently they encounter pornography, the motion says. For instance, Internet addresses obtained from the search engines could be tested against filtering programs to evaluate their effectiveness."