Excuse me while I dust off my soapbox. I haven’t been up here in some time—sure hope the height doesn’t make me any dizzier than I have been over the recent news about our fearless leaders attempting to track our movements over the Internet by browbeating browser services into turning over users’ records. Yahoo was the first to cave, which really surprises me because Yahoo was started by a bunch of geeks who didn’t fit in and was so named as a way of snubbing noses at the established computer world at the time. Guess by now they have made so much money, they are the establishment and want to hold onto every penny. That plus everybody is now afraid of saying no to the feds about anything. What ever happened to Question Authority?

So far Yahoo has complied with the request—a request, not a subpoena—to turn over a random week’s samplings of things people search for on their browser. MSN also complied, not so surprising as it is a huge company that has already seen its share of lawsuits for attempting to monopolize certain aspects of the computer. However, so far, brave Google is standing up and saying, um, I don’t think so boys; citing the sanctity of a user and whatever searches they may be making.

The government would have you believe they are simply trying to protect children from “stumbling” unawares into porn sites. For the record, I’ve been using the Internet since before it was the Internet as it is known today, since 1983 in fact, and I have never stumbled into a porn site. Never gone looking for one either, but looking for one is exactly how curious adolescents find them. Nobody stumbles over porn. Oh sure, there may be a dirty photo emailed via spam to you from time to time attempting to lure you to a site where someone can separate you from your money, but it would be damn difficult to accidentally find yourself in cyber porn city.

Adolescents are curious about their bodies and those of the opposite sex by nature. Looking for porn or naked people on the Internet is simply the modern equivalent of teens looking to find their older brother’s skin mags of yesterday. Porn offers live action, I guess, making Playboy somewhat puritan by those standards, but the reason for searching is the same—their bodies are changing, they are experiencing sexuality for the first time and they are curious as hell.

The length to which our right to privacy is being eroded is mind-boggling and the silence of this nation is quite frightening. People seem to think only those with something to hide should be offended by this, but what if I don’t want anybody to know I cyber stalk George Clooney’s every move on my computer? While that isn’t true, what if it was? Don’t I have some right to expect that whatever I may go looking for on a computer I bought and paid for, using a DSL service I buy and pay for would be private?

To me this reminds me of a story oft told by those who experienced life under Nazi occupation. You all know this, about how the guy doesn’t stand up and say anything when they took away this group and that group and finally when they came for him, there was nobody to stand up and say anything, because everyone had been taken.

Aside from Google, the only other group I know of who has steadfastly refused to cooperate with these mindless invasions of our privacy are librarians. Some years back the feds wanted to know who was checking out what at public libraries and librarians refused to turn over their records and cooperate on the basis of the U.S. Constitution’s right to privacy. It’s some world when the powerful cave and the only line of defense for millions are librarians—God love ‘em.

The only time it will be all right for someone to track my computer movements is if I get murdered. Then I fully expect CSI, NCIS, the FBI, the CIA, and Okaloosa County Sheriff’s deputies to make sure I wasn’t corresponding with federal, state and local inmates—some of whom may have just been paroled—before my body was found in a state of deadness. We all know the site: conchat.com, a chat room for single women with a thing for inmates. I’ve made it easy for the detectives—it’s listed under my favorites menu.

Descending the soapbox and feeling much lighter for having gotten that off my chest.

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