Good for Google.

John Cole has taken a stand in favor of Google, who is fighting a demand from the government that they turn over web search records.

The Bush administration on Wednesday asked a federal judge to order Google to turn over a broad range of material from its closely guarded databases.

The Mountain View-based search and advertising giant opposes releasing the information on a variety of grounds, saying it would violate the privacy rights of its users and reveal company trade secrets, according to court documents.

There are a variety of things I could say about why this demand by the government is wrong and is symptomatic of executive power grabs spanning decades, but John has already said it all. In part:

At some point, someone has to put their foot down. Every day it seems it is something else, there is some other bogeyman out there that requires us to cede more ground to the authorities. During the eighties and early nineties (if I remember correctly), it was crack and drugs in general, and this was used as the reason for rewriting how the government approaches searches and property seizures

Then came terrorism, which seems to have replaced the War on Drugs as the ultimate opportunity for power grabs by the government.

Nobody wants child porn circulating, but that also can't be used as an excuse to simply open the doors to government supervision of every aspect of our lives. When checking for child porn distribution or drug activity gets used as a legal "basis" for monitoring the activities of anti-war groups, the pendulum has swung too far in the other direction.

Check out Cole's post. It really says it all.