Google subpoena hearing delayed

February 3, 2006, 05:04 PM —  IDG News Service — 

A hearing on U.S. Attorney General Alberto Gonzales' attempt to compel Google Inc. to turn over search records to the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) has been postponed until March 14.

The hearing in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, in San Jose, had been set for Feb. 27. In an order filed Thursday, U.S. District Court Judge James Ware pushed the date back without explanation.

The U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) subpoenaed records from several search engine companies to bolster its argument that a federal law is more effective than filtering software for protecting Internet users under 18 from viewing pornography. America Online Inc., Microsoft Corp.'s MSN and Yahoo Inc. all complied with the subpoena to some degree, but Google refused to provide the records. Gonzales filed a motion in the court in San Jose to compel Google, based in Mountain View, California, to comply.

Google now has until Feb. 17 to file its response to Gonzales' motion, and the DOJ has until Feb. 24 to reply to what Google files. Third parties filing "friend of the court" briefs also have until Feb. 24.

The DOJ is defending the Child Online Protection Act in a 1998 suit by the American Civil Liberties Union, which says the law violates the U.S. Constitution's First Amendment right to freedom of speech.

IDG News Service

I like it!
Post a comment
The content of this field is kept private and will not be shown publicly.
  • Allowed HTML tags: <a> <em> <strong> <cite> <code> <ul> <ol> <li> <dl> <dt> <dd>
  • Lines and paragraphs break automatically.
Free books

Essential JavaFX
Get started building rich Web apps quickly with an introduction to the power of JavaFX key features -- scene node graphs, nodes as components, the coordinate system, layout options, colors and gradients, custom classes with inheritance, animation, binding, and event handlers.Enter now!

The Nomadic Developer
Consulting can be hugely rewarding, but it's easy to fail if you are unprepared. To succeed, you need a mentor who knows the lay of the land. Aaron Erickson is your mentor, and this is your guidebook. Enter now!

Featured Sponsor

AISO founders envisioned a Web hosting company that was environmentally friendly. While the company employed energy-efficient innovations like solar panels, its infrastructure produced unacceptable power and cooling requirements. Find out how AISO leveraged AMD technology to overcome their challenge in this case study white paper.

In this whitepaper, Scalar explores the opportunity to change the landscape with respect to mission critical databases built around Oracle. Leveraging technologies such as Linux, high-end commodity processing power and Oracle RAC technology to architect, design, build and maintain database infrastructure that delivers maximum availability, reliability and performance at a fraction of traditional cost.

On a typical day, weather.com, the Web site for The Weather Channel in Atlanta, serves up between 15 million and 20 million page views. But in September 2004, when back-to-back hurricanes ransacked Florida, the peak traffic on one day more than tripled: over 70 million page views by more than 7 million unique visitors. Read the full success story now.

Marketplace