Patriot Search
Philipp Lenssen has created a parody site called Patriot Search that makes fun of the government subpoenas of search engine records (see Should Search Engines Remember What You Search For?) by claiming to make “sure the government is informed should you search for something obscure, illegal, or unpatriotic.”
Part of its mission statement says:
Instead of letting the government waste tax money by going through complicated procedures to get user and search data from Yahoo, MSN, Ask Jeeves or Google, users of Patriot Search make sure their queries end up right where they belong – in the databases of the government and its various agencies.
This would be funnier if the current state of the FDLP didn’t guarantee the same thing. By ensuring that the only way to get government information is from government controlled web-servers instead of from FDLP libraries, we ensure that the government has a record of every government report you search for and every one you view. Of course, there are some privacy policies in place that say that they would not do that, (see Will GPO guarantee user privacy? Can it?), but can we believe that the government will ignore what it owns when it is willing to subpoena what it does not?
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