What was once private is now under Google's domain
The Bush administration's recent overreach for vast amounts of data from Google and other search engines raised all sorts of hackles, many of them misplaced. It was decried as an extension of the government's plan to snoop on Americans, an attempt by the Justice Department to catch child pornographers and an assault on personal privacy.
It was none of those things.
But the very public flap alerted millions of Internet users to what could have been.
This time, the government wasn't looking for information that could be traced to specific people. But next time, it could, and the effects on personal privacy could be devastating.
