Google Fights Bush Court Motion

Google is resisting a motion from the Justice Department that is requesting "all URLs that are available to be located through a query on the company's Web site," plus "all queries that have been entered on the company's Web site between June 1, 2005, and July 31, 2005."

CNN Reports that Google Inc. said it intends to "vigorously" resist the Bush administration's request that a court order the popular Web site to turn over a broad range of materials.

"Google is not a party to this lawsuit and their demand for information overreaches," said Nicole Wong, associate general counsel for Google Inc. in a written statement to CNN. "We had lengthy discussions with them to try to resolve this, but were not able to and we intend to resist their motion vigorously."

The lawsuit indicates that the government is narrowing its original subpoena from July 31, 2005, requesting Google to produce an electronic file containing "all URLs that are available to be located through a query on the company's Web site," plus "all queries that have been entered on the company's Web site between June 1, 2005, and July 31, 2005."

The Justice Department is now asking for "a multi-stage random sampling of one million URLs" and "the text of each search string entered onto Google's search engine over a one-week period."