Google faces DoJ subpoena deadline

The US Justice Department has set a suggested deadline for Google to hand over information about its users' search habits: 21 days.

In court documents submitted on Thursday to US District Judge James Ware in San Jose, California, federal prosecutors said they need a prompt response because of the compressed schedule of the case. They're asking Ware to set a 21-day deadline that would begin as soon as he makes a decision.

The three-page brief said: "Delay in this court's resolution of the motion to compel would be unwarranted."

In January, the Justice Department asked a judge to force Google to hand over a "random sample of one million" web pages from its index, and copies of a week's worth of search terms, to aid in the Bush administration's defence of an internet pornography law. That information is supposed to be used to highlight flaws in web-filtering technology during a trial in Philadelphia this autumn.

The Justice Department subpoena would normally have been a routine matter, and AOL, Microsoft and Yahoo! voluntarily complied with similar requests. But Google's resistance sparked a furore over privacy, with senator Patrick Leahy, a Vermont Democrat, asking the Justice Department for details, and a bill announced in the House of Representatives that would require websites to delete information about visitors.

A hearing before Ware has been scheduled for 14 March. He could rule on the Justice Department's motion during the hearing or anytime thereafter.

Google objected to the subpoena in a strongly worded brief filed last month by Lisa Delehunt and Al Gidari of the law firm Perkins Coie. It said complying with the subpoena would be burdensome and violate privacy rights; that it's unnecessary for the government's defence of the Child Online Protection Act (Copa); and that it could even violate the Electronic Communications Privacy Act.

The Philadelphia judge overseeing the Copa case wants expert reports in by 3 May, which is why the Justice Department has asked Ware for a speedy schedule. After the Justice Department receives the data, it plans to turn it over to an academic statistician who will analyse the prevalence of pornography on the internet and in Google searches.

For its part, the Justice Department says it is seeking "this information only to perform a study, in the aggregate, of trends in the internet. No individual user of Google, or of any other search engine, need fear that his or her personal identifying information will be disclosed".

Declan McCullagh writes for CNET News.com