Thang 19: Privacy or Patriotism

Google Docs was quite easy to use and I was able to edit other people's documents with no problemos. I can see its use for collaborative work though I would eventually store the final work on my own computer and use WORD for the final touches. My main reason is privacy protection as my short essay explains on "Google and the Patriot Act" done on Google Doc:

Two years ago Simon Avery wrote an article in the Globe and Mail about the dangers of the U.S. Patriot Act skulking about the internet jungle:

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/technology/article675014.ece

The article begins with some worries expressed by members of a Canadian university that had signed up to Google's Cloud Service (which only took 30 days to set up and was for free versus investing $1 million for another commercial product that would have taken months to establish). You may wonder why these professors were against a freebie which offered the latest in software capabilites to their students. The problem was the country that Google Inc. is based in: the United States of America.

Part of the war against terrorism was the creation of the Patriot Act which made it easy for the U.S. government to snoop on it's citizens for security reasons. This was to exist for only a limited time, but has been extended since it reached it expiration date. The latest extension was just this February 2010 [ http://www.csmonitor.com/USA/Politics/2010/0301/Obama-signs-Patriot-Act-extension-without-reforms ].

"Using their new powers under the Patriot Act, U.S. intelligence officials can scan documents, pick out certain words and create profiles of the authors - a frightening challenge to academic freedom" is a quote from one of the Canadian academics. "For instance, a researcher with a Middle Eastern name, researching anthrax or nuclear energy, might find himself denied entry to the United States without ever knowing why."

Apparently Google has gone to court over just this issue: "The firm cites a court case it fought in 2006 against attempts by the U.S. Justice Department to subpoena customer search records." It may be a comfort to know that Google is fighting for our privacy, but scary to know that the U.S. government does see Google as a prime source of information with a great search engine to assist in their security scans. Google was not willing to reveal how frequently they receive such demands from the government to access customers' files and whether the Patriot Act had invoked against them.

For more information go to: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USA_PATRIOT_Act