14 DAY TRIAL // Whenever the Freedom of Information Act is mentioned in a lawsuit it's obvious it's going to be a very interesting one. As long as somebody has something to hide, you just know that information is worth knowing. The Electronic Frontier Foundation privacy group has asked a federal court to order the release of all communications between Google Incorporated and Jane Horvath, the Justice Department's chief privacy and civil liberties officer, the Associated Pres reports.
Back in 2006, the Mountain View-based company was asked by the Justice Department to surrender the text of every term entered into the Google search engine during a one-week period. That must have been a close call for the Internet giant, as it did not comply with the request for no officially mentioned reason. After the request was repeated, Google finally scaled it down to a random 5,000 searches, the EFF claimed. The online privacy group also said that Jane Horvath was critical in making the widening of terms happen.
In August 2007, the former Justice Dept chief was hired by the Mountain-View based company as a senior privacy counsel, a position she still holds. "Google has an unprecedented ability to collect and retain very personal information about millions of Americans, and (Justice) and other law enforcement agencies have developed a huge appetite for that information. [?] We want to know what discussions DOJ's top privacy lawyer had with Google before leaving her government position to join the company," David Sobel, senior counsel for EFF, said in a press release.
The object of the request for information is all the correspondence between Horvath and any Google related person, email and other means of communication included. The response is waited to come within the next 20 working days. Google playing dirty?