Screaming Penguin - Source Does Matter

Jeremey has a post about the DOJ thing. It is one of those blog posts that you read and you can just feel the pain between the lines.

I've waited several days and thought quite a bit before saying anything about the Department of Justice asking search engines for search data. I waited partly because I didn't want to say something I'd regret, and that was pretty likely to happen early on. And partly because I wanted to see how the companies involved were going to handle the situation. Most did a very poor job.
I was initially tempted to post instructions and screen shots for each major search engine. They'd illustrate, step-by-step, how to sign out and search anonymously--you know, just in case. But that's a lot of work and all I really wanted to say was this: I'm disappointed.

I'm disappointed in the government for wanting to use the online behavior of millions of people in an attempt to justify a law that many of those million are likely against. I'm disappointed in them for making people even more fearful of "being tracked online" and the Bush Administration's attempts to keep an eye on the public.

I'm disappointed in those companies that appeared not to put up a fight, notify their users, or explain what happened in a timely fashion. I'm disappointed in them for not providing an opt-out mechanism. I guess that's everyone but Google so far.

Now, I am certainly not a prominent geek blogger for a tech company. I know that even that slight of hand stab at Yahoo doesn't make his boss happy. Anyone who has seen us shoot our keyboards off around here knows that geeks can respond explosively. He certainly didn't come out guns a blazin like Scoble did when MS bent over and took it from the Chinese government -- or rather gave it to one of their users on the govt's behalf:

OK, this one is depressing to me. It’s one thing to pull a list of words out of blogs using an algorithm. It’s another thing to become an agent of a government and censor an entire blogger’s work. Yes, I know the consequences. Yes, there are thousands of jobs at stake. Billions of dollars. But, the behavior of my company in this instance is not right.

Rebecca MacKinnon has the details in a post titled Microsoft takes down a Chinese blogger.

Why is this so important to me? Well, you ignore the voices of individual people at your peril. And, I’ve been raised by people who taught me the value of standing up for the little guy. My mom grew up in Germany. Her mom stood up to the Nazis (and got a lot of scorn from family and friends for doing so).

I do believe in a slippery slope. If they come after you today, maybe they’ll come after me tomorrow. Gotta stop this kind of stuff while we’re still talking about you.

Oh, and to: Zhao Jing, aka Michael Anti I’d like to offer you a guest blog here on my blog. I won’t censor you and you can write whatever you’d like.

Guys over at MSN: sorry, I don’t agree with your being used as a state-run thug.

Scoble ended up backtracking a bit later with this post:

Blogger time isn’t that easy to live with when you work in a big company. That’s not an excuse, but just a fact. Already there are plenty of people who took me to task for reacting like a blogger and not waiting until I had checked with all the parties. Truth is this thing was going supernova already (it was on Instapundit before I even knew about it).

I have been talking to lots of people today, though, inside and outside of Microsoft. In every instance they asked me to keep those conversations confidential. Why? Cause we’re talking about international relations here and the lives of employees. I wish I could go into it more than that, but I can’t. Not yet. See, it’s real easy as Americans to rattle the door and ask for change, but we don’t live there. Saying “give them the finger� isn’t that easy when there are real human lives at stake. And I don’t need to spell out what I’m talking about here, do I?

The problem is, in both of these cases, Jeremy is right, Google is the only party in a slew that hasn't let down the general public.

Now, I of course, believe Microsoft is evil. Their own largess is doing more to combat that evil than anything before, of course, Bush making his first act as president to let them get away with a decade of criminal behaviour doesn't hurt them at all either. However, I have friends who work for Microsoft. It is easy to forget that a lot of the people that work at these companies are the same kinds of people we all know and love. How exactly the collection of people goes from good individuals to a massive mustache twirling evil is something that a lot of people have pontificated on over the years.

I am really curious, though. In a world where the nation-state is more and more being replaced by the corporation -- indeed, Gibson and others see this as an inevitability in the medium term -- how are the individuals supposed to give or deny the kind of moral authority to their leadership that they need to deal with situations like these?