Sherry Chandler

from After Subpoenas, Internet Searches Give Some Pause

Kathryn Hanson, a former telecommunications engineer who lives in Oakland, Calif., was looking at BBC News online last week when she came across an item about a British politician who had resigned over a reported affair with a “rent boy.”

It was the first time Ms. Hanson had seen the term, so, in search of a definition, she typed it into Google. As Ms. Hanson scrolled through the results, she saw that several of the sites were available only to people over 18. She suddenly had a frightening thought. Would Google have to inform the government that she was looking for a rent boy - a young male prostitute?

Ms. Hanson, 45, immediately told her boyfriend what she had done. “I told him I’d Googled ‘rent boy,’ just in case I got whisked off to some Navy prison in the dead of night,” she said.

from War and Piece

Perhaps this is the whole point of the Bush administration invasion of Americans’ privacy through things like demanding Google, Yahoo, AOL, etc. turn over *all* search records, monitoring phone calls without warrants, etc. Not to root out illegal activity. … No, it’s to make ordinary Americans who are not breaking the law feel like they’re being watched, so they curtail their normal behavior, so they are less political, less inquisitive, less vocal, less active, so they feel less free. Typical feature of the surveillance state.

98. Good v. bad poetry. The distinction is not useful. The whole idea assumes a shared set of articulatable values by which to make such a judgment. It assumes, if not the perfect poem, at least the theory of limits, the most perfect poem. How would you proceed to make such a distinction?

99. Those who would excerpt or edit miss the point.

— from Ron Silliman’s The Chinese Notebook