While Google told the Department of Justice to suck its left boobie, it would appear that Yahoo, Microsoft's MSN and America OnLine have all said yes to the data searches, giving up the records of millions of users all under the false veil of proving the Child Online Protection Act constitutional. From BoingBoing:

It seems apparent that Google objected to the request not for privacy reasons, but on grounds that the request was too broad and burdensome. Privacy advocates I spoke to today, including attorney Sherwin Siy at EPIC, say while the DoJ's request would not identify individual users, the scope and nature of this request sets a troubling precedent. Today, they argue, only search strings and urls; tomorrow, perhaps, the IP addresses of all users who typed in "Osama Bin Laden."

From SearchEngineWatch:

Getting a list of all searches in one week definitely would let US federal government dig deep into the long tail of porn searches. But then again, the sheer amount of data would be overwhelming. Do you know every variation of a term someone might use, that you're going to dig out of the hundreds of millions of searches you'd get? Oh, and be sure you filter out all the automated queries coming in from rank checking tools, while you're add it. They won't skew the data at all, nope.

As you think about the consequences, consider this. They're not specifically asking for anything related to porn. They're asking for it all. Once they have it, what they do with it is their discretion. Sure, Gonzo's Porn Squad will try to prove their law to be viable. But, as stated above, there's nothing to stop them from looking for people who are searching for anything that could be subversive to their agenda. And we mean anything. (Link -- via BoingBoing)