It’s Thursday night, and you know what that means - it’s the night that we take a little break from our week-long BPP cancellation vigil and have a little normalcy in the form of Brooke and Bob. Yay!
The episode starts with a clip of President Bush talking about how pleased he is about his brand new warrantless wiretapping law. I’m kind of sad that it’s my recap week - Matthew’s going to be totally jealous. Warrantless wiretapping is one of his favorite things. Er, to talk about. I’m going to leave this part to him, later. Things to note: Obama voted for the new FISA law, only one of our branches of government works, and people hate their phone companies.
Wait - there’s one more thing. With all three of our official branches of government all in favor of eavesdropping on foreign calls, it’s now more important than ever that the unofficial fourth estate step it up a bit. The senate majority leader is trying to get some shield laws in place before the August recess in the hopes that by being allowed source anonymity, journalists can stop this madness.
At the end of the interview with professor Johnathan Turley about FISA, Brooke sounds kind of relieved that it’s over. Was it too much to take in, or was she just aching for a snack break? Either way, on the other side of the catchy theme music, she sounds much happier.
Next up - a little series of vignettes about Google’s omnipotence.
Vignette No. 1 - Google is passing along the user names and IP addresses of people who watch copyrighted Viacom content on YouTube. Viacom doesn’t want the names so that they can tell when I watch the silly James K. Polk video again. They want them so that they can tell when I’m wasting time watching uploaded episodes of “Pop-up Video” and “America’s Next Top Model”.
Granted, Viacom is being careful to not expose anyone’s user information. There’s a lot of confusion - the internet is still so young that people don’t know how to legislate it, other than on a case-by-case basis. The case hasn’t gone to trial yet, and some of the outcome rests on Sumner Redstone, the guy who runs Viacom. Silicon Alley Insider Peter Kafka describes Redstone and the situation this way:
“He’s very erratic. Basically you don’t really know what a billionaire in his eighties, who likes to shave himself nude in his bathtub in Beverly Hills, is going to do from day to day. ”
And that’s more than I ever wanted to know about Viacom.
Vignette No.2 - If Sumner Redstone is searching for other naked octogenarian billionaires, he should probably skip the Google search. Google has the records of pretty much every search. Granted, in its privacy policy, Google swears (”cross its heart and hope to die”, adds Bob - I love it when his inner 12 year-old girl comes out) that it’ll never compromise user information. But what if the government got involved?
Vignette No.3 - Once again, Brooke is all over the obscenity stories:
“It all began in June 2006, in a little town outside Pensacola, Florida, where Clinton McCowen owned, operated and filmed vignettes for his extremely adult website, the initials of which are COHF. If you need to know what that stands for, look it up on Google.”
I love Booke. She’s great. She’s convinced that people in Pensacola are searching for all kinds of dirty things. Dirty things that may have no scientific or cultural merit, serve the prurient interest and go against the community standard of decency.
McCowen was charged with obscenity. But, his rather brilliant lawyer decided to prove that the client’s site was in line with community standards by using Google Trends.
And what did they find? There are prurient people in Pensacola - lots of them. “Terms as “orgy” and “group sex” were searched far more than “apple pie” or “ethanol” or “boating.”
Um, of course they were. I’m wondering how often searches like “apple pie orgy” or “group sex boating” happened. (I just paused to think that now, someone is going to find this humble little radio blog when they search “group sex boating”. I’m not sure whether to be pleased or disgusted.)
Sadly, before we could all learn a thing or two about the ever-changing definition of “community” and “standards”, the prosecution settled. Google probably had something on them, too.
These are scary times we live in, people.
Until next week - try not get wiretapped or busted searching for obscene material via Google. We’ll try and do the same.
This post was written by Kerry. Matthew is *heaving, Bob-like sigh of adoration* away this week.
(Photo from Kris Kros)
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