On a day when Osama bin Laden proved that he just doesn’t get it (great, Osama. Now we have to stay in Iraq. Thanks a million), there’s another story developing under the highly-invasive radar:

SAN JOSE, Calif. — The Bush administration, seeking to revive an online pornography law struck down by the U.S. Supreme Court, has subpoenaed Google Inc. for details on what its users have been looking for through its popular search engine.

Google has refused to comply with the subpoena, issued last year, for a broad range of material from its databases, including a request for 1 million random Web addresses and records of all Google searches from any one-week period, lawyers for the U.S. Justice Department said in papers filed Wednesday in federal court in San Jose.

…The government contends it needs the data to determine how often pornography shows up in online searches as part of an effort to revive an Internet child protection law that was struck down two years ago by the U.S. Supreme Court on free-speech grounds.

The 1998 Child Online Protection Act would have required adults to use access codes or other ways of registering before they could see objectionable material online, and it would have punished violators with fines up to $50,000 or jail time. The high court ruled that technology such as filtering software may better protect children.

Wow! There’s so much going on here, it’s hard to choose where to start. Okay, how about with this:

pin up

I just wanted to get that out of the way. This pin-up (by Olivia de Berardinis) now makes Fanatical Apathy a site that would require you to enter a code or credit card number in order to visit. No, I’m not kidding. You can read the text of the legislation here. It violates the “or a lewd exhibition of the genitals or post-pubescent female breast” clause. There’s no doubt that Ms. de Berardinis means to be lewd, and no doubt that I do as well, and no doubt that the breast in question is “post-pubescent.”

Okay, so now that I’ve made this site illegal in the future… let’s move on. [By the way, a great place to make your site tastefully illegal in the future, which I heartily recommend, is thepinupfiles.com. I found it… through Google.]

So the Supreme Court struck this law down in 1998. But that was two appointments ago. The new court will have two fewer post-pubescent female breasts. And two more boobs. So the Bush administration definitely has a shot here.

But why subpoena Google? My guess is that the government wants to make its case by reading us a list of all the disgusting, licentious things that people typed into a Google window over the course of a week. Because that would prove that people look for dirty stuff on the web. Which presumably means that any child could find him or herself looking at online filth just by innocently typing “hot sexy naked dwarves drowning in semen” into a Google window. It probably happens all the time, for school projects and whatnot, and just think about what that seemingly innocuous search could lead to!

I guess the least-interesting and most-important thing here is that the government wants to view information about our online habits, and they’re not even trying to prosecute a crime. They just want to shore up their case for re-passing that bill that the Supreme Court already called, ironically, a violation of privacy.

As I said, it might be the most important part, but it gives me no further opportunities to make lewd jokes or offer up artfully-exposed B-cups, so I won’t dwell on it. Scroll back up and goggle and the googled pin-up again. And then add one to your own 40 acres of web space. Knowing that you’re a criminal in the future just makes it more fun, doesn’t it?