CORRECTION APPENDED. SEE BELOW.

Just how much pornography do web surfers go hunting for, and how easy is it to find? The federal government wants to know, not because the Department of Justice is looking for hot babes, but in order to defend one of its own laws against a legal challenge.

On Tuesday, Federal District Court Judge James Ware ordered Google to turn over a sampling of users’ search queries to the Justice Department. The government claims it needs Google’s data to show that young people are getting around software intended to prevent them from seeing pornography. As with any case that raises privacy concerns, Ware was responsible for weighing competing claims: Google’s right to protect its data against the government’s need for information to enforce (and, in this situation, evaluate) its laws. In this case Ware made the wrong decision. The government’s desire to prevent clever youngsters from subverting anti-pornography software does not justify an exploration of Google’s data, it represents a very real threat to the privacy of Google’s users.

We do, however, recognize that the government has made significant concessions in the Google case. The Justice Department originally requested what could have turned out to be billions of web addresses derived from Google searches. We believe that this data would have made it possible for government investigators to uncover potentially sensitive information about Google users. For example, since users frequently include their own names and those of their friends in their searches, the government could have used search terms to uncover personal information on individual users. When Google challenged the government’s right to claim this quantity of information, the government scaled back its claim. It now requests only