Comments on: Has the FBI ever heard of Google?

Attorney Eric J. Sinrod says Uncle Sam's dubious claims for exemptions in the Freedom of Information Act don't wash in the Internet era.

[mstrclark]

For all your knowledge you have no wisdom

"or finding out whether a prominent person is dead is to use Google (or any other search engine), to find a report of that person?s death."

How many John Q Public do you think there could be out there? Just because a search engine identies a site who has reported the death of a person:
a) doesn't mean it's accurate. )do you believe everything that's posted n the web?)
b) It's actually the person your looking for.

I know for a fact that there are three people in my city of 300K that have the same exact name. Two of us actually work for the same shipping company, which by the way caused the IT guys a lot of confusion when issuing email addresses.

"Your Honor, we didn't mean to break the law, Google said he was dead, honest.", won't fly in a court law.

How about a does of common sense.

[Dalkorian]

but it would give them somewhere to start ...

It would give them somewhere to start, assuming the FBI was
interested in answering the question. Of course it's more likely
they simply didn't want to comply with the FOIA request and
pulled the first canned response they could find. Remember, this
is the era of the Bush Dictatorship, where everything about the
government is secret and the public is allowed no privacy
whatsoever (question: how many laptops containing personal
information like names, addresses and SSN's has the
government "lost" already?)

It's about to get worse - the senate is considering a bill that
basically amounts to a blank check for the current dictatorship
to stomp on the rights of everyone, "terrorist" and "american"
alike. Wire taps, terrorist tribunals, secret prisons - kiss your
beloved constitution goodbye!

Don't expect to be able to change anything at the polls in
November either - they've been rigging elections since 2000 and
have become very good at it. Republican votes always seem to
work, but Democratic votes always get snarled up in some snafu
or another (see <http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/
content/article/2006/09/12/AR2006091200535_3.html?
nav=rss_print/asection> for the latest example; in particular
note the following comments -1. "But when the registered
Democrat put his card into the voting machine, a Republican
ballot appeared on the screen ... Other voters were having the
same problem, he said, and complained to election officials, who
didn't know how to fix the machines" -2. "... a report in June by
Common Cause concluded that they (electronic voting machines)
"are highly vulnerable to machine malfunction and human
manipulation." It also found that Maryland was one of 17 states
with voting systems that are at "high risk" because their
machines don't have a paper ballot backup system").

Feeling "free" yet? IMPEACH THE SON OF A BUSH!!!

[Jahntassa]

No need to be general

Yes, there could be cases where something like that would happen, but I think the jist of the statement was. "You could've at least done this simple task, that most people do twenty times a day."

The equivalent of saying, "You could've just looked out the window to see if it's raining, rather than saying you don't know what the weather's like." It may not be the most accurate method (google) to determine a person's death, but in the case (in context) it seems that the FBI could have done something as minimal as such.

[fred dunn]

Most genealogy researchers could find this...

So whay can't the FBI?
Because they don't want to make an effort.
They are so locked-up in their microcosm of NIH (not invented here) and arrogance that their determination is final.
My father was an FBI agent under J. Edgar Hoover so I know what kind of B$ they have to go through.
FBI agents don't get a chance to think independently as that is mutiny and will hamper any agents chances of advancement.
As with most Federal agencies it is such a vertical management style that by the time anybody get the permission to perform any activity not officially "sanctioned" by that agency, it's too late (9/11 is a prime example).
Once they get past the "sanctions" then they have to worry about their superiors thinking that they are being upstaged so the agent has to massage it into their superior's minds that it was their idea.
As far as the information itself, any genealogist worth their salt could dig up these individuals in a short amount of time.