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LET ME SAY THIS RIGHT AWAY: I don't want kids to see Internet porn.

To that extent, I'm in line with the U.S. Department of Justice, which wants to revive a law enacted but never enforced to keep kids away from adult Web content. But the means the DOJ lawyers want to use (penalizing Web operators if kids access their raunchy sites) are unconstitutional, and the tactics they want to employ (subpoenaing Web indexes and search logs from Yahoo!, Google, MSN and AOL) will put a damper on the free access to information and should be stopped.

Google's refusal to comply with the government's subpoena has brought to light a fact that many users may not have appreciated fully: Their search activities are stored and recorded by the big search engines using cookies and other data compilation methods. In fact, a January phone survey by the Ponemon Institute, a data and privacy management group, found that 77% of Google users don't realize the search engines keep any record of their searches.

And as the engines expand their features beyond text search — to desktops, local search, mapping, e-mail, social networks and personalization — they amass even more knowledge about the everyday lives of their registered users.

We computer-literate types generally realize we're handing over a certain amount of our privacy when we perform a general search, and certainly when we register for ancillary features and services through the search engine portals. We assure ourselves that the data we're exposing isn't personally traceable but will be used in the aggregate — for example, to let a search engine “learn” what we customarily look for on the Web and offer results matching those tendencies before others.

But in practice, “not personally identifiable” translates into “not profitably identifiable.” The search engines value their cred among users. Reputation is what keeps them tweaking algorithms for better and more relevant results, and working to root out abuses on their results pages. Making personal searches public would cost them much more than they stood to gain by doing so. So protecting user confidentiality is a bottom-line issue for search engines.

Proof of this is that most of us will sign up for services from a Google or a Yahoo! much more quickly than we will register for a simple e-mail newsletter from an unfamiliar, no-name Web site. We trust the search engines will handle our data responsibly or be roasted in the online and offline media minutes after the first eagle-eyed blogger spots any evidence of misuse.

Personally, I don't have similar trust in my government. The last few years have seen some dumb attempts to encroach on civil liberties, and some egregious ones. The former category includes the implantation of invisible codes in laser printers to trace the documents they produce. (Goodbye counterfeiting, but hello counterintelligence.) The latter group includes plans to monitor library records to flag readers of suspicious books, the massive “Terrorist Information Program” data-mining scheme, and the use of warrantless wiretaps on U.S. citizens in the name of homeland security.

Earlier this year it was revealed that a number of government Web sites, from the Smithsonian Institution to the National Security Administration, were dropping third-party tracking cookies on visitors' browsers. The official explanation: The cookies were inserted “by default” after a software upgrade. (Of course; why expect those non-techies at the NSA to understand how cookies work or what they can do?)

The Justice Department's ability to order up wholesale scans of Web search could place a big, mean bouncer at the doorway to all the creativity and knowledge that's going to come from this amazing innovation. While those search engine records may be aggregated and impersonal today, I don't trust they can remain permanently anonymous if a federal agency wants to back-engineer some method of linking the search “where” to the searching “who.” I want more assurance that my click-streams will be properly guarded, or I'll start searching anonymously and no one will get to watch me — not even the engines.

We need federal legislation to prevent government officials from getting their hands on search data that the public has assumed will remain as private as their telephone calls. (Oops.) There are some early prospects of such a law: Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-VT, requested more information about the DOJ search subpoenas, including an explanation of how the department intends to protect confidentiality and whether it will ask for more search data in the future. In a Jan. 25 letter to U.S. Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, Leahy said that “The collection and use…of such commercial transactional data on law-abiding Americans poses unique concerns, including the specter of excessive government surveillance that may intrude upon important privacy interests and chill the exercise of First Amendment-protected speech.”

That said, I'm not faulting Microsoft, Yahoo! or AOL, engines that complied with the DOJ subpoenas. It takes a lot of guts to flout a request by a federal agency that can make your corporate life miserable by, say, raising questions about your compliance with an anti-trust settlement. And I'm not holding Google up as a monument to civil liberties or free speech. Aside from a possible public relations bounce from its refusal, the company's stand probably was motivated as much by an impulse to preserve its algorithm's trade secrets as by concern for user confidentiality. (Besides, Congress also is set to investigate the apparent surrender of Google, MSN and Yahoo! to Beijing's demands that they censor inflammatory content from the Web results they serve up in Asia.)

I'm just saying that in this world where privacy has to be guarded constantly and often is traded for expediency, I'll side with free speech and free enterprise every time. Letting federal prosecutors access search data now for an “impersonal” survey of the Web could easily lead to targeted investigations of groups or individuals in the future. Let the government do its own dirty work.

Meanwhile, parents: Buy a software filter for your kids and spend a few hours learning how to use it. And let us all search without worry.