I never point to John anymore, but he's got a fairly interesting scenario describing a search engineer who culls data on young ladies. It's timely as it fits in with the recent privacy concerns surrounding the case of a Mr. Petrick, who was found guilty of murdering his wife based largely on the evidence of his search history.

The fear is that if law enforcement could obtain records of searches performed by users on a large scale, they could simply go data mining for suspects whenever a crime occurs. I don't think that's a scenario that's close at hand, but it's certainly something that would be likely in a large-scale terrorism situation. With the paranoia of the US federal investigators, I wouldn't rule out large scale detention of everyone who closely matched a terrorist search profile. Obviously, that's not closely tied to this case, but it's something everyone's thinking about.