MSN Vice President Christopher Payne is at the front of the room right now and is being grilled by the search champs about what they gave the government and when they gave it.

Some clarifications. No IP addresses or identifying information was given over. They also asked for more information in the beginning and MSN said no (Gary Flake said that) and renegotiated to make sure that no personal identifyable information was handed over.

I’ll track this conversation on blogs. I wish this were being recorded. It’s like being in a White House press conference.

The search champs has a whole session on this topic later today.

One of the attendees said that this is the first time that everyday people realized that search engines track a lot of things and that those things could be given over to governmental bodies. I didn’t catch his name, sorry.

Another attendee asked us to work with Google and Yahoo and other search engine companies to have a unified front and not to use this as a PR issue to play one company against the other.

Payne says that he realizes that they need to be far more transparent about these issues.