Good day all. With all the political news, this story about Yahoo reading people’s email and reporting back to the Federal government sort of slipped under the radar.
Since the Snowden Affair, Americans have been aware that the National Security Agency and the FBI have been basically using the 4th Amendment as toilet paper with regards to people’s digital “papers” such as their email. Many Internet mail services have started end to end encryption to deal with this issue. Now news has come out that Yahoo created some software to break their encryption system and go through people’s email. Here are the details from Reuters via…Yahoo:
Yahoo Inc last year secretly built a custom software program to search all of its customers’ incoming emails for specific information provided by U.S. intelligence officials, according to people familiar with the matter.
The company complied with a classified U.S. government demand, scanning hundreds of millions of Yahoo Mail accounts at the behest of the National Security Agency or FBI, said three former employees and a fourth person apprised of the events.
Some surveillance experts said this represents the first case to surface of a U.S. Internet company agreeing to an intelligence agency’s request by searching all arriving messages, as opposed to examining stored messages or scanning a small number of accounts in real time.
Reading through the story, I don’t see any indications of a warrant being served, or the request being very limited in scope. In fact, it looks like it was just the opposite.
According to two of the former employees, Yahoo Chief Executive Marissa Mayer’s decision to obey the directive roiled some senior executives and led to the June 2015 departure of Chief Information Security Officer Alex Stamos, who now holds the top security job at Facebook Inc.
“Yahoo is a law abiding company, and complies with the laws of the United States,” the company said in a brief statement in response to Reuters questions about the demand. Yahoo declined any further comment.
And is it any wonder that Yahoo is floundering like a drowning whale? It’s things like this that end any trust in a company. As for the request, a number of people in a position to know, are saying they’ve never seen anything like this before.
U.S. phone and Internet companies are known to have handed over bulk customer data to intelligence agencies. But some former government officials and private surveillance experts said they had not previously seen either such a broad demand for real-time Web collection or one that required the creation of a new computer program.
“I’ve never seen that, a wiretap in real time on a ‘selector,'” said Albert Gidari, a lawyer who represented phone and Internet companies on surveillance issues for 20 years before moving to Stanford University this year. A selector refers to a type of search term used to zero in on specific information.
“It would be really difficult for a provider to do that,” he added.
The reason you’ve never seen anything like this is because it’s never been tried before. Usually when the Federal Government shows up with something like this, they’re told, rather pointedly, to buzz off.
Experts said it was likely that the NSA or FBI had approached other Internet companies with the same demand, since they evidently did not know what email accounts were being used by the target. The NSA usually makes requests for domestic surveillance through the FBI, so it is hard to know which agency is seeking the information.
Have you ever wondered why you don’t see things like this being requested by the Central Intelligence Agency? Because they have been hammered repeatedly on domestic spying and, unlike what you see on television, are only allowed to work outside of the United States. The NSA has no such restrictions, and has been ignoring what restrictions there are for a long time now. As for the other companies? Where they also approached?
Alphabet Inc’s Google and Microsoft Corp , two major U.S. email service providers, separately said on Tuesday that they had not conducted such email searches.
“We’ve never received such a request, but if we did, our response would be simple: ‘No way’,” a spokesman for Google said in a statement.
A Microsoft spokesperson said in a statement, “We have never engaged in the secret scanning of email traffic like what has been reported today about Yahoo.” The company declined to comment on whether it had received such a request.
They probably have and probably told the Feds to go pound sand. Thanks to Snowden’s revelations, the Government has been forced to scale back a bit on Domestic spying.
Under laws including the 2008 amendments to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, intelligence agencies can ask U.S. phone and Internet companies to provide customer data to aid foreign intelligence-gathering efforts for a variety of reasons, including prevention of terrorist attacks.
2008? Hmm, that would be Bush, but also, recall who controlled Congress at that time. It was the Democrats, the party so well known for their concerns of people’s constitutional rights.
Disclosures by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden and others have exposed the extent of electronic surveillance and led U.S. authorities to modestly scale back some of the programs, in part to protect privacy rights.
Or so they say.
Companies including Yahoo have challenged some classified surveillance before the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, a secret tribunal.
The problem with the FISA court is that it has a bad habit of rubber stamping FBI requests and due to the, in my opinion, unconstitutional, nature of the court, you have no way to seek redress.
“It is deeply disappointing that Yahoo declined to challenge this sweeping surveillance order, because customers are counting on technology companies to stand up to novel spying demands in court,” Patrick Toomey, an attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union, said in a statement.
Yahoo is in trouble as a business. It came into being during the early days of the internet, supplanting AltaVista as a search site. They added features such as free email and a web portal for their users to keep personal data. When Google came along, they crushed Yahoo, and Yahoo has been trying to redefine themselves for years. This is one of the reasons that Marissa Meyer was brought in as the new CEO a few years ago. Her tenure has not been considered a resounding success. With this revelation, her tenure may be seen as a catastrophic failure that finally ends Yahoo as an independent company.
I have a yahoo account, and have had it going back to the 90’s. I haven’t used their email system in years, and now I never will unless I encrypt any messages I send through it. (Anger Central recommends the Gnu Privacy Guard) Yahoo has shown they can’t be trusted to protect their user base, and losing trust is usually what kills a company. Stick the fork in, Yahoo’s done.
Thatisall
~The Angry Webmaster~
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