Slashdot Mirror
"Lawful Spying" Price Lists Leaked
ogaraf writes "Wired has a story about how the site Cryptome.org leaked the price lists for 'lawful spying' activities of Yahoo and other companies, and subsequently received a DMCA takedown notice from Yahoo. The documents, however, are still posted online, and in them you can learn, for instance, that IP logs last for one year, but the original IPs used to create accounts have been kept since 1999. The contents of your Yahoo account are bought for $30 to $40 by law enforcement agencies."
I like the part where Yahoo complains that the leaking of the document could "shock" its users and damage its reputation. Shoulda thought of that earlier, huh?
Time for paid services with explicit privacy protection. There is a good business case for this, I think, but will require thoughtful way to market to the masses. Any ideas?
Fuck systemd. Fuck Redhat. Fuck Soylent, too. Wait, scratch the last one.
But this "search warrant" give you a lot more than just Mr. John Doe at some street.. It gives you all the Doe's at a specific month who visited some URL. That is freaking privacy intrusion. Goodbye Yahoo.
In order to form an immaculate member of a flock of sheep one must, above all, be a sheep.
It's not that Yahoo occasionally complies with the authorities. It is that they have a pricing scheme for it. Maybe this is common practice, but it sounds like instead of fighting for the user, Yahoo is rolling over and perhaps even jumping at the opportunity to make a quick buck by selling out someone's confidential information.
End of liberty as we know it? No. Scary, when combined with the US government's increasingly arbitrary conditions for search warrants if you're a "terrorist"? Yes.
If you don't like judicial powers, take it up with your representative and senators.
and what makes you this /. does not collect data and market it to pay their own bills?
The privacy intrusion does not start with the search. It starts with retaining the information.
We the people is a law enforcement agency.
We the People ought to be enforcing the Common Law, but ... hey, who's on Idol tonight?
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
But this "search warrant" give you a lot more than just Mr. John Doe at some street.. It gives you all the Doe's at a specific month who visited some URL. That is freaking privacy intrusion. Goodbye Yahoo.
Who exactly were you planning on using for email or IM that will ignore a subpoena from law enforcement? What good will it do you unless everyone you communicate with also uses such a provider? What about your connection to that provider?
If you become interesting to law enforcement, you're living in another world if you think they won't consider it worthy of further investigation that so many connections from your ISP are to an email provider (or, if paranoid a VPN endpoint) in another country known to be un-cooperative with your local law enforcement.
In the US, the people are the final authority on what is right and wrong, Constitutional or not.
In my opinion, Marbury v. Madison was a terrible ruling, and the beginning of the American decline. Without that ruling, it would have been up to the people to police Congress, and the level of apathy we see today would have never been attained.
Learn about Photography Basics.
Nothing compels Yahoo to keep logs for as long as they do. That's what bothers people. That and that Yahoo wanted to keep it a secret from their users.
Yahoo wrote in its objection letter that if its pricing information were disclosed to Soghoian, he would use it “to ’shame’ Yahoo! and other companies — and to ’shock’ their customers.”
It's hard to shame someone who doesn't already feel that they have something to be ashamed of. I guess we know Yahoo understands it's behavior to be shameful but continues to do it.
It gives you all the Doe's at a specific month who visited some URL.
If the government suspects that a URL is being used to do illicit communications, how else do you expect them to figure out who was trying to get the message? Particularly if they're clever enough that rather than having an URL of someserver.com/alqaida/people_we_will_kill.html, they've used steganography to embed the information in an otherwise harmless looking file?
The question is not whether such search warrants have been granted, it's whether it has been done so in an abusive manner. And that's not covered in this document.
A confidential internal memo detailing plans for building a new type of engine could "promote the Progress of Science"; ergo, it deserves copyright protection. It also details trade secrets that could damage the company it belongs to; ergo, it deserves to be treated as confidential. Using this example, I'm having a hard time understanding your complaint.
God invented whiskey so the Irish would not rule the world.
What makes it sinister isn't so much what it says, but that it's supposed to be secret in the first place, and the takedown notice now that it has been divulged. I prefer to know what my rights are in the first place, thankyouverymuch. There's this idea that we can't let people know the rules of the game, since bad guys would then exploit them. Admittedly there is some truth to this; look at how corporations freeload by playing games with the tax codes. But what is the alternative? A lawless state where everybody lives with the vague threat of "stay in line or something bad might happen."
Right, and ooh, a subpoena is SO hard to issue! No judge need be involved; prosecutors get to write them themselves -- motivated, perhaps, by nothing more than a hunch.
There's a huge difference between a warrant and a subpoena.
$META_SIG_JOKE
most people use Dynamic IPs, so they can subpoena the IPs but they will get a lot of "false positives" to track down the owner of those Yahoo IDs. Most people do not have the same ISP they had in 1999 due to the great dial-up to broadband rush after the Dotcom bubble burst. You'll have grandmothers and teenagers be accused of stuff that some random stranger that shared a dynamic IP address with them did.
Thanks to the Patriot Act, the police, NSA, FBI etc can get the information without a search warrant. The Democrats lead by Obama had promised to remove the Patriot Act as soon as they took office, but why it is still a law, I'll never know. But then many of them voted to pass it when Bush was President anyway. Both the Democrats and Republicans are corrupt in that way.
By the way Yahoo uses web beacons to track web site usage and most users don't know how to opt out of that. I've opted out of it several times already.
Remember, Slashdot does not have a -1 disagree moderation, and no, troll, flamebait, and overrated are not substitutes.