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Yahoo Receives Special Recognition For Fighting For User Data Privacy
An anonymous reader writes "The Electronic Frontier Foundation awarded Yahoo a gold star for its diligence in fighting for user privacy in courts. From the release: 'In 2007, Yahoo received an order to produce user data under the Protect America Act (the predecessor statute to the FISA Amendments Act, the law on which the NSA’s recently disclosed Prism program relies). Instead of blindly accepting the government’s constitutionally questionable order, Yahoo fought back. The company challenged the legality of the order in the FISC, the secret surveillance court that grants government applications for surveillance. And when the order was upheld by the FISC, Yahoo didn’t stop fighting: it appealed the decision to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court of Review, a three-judge appellate court established to review decisions of the FISC. ... Yahoo went to bat for its users – not because it had to, and not because of a possible PR benefit – but because it was the right move for its users and the company. It’s precisely this type of fight – a secret fight for user privacy – that should serve as the gold standard for companies, and such a fight must be commended. While Yahoo still has a way to go in the other Who Has Your Back categories (and they remain the last major email carrier not using HTTPS encryption by default), Yahoo leads the pack in fighting for its users under seal and in secret.'"
Although they did end up losing, and were forbidden from even mentioning the existence of the case until recently.
Although they did end up losing, and were forbidden from even mentioning the existence of the case until recently.
Anybody seen my dog?
He's missing his left eye, has a broken tail, limps from an infection in his front right paw, is deaf and has worms.
He answers to "Lucky."
They will risk jail and disregard all gag orders as a clear violation of free speech rights. I'm not impressed with show trials while secret deals are made in the back room.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
But putting up a good fight matters! When the Zombies came looking for their users' brains, they at least boarded the doors and windows and load the shotguns and screamed Yahoo!!!!!
I can see, why this sort of procedure — including the gag-order — may be justified in some cases. But it is so easy to abuse, I'm not sure, the benefits we are getting are worth the risk we are taking.
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
90% of my spam comes from gmail address, the remainder from hotmail.
SJWs are the new boogeyman. -Me
This is just like Kafkas "Der Prozess".
You got secret laws that people/companies are ordered by a secret court to be followed, and they are not even allowed to tell anybody about it.
Land of the free.
HI O WISE PRINCE. WHT TOOK U SO DAM LONG?
Is this the same Yahoo! that turned over data to the Chinese, which resulted in a bunch of people going to prison?
http://money.cnn.com/2006/02/08/technology/yahoo_china_b20/
Seems like a convenient PR stunt to me.
" a secret fight for user privacy" is BULL SHIT !
Yahoo's Legal Dept. would only go after 'something like this' if their CEO + CFO + Board Members' private e-mails + Skype + Outlooks et al. were compromised and nothing else.
NO Publicity? So EFF is doing this out the golden goodness of their collective heart? FUCK NO.
Fuck Yahoo and Fuck Yahoo's new 'errand boy' the immaculate conception EFF.
Yes, the good fight. How about they put up a good fight and fix their auth cookie vulnerabilities that lead to infected ads stealing user credentials and sending spam as authenticated Yahoo users? That's been going on for quite a while and still happens daily.
The brains of the Yahoo board aren't enough to be appetizers for zombies.
They're not based in America and don't have a USA subsidiary and if they hand data to NSA they can be put in jail behind bars.
I'm sorry and all, but get real here, Yahoo appealed to the Kangaroo Court, and lost, it appealed to the Superior Skippy Court and lost. It could appeal to the Supreme Court if the law is changed to permit it, and it would still lose, judges like Antonin Scalia? The 'torture isn't punishment therefore it's not cruel and unusual punishment' judge? Lots of right wing nutters put there for their extreme pro-military thinking. No doubt with the help of a leak or two from the NSA against their competitors.
You are the only one that can protect your privacy at this point, and that means encrypting traffic, using non-US hosting, https everywhere, Jabber or Jitsi with encryption everywhere. SSH everywhere, SFTP, never FTP. Ditch the major US cloud providers, yep, sorry Yahoo, you tried, you failed, I'd play a violin, but I'm busy picking up the privacy pieces. Don't buy kit with backdoors, no HP kit. Move away from the worst offenders, PRISM timeline says Microsoft is the worst. Skype? Ditch it now. Facebook? Well consider all private walls as extra interesting to the NSA, because you must have something to hide. Buying a sex toy? Pay cash.
http://www.amnestyusa.org/our-work/cases/china-shi-tao
"
Shi Tao was sentenced in April 2005 to 10 years’ imprisonment and two years’ subsequent deprivation of his political rights. According to the court verdict, part of the evidence for the case was account holder information supplied by Yahoo!. Spokespersons for Yahoo! claimed the company was simply following local laws.
"
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/08/28/yahoo_seeks_dismissal_human_rights_lawsuit/
"
Yahoo! has asked a US court to dismiss a lawsuit accusing it of "aiding and abetting" acts of torture and other human rights abuses against Chinese dissidents. The company handed over information about its users to the Chinese government, which led to the arrests of the dissidents.
"
http://www.marketwatch.com/story/yahoo-helps-china-jail-dissidents-says-rights-group
"
Human Rights in China, a New York-based group, said Thursday that Wang Xiaoning was sentenced to 10 years in prison in Sept 2003 for "incitement to subvert state power" after Yahoo provided authorities with his email address.
"
and call me a tinfoil hatter all you want, but I do think this and the Snowden-crash issues are related-
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=3929983&cid=44170993
Mod that up..
The real cost of these BS authoritarian programs, as far as dollar figures go: First, we all get to fund these despicable agencies via our tax dollars. If that's not bad enough, then the drag on the economy manifested through situations such as the one described in TFS.
Everybody loses.
Not even taking into account the corrosive effects of these programs on our freedoms and rights.
A friend of mine worked for a company focusing on teen/tween culture. When I asked him how they generate their original user base/mail list. He bluntly told me they had a "marketing partnership" with Yahoo!
how pathetic and weak.
I'm only half kidding. As much fun as it is to mock Yahoo for being, well... Yahoo, they certainly deserve all the brownie points coming their way for defending their users' privacy.
And while the EFF is handing these out, they ought to give one to this guy.
In the end, they're a huge internet company that gives all our stuff up to the spooks. "Going to bat" would be doing what Snowden did - INFORMING us. They had years to do that.
you can fight for my rights anytime~~
I know the slashdot crowd really has their pantys in a twist about this, but honestly is it really so terrible to turn over info about a few people that a court has determined to have communicated with overseas terrorists?
I think it's a reasonable thing to do provided it is not blanket access and is only for a few court reviewed and ordered cases per year.
I think the loss of privacy is really quite minor compared to daily assults to privacy we face from commercial interests, and the benefits are far greater, I really like not being blown up.
What fight?
Going to a secret court where you WILL lose, then appealing to another secret court, where you WILL lose? How heroic.
It's one thing to work hand-in-glove with them like Microsoft and the telecom companies do, but being praised for going through a pointless exercise is a bit much.
It's like building a datacenter 100m closer to a hydro-electric dam than your competitor and claiming you only use green energy because of it's proximity.
Sleep your way to a whiter smile...date a dentist!
It is when said court is *secret*, the laws used by the court are *secret*, the verdicts reached by the courts are *secret*, and the punishments and actions encted by that court are *secret*.
To better understand, let's use an argumentum ad absurdium:
The secret court decided that anyone who wears blue, of any shade, is a terror suspect, because of intelligence that cells of terrorists are identifying each other based on wearing blue clothing. They keep this pronouncement in the strictest of confidences, lest the terrorists find out, and switch to earing pink.
Blue jeans are absurdly popular as casual wear in the USA. As such, "wearing blue" makes basically everyone into a terror suspect. Due dilligence requires the intelligene agencies, and secret intelligence courts to investigate and authorize said investigation, of basically everyone. False positives happen. It's life.
Robert Anyman, who lives at 421 maple street, gets unceremoniously arrested, by a secret court order, issued by the secret court, by secret police. He is prevented from exercising his right to counsel of his choosing, because the law he is being charged under is secret, and ordinary lawyers are not alowed to know such laws even exist, let alone what they say!
In the end, since nobody is allowed to check and impose oversight on this secret legal system, that legal system, and its enforcers, can do anything and arrest anyone they want, for any reason. They don't have to explain their actions, under grounds of national security.
That is why this is a very bad thing, and you should not buy into the sob story they are spinning about catching terrorists.
If Mayer really wanted to skate to where the puck is going, she'd make a massive push to retool Yahoo into a privacy-centric company.
Move as much of Yahoo out of the USA as possible so they can speak to their users freely. Very publicly and loudly proclaim that they will not play ball with government spy agencies, and back it up with real and demonstrable steps toward that end. Encrypt everything. Set up their services to make it cryptographically impossible for them to turn over plaintext to anyone. Keep the absolute minimum logs required by law. Don't collect any information that isn't absolutely necessary. Alert everyone to all government requests for data whenever possible, and give every user a status in their account which says, "Your information has NOT been requested by a government or intelligence agency" which disappears when this statement is no longer true. Provide a deadman's switch to automatically delete data according to some user-defined criteria. Open their infrastructure to community audits from trusted security experts. Have bug bounties for security flaws. Do all this and more. These are all legal and many could be implemented immediately.
Done sincerely, this could earn them respect, users, customers, and profits. They'd keep their old users of course (if they're still with Yahoo nothing is going to get them to budge) but they'd be set up to grow into a huge new sector. Privacy is going to be big in the coming years, and the technology exists to nearly completely, and legally, nullify most of the efforts of the surveillance state. They could steal all of the users who are wary of Google and Microsoft but don't see any decent alternatives. The companies which set themselves in this direction now are going to be the leaders that everyone else is chasing in 5-10 years. Kim Dotcom's Mega was arguably the first, putting privacy as the number one priority in their mission statement. Yahoo has the resources to be a big player in the this space.
What else can they do to save a dying brand? What better way to really set themselves apart? So much of what the NSA et al do is predicated on the complacency and collusion of private enterprise. Yahoo could stand head and shoulders above the rest by saying no when they come asking. Sorry, come back with a warrant. Got a warrant? OK, here's your encrypted pseudo-random noise--and its in dead-tree format. We are still at the point where government needs private business to cooperate. Business still has a choice in a lot of this. They can still choose to be on the side of privacy and liberty, and they could be greatly rewarded for it.
If you build it, nerds will come. Soylentnews.org
If your technology doesn't protect you laws won't. So forget Yahoo, Google, Bing, Facebook etc... Start by downloading tor https://www.torproject.org and using a search engine like https://startpage.com or http://yacy.net (decentralized). For email ditch existing services and use http://www.gnupg.org with a service that supports it. For torrents use I2P http://www.i2p2.de . Don't use Windows or OS X or IOS or Android etc... Switch to free (as in freedom) software like Debian.
I feel so stupid for not listening to Richard Stallman in the first place.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SUJtMlEwd6Q
PS: Pay cash
http://www.amnestyusa.org/our-work/cases/china-shi-tao Nice try yahoo.
If they do all that fighting in secret courts, small wonder that nobody knows they're still exist.
Seems to me that the reason that government wants data is to gain hold over everything and everyone, and to use those insights into gaining a more competitive position for the country, maintaining its own power, and serve specific well-connected interests.
The solution to this: Share absolutely everything. Make sure each and every person has access to every piece of data. The only reason data has unbalanced power is that we want to keep it hidden. So if you're cheating on your wife and want to encrypt your emails to your gay fundamentalist christian pastor... tough mantitties.
Transparancy is the light of equality.
Yeah. Let's all just give up right now. Especially if nobody is going to know about it. Nice attitude there.
which is totally what she said
if they really were going to put up a good fight they would have said fuck it and brought the whole thing public years ago. this is all bullshit pr. yahoo does not deserve a cookie.
Snowden leak: Microsoft added Outlook.com backdoor for Feds
NSA praises Redmond for 'collaborative teamwork'
There are red faces in Redmond after Edward Snowden released a new batch of documents from the NSA's Special Source Operations (SSO) division covering Microsoft's involvement in allowing backdoor access to its software to the NSA and others.
Documents seen by The Guardian detail how the NSA became concerned when Microsoft started testing Outlook.com, and asked for access. In five months Microsoft and the FBI created a workaround that gives the NSA access to encrypted chats on Outlook.com. The system went live in December last year – two months before Outlook.com's commercial launch.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/07/11/snowden_leak_shows_microsoft_added_outlookencryption_backdoor_for_feds/
enough of this race baiting by a Government manipulated New's Media. It's all most like they are trying to start Civil Unrest.