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Yahoo Secretly Scanned Customer Emails For US Intelligence (reuters.com)
An anonymous reader shares with us an exclusive report from Reuters: 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 directive, scanning hundreds of millions of Yahoo Mail accounts at the behest of the National Security Agency or FBI, said two former employees and a third person apprised of the events. Some surveillance experts said this represents the first case to surface of a U.S. Internet company agreeing to a spy agency's demand by searching all arriving messages, as opposed to examining stored messages or scanning a small number of accounts in real time. It is not known what information intelligence officials were looking for, only that they wanted Yahoo to search for a set of characters. That could mean a phrase in an email or an attachment, said the sources, who did not want to be identified. Reuters was unable to determine what data Yahoo may have handed over, if any, and if intelligence officials had approached other email providers besides Yahoo with this kind of request. The two former employees say that the decision Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer made to obey the directive resulted in the June 2015 departure of CISO Alex Stamos, who left to work for Facebook. The company said in response to Reuters questions about the demand, "Yahoo is a law abiding company, and complies with the laws of the United States."
...was there anybody left who didn't know that?
This wonderful government NEEDS MORE MONEY!!!
Make damn sure you and everyone else PAY YOUR FAIR SHARE!!!!
Obama had the most transparent administration in history. If you don't agree, you will be subject to double enhanced surveillance.
...the only department of the US Government that actually listens to you.
Oh, wait...
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
THEY DIDN'T FIND ANY!
"....Nobody here but yahoo customers...."
They were searching for a leaker of former CIA director's adultery story
You plotters should be writing your messages, saving them as drafts, and then your co-conspirators can log into the same account and read the draft message and delete it. It never gets sent and therefore never goes through the NSA scanners. Come on perpetrators, this is terrorism 101 level material here.
If they were a law-abiding company, they would DENY requests for warrantless wiretaps.
Instead they're in the business of trading political favors.
Even without verification. I would expect that all email is scanned for relevant information for intelligence. If you didn't think this was happening then you obviously have not lived on Earth very long.
...part is that according to Stamos, the scan code was so poorly written that "Due to a programming flaw, he told them hackers could have accessed the stored emails." Also imagine that the CEO did not warn his top security guy after receiving the order. Also imagine that not only Yahoo was targeted.
What's different here is that the messages are being scanned in real time, rather than scanning a database of saved messages. Maybe this explains why Yahoo Mail is so damn slow.
Support Right To Repair Legislation.
I have a Yahoo! mail account, which was my main contact account for things like my bank, credit cards and so on. After 2 cases of password breaks, I've now migrated away from that and sent them all to gmail, which I was using for something else.
Looks like once the remaining people on it leave, there won't be even a subscriber base to make Yahoo! even worth acquiring.
I can't wait for the Democrats to take over and end this nonsense just like they promised.
I'll bet a whole dollar that Microsoft, Google and Apple have been secretly doing this for ages too.
Yahoo already did this 10 years ago for Chinese government, remember Shi Tao?
Hope they enjoyed my dick pics.
She ignored employees who wanted to continue the company practice of working from home, executives who wanted to take the site in a different direction, and shareholders who wanted her to be competent in her job and actually increase shareholder value in ways other than just ridding her inheritance of the Alibaba position.
The US government has been scanning all fax traffic for many years.
and the government will confiscate it in physical or virtual form.
Or haven't you been paying attention to the new powers of confiscation your government has? Extremely ironic since this exact sort of activity was one of the cornerstones of the grievances leading to the Revolutionary War.
But apparently your current generation is too weak to remind the Crown^H^H^H^H^Hgovernment who works for who.
Yahoo Secretly Scanned Customer Emails For US Intelligence
But did not find any !
Filter error: You can type more than that for your comment.
That is a request that is so obviously unconstitutional.
But, perhaps, we should consider why Yahoo acquiesced. Perhaps when the NSA was wiretapping those connections between datacenters, they discovered something that could be used to blackmail Yahoo, or its CEO, or both.
The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!
Cop:
And why are you receiving phone calls from J. Edgar Hoover?
Wadsworth:
J. Edgar Hoover?
Cop:
That's right. The head of the Federal Bureau of Investigation.
Colonel Mustard:
Why is J. Edgar Hoover on your phone?
Wadsworth:
I don't know. He's on everyone else's, why shouldn't he be on mine?
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
I can understand that. Who needs is more than them.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Since those on top are either above the law (see Clinton family) or arrange the law/enforcement system so they effectively are, we clearly need a higher standard. Kind of like IBM doing business with Nazi Germany. Sure it was legal; The USA wanted business from Germany, IBM wanted to make money from Germany, it didn't affect us (or so we thought) so we went on ahead with no sense of morality. IBM knew what was going on. It didn't care. Yahoo (and others, yahoo the only one, see reports on Snowden's release papers) also had deals with China leading to the arrest and torture to human rights advocates there (as covered in a Senate hearing). there are outside alternatives Yes, some governments (Sweden, Germany, France I believe) are apparently working with the USA, but at least it's not likely to be accessed as quickly (and it's encrypted). Checkout these web mail alternatives
;-) )
https://www.vmail.me/en/
https://countermail.com/
http://www.neomailbox.com/
http://www.e-mail-made-in-germ...
http://www.inbox.lv/index?lang...
(not encrypted but smaller country + company appeals to me
there are others listed in this article:
http://techpp.com/2013/08/28/n...
We all have a choice, if we decide to. Let's exercise that ability while we still have it. I believe in the idea "Use it or lose it". Like the election in the USA. Can can STILL vote for Sanders. Yes, you CAN fill in his name on the ballot. It's not necessarily A or B as the two parties would have you believe. We can still choose. Like web mail, we have other choices than the big 3 (Microsoft, Gmail, Yahoo). Time to think outside the boxes put in front us. And to Yahoo, well, didn't have much faith/trust in them before, I have even less now.
"Imagination is more important than knowledge" - Einstein
AT&T had cut a plum deal with Yahoo to provide e-mail services for the telecom giant way back in the early 2000's, which is still in effect to this day.
Chew that over and get back with me.
First rule of holes; When in one, stop digging.
No joke. Choose your source. It happened.
http://thehill.com/blogs/ballo...
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/08...
or google "trump security briefing nuclear"
There are two types of people in the world: Those who crave closure
The secret word was "rangledangkaloof"
Polluting the discussion with extra lies is not good for the future of humanity.
That's right, Trump is polluting it with enough lies for everyone.
Okay, I listed this before and I'll do it again, because...this is important. There are alternatives to yahoo, MS and Google and we need to hold the to a higher standard. Checkout these web mail alternatives
;-) )
there are others listed in this article:
https://www.vmail.me/en/
https://countermail.com/
http://www.neomailbox.com/
http://www.e-mail-made-in-germ...
/
http://techpp.com/2013/08/28/n...
(not encrypted but smaller country + company appeals to me
http://techpp.com/2013/08/28/n...
we need to use alternatives to show there are choices and to make companies aware they need to work in OUR best interests if they want us to use them.
"Imagination is more important than knowledge" - Einstein
This is precisely why I host my own email, web, ftp, and name servers. I don't trust the integrity, or lack of for the matter, of any of the free services. This just reinforces the fact that my mistrust is not incorrect. It is not terribly difficult to do and you can find howtos. I even have a backup mail exchange and name servers.
No joke. Choose your source. It happened.
Your first reference quotes Joe Scarborough making the claim, without substantiation, in the course of interviewing former CIA Director Michael Hayden (who is NOT the source). That takes the libel (and maybe the felony) out of your mouth and puts both into his.
The second, and as many of its links as I've followed (I don't promise to have followed them ALL, but I tried to follow each that seemed appropriate), doesn't mention the "asked three times in his first security briefing" claim. They try to spin the remarks he DID make into "he's clueless and will drop the bomb". But the actual quotes just seem to show that he's a competent high-level negotiator who understands the "Mutual Assured Destruction" doctrine of the cold war.
In case you're not familiar with it, it's a variant on the game of "chicken". It's built on making potential attackers believe that, if they attack us (or our allies) with nukes (or other suitable "weapons of mass destruction" such as biological or chemical weapons), we might just nuke them into slag regardless of any "fallout" - literal or otherwise - to ourselves or the rest of life on earth.
The trick to "The MAD Doctrine" is that the leaders of the maybe-retaliating power have to LOOK just crazy enough that they MIGHT do it, or the threat doesn't work.
Republican Party political figures have tended to play that game well, achieving success in international relations, though it costs them dearly in elections. Democratic figures tend to play it poorly, going for the election win and screwing up the credible threat and international relations. Then they get pushed progressively farther until they eventually strike out, but with "measured" and "proportionate response", which gets us into ever-escalating wars (and gives the opponents no opportunity to capitulate). This is part of why Democrats have historically started wars and Republican ended them.
Little as I like Republican Party politicians, this is a subject where they have (at least pre-Neocon) had a lot more on the ball than their major competition.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
..and it's a law that no act of congress can supersede.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
The yahoo lawyer is Ron Bell. He signed off on this loathsome activity. http://legaltalknetwork.com/po...
Both me and my lawyer used yahoo email in regards to discussion in making serious allegations of fraud, breaking employment laws. Our discussions were now comprimises by the people we were to indict. Many laws were broken, and people directly harmed as a result of this
Usually, by "customer" we mean the people who pay for something.
AFAIK the Yahoo e-mail service is free, so its users aren't customers.
Yahoo customers are advertisers, or people who make transactions on its e-commerce platform. And Yahoo don't control their e-mails unless they are also using Yahoo mail. So Yahoo cannot really monitor their incoming messages.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Did they find any?
"Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife
Google and Microsoft are almost certainly cooperating too. The best thing to do is diversify. I host my own email for a reason. If they seize my email not everybody around me is also seized.
From now on, sensitive writings from me will be on paper and encoded with Enigma with a codebook unique to me and the recipient.
I bet they forgot how to work Enigma out, since it seems they've spent the last 20 years slurping our email.
I'm only half joking.
The "Civilized World" jumped the shark ca. 1973.
Well done, government, you leveled the score.
I'd be willing to bet they were paid for their services. If so, that would be only reason other major email providers haven't done this yet. They're haven't been as desperate for revenue like Yahoo. It's very likely there will come a time when they will be. That's one of those facets of this problem not getting enough attention. Everyone's much more "trustworthy" when they're stable financially, even corporations. Can you still continue to trust them with your valuable personal data when their luck begins to run out?
Are there any gopher servers left?
Also do any modern browsers support the gopher protocol anymore?
Yes those are somewhat serious questions as it has been ages since I accessed a gopher server, probably since the mid to late 90s and the last time I did was probably when I was at the University of Minnesota.
Time to offend someone
You seem to be under the delusion that Trump is a 'Republican Party political figure'.
DogPile !!
remember it and smile :'-)
I hope the FEDS enjoyed the VIAGRA offers and HOT SINGLES in my area! Yahoo has the WORST spam filtering....
Is this news to anyone? If you are willing use a "free email" that mines your mail for "value" (marketing, etc.) to be sold off are you really surprised when they are using the same platform to get paid by the govt. to search that same data? If you don't physically control the server and manage the software then you don't control the data stored there. Period, this is why you manage your own data. You can ask secretary Clinton about the privacy benefits of a directly owned and managed email server.
The bottom line is that no one cares as much about your privacy/data as you do. To these companies your data is a resource to exploit. Shit, we used to have "personnel" departments at work, now we have "human resources", which by the way is very appropriate - they want to strip mine everything of value then discard the husk, we are a resource... just like coal or iron ore.
http://lmgtfy.com/?q=gopher+server