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Yahoo Offers Non-Denial Denial of Bombshell Spy Report (theintercept.com)
Reuters reported on Tuesday that Yahoo 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. When The Intercept reached out to Yahoo for an official comment and explanation, the company offered a non-denial response after 20 hours since Reuters's report, a report said. (If a report is inaccurate, the company says so explicitly. Non-denial is something you give when you are caught off guard and things reported are true.) From the report: From Yahoo's PR firm, "The article is misleading. We narrowly interpret every government request for user data to minimize disclosure. The mail scanning described in the article does not exist on our systems." This is an extremely carefully worded statement, arriving roughly 20 hours after the Reuters story first broke. That's a long time to craft 29 words. It's unclear as well why Yahoo wouldn't have put this statement out on Tuesday, rather than responding, cryptically, that they are "a law abiding company, [that] complies with the laws of the United States." But this day-after denial isn't even really a denial: The statement says only that the article is misleading, not false. It denies only that such an email scanning program "does not" exist -- perhaps it did exist at some point between its reported inception in 2015 and today. It also pins quite a bit on the word "described" -- perhaps the Reuters report was overall accurate, but missed a few details. And it would mean a lot more for this denial to come straight from the keyboard of a named executive at Yahoo -- perhaps Ron Bell, the company's general counsel -- rather than a "strategic communications firm."Reuters reported that Yahoo's decision has prompted questions in Europe whether EU citizens' data had been compromised, and this could result in derailing a new trans-Atlantic data sharing deal.
Precisely what I was thinking. For all we know, they have a black box from a three-letter agency that filters every piece of mail before it hits their system. It's not theirs, so they can hold up their hands and go, "not on our systems!"
Hell, just toss some emphasis into different parts of that last sentence alone and you can see how weaselly it really is and what it could really mean:
The mail scanning described in the article does not exist on our systems.
...but we definitely filter stuff and send it to the government. We just don't like to say that we're scanning it.
The mail scanning described in the article does not exist on our systems.
...but something remarkably close is definitely on our systems.
The mail scanning described in the article does not exist on our systems.
...but it did up until a few minutes ago when we finished the 20-hour process of removing it, which explains why our response was delayed. Also, we plan to restore it again in just a minute here.
The mail scanning described in the article does not exist on our systems.
...but we suspect it does on the government's black box attached to our system.