Slashdot Mirror
US Internet Company Refused To Participate In NSA Surveillance, Documents Reveal (zdnet.com)
Zack Whittaker reports via ZDNet: A U.S. company refused to comply with a top-secret order that compelled it to facilitate government surveillance, according to newly declassified documents. According to the document, the unnamed company's refusal to participate in the surveillance program was tied to an apparent expansion of the foreign surveillance law, details of which were redacted by the government prior to its release, as it likely remains classified. It's thought to be only the second instance of an American company refusing to comply with a government surveillance order. The first was Yahoo in 2008. It was threatened with hefty daily fines if it didn't hand over customer data to the National Security Agency. The law is widely known in national security circles as forming the legal basis authorizing the so-called PRISM surveillance program, which reportedly taps data from nine tech titans including Apple, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, and others. It also permits "upstream" collection from the internet fiber backbones of the internet. Any guesses as to which company it may be? The company was not named in the 2014-dated document, but it's thought to be an internet provider or a tech company.
MySpace. And you know what happened to them!
That would be a neat trick... Can we 'refuse' too?
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
There are only a few large companies out there that could refuse and make it more difficult for the government.
Giving the history with Apple refusing the decrypt data I would go with them, NSA probably wanted to tap into the iMessaging service.
It's not a typo if you understood the meaning!
Lavabit, assuming the calendar years fit the redacted docs.
Probably Qwest. That was covered extensively here back in the day. Their CEO was jailed for "insider trading" because the government didn't pay its contracts as leverage and it tanked the company.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qwest
...but I do have a house for sale if any of you warrant-bearing gentlemen are in the market.
Seriously, this unnamed provider was both patriotic and loyal to the country. Kudos!
Blow Daddy?
May the lies we live by make us strong, healthy, happy and wise - Kurt Vonnegut.
Just going to say Qwest. If you don't play ball with Uncle Sam then business suddenly becomes more difficult.
Only the State obtains its revenue by coercion. - Murray Rothbard
Reasonably designed. Persons reasonably believed to be outside of the united States.
Spot checks as oversight?
Periodic reviews?
If they have someone from the USA, all they have to do is report it within 5 days?
What the Protect America Act did to the Fourth Amendment.
The Fourth Amendment foreign intelligence exemption.
How the Forth amendment is "balanced".
Compensation for services?
Finally the order to comply.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
Cox Communications? I know they've not been too friendly to the feds.
The timeline of PRISM? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
Redacted laws...
Are you proud to be an American?
Does the government surveillance benefit citizens of the USA ? If so: how ?
Does it benefit a small, well connected elite ? If so: who are they ?
That is the trouble with all this secret nonsense - no one knows how much it goes on, why it happens, who gains by it.
BTW: I suspect that if a company pushes back, the government just finds a low level employee or two: shows them (but does not let them keep) a scary looking bit of paper and gets what it wants anyway.
Twitter was in the secret courts in 2014
http://www.reuters.com/article/us-twitter-nsa-idUSKCN0HW1V520141007
I remember Quest Communications being touted as not complicit with NSA surveillance directly after September 11. The CEO subsequently got investigated for income tax evasion by the IRS and was sent to jail. Quest went belly up a few years later.
I'm surprised no one else mentioned this, but from Edward Snowden's revelations, the docs highlighted the NSA has "major problems" getting into zoho, specifically their encrypted email service.
But I think zoho might be an Indian company (surprisingly); while the post mentions a "US Internet Company".
Snowdon's revelation also revealed that NSA didn't have much difficulty in monitoring hundreds of thousands of VPN's as well as having the ability to decrypt and intercept https comms [source].
My favorite part of this story is that, due to all the secrecy involved, this company can get no kudos for refusing to facilitate spying, almost certainly knew that, and yet they did it anyway.
“The true test of a man’s character is what he does when no one is watching.” John Wooden
I have had a similar experience with Cox. A long time ago Cox indicated that they had been notified of copyrighted material being downloaded through my IP and suggested that if that were the case, I delete any material that could provide liability but never communicated my information to the complainant. They earned a lot of my respect then and now, 10 years later, I have upgraded to their business service (no monthly bandwidth limit and other advantages) and am still very happy with them.
what I heard
Former Qwest CEO Joseph Nacchio, after threats from the NSA that his refusal to cooperate may jeopardize future government contracts, alleged in appeal documents that the NSA requested that Qwest participate in its wiretapping program in February of 2001, more than six months before September 11, 2001. He was the only head of a communications company to demand a court order, or approval under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, in order to turn over communications records to the NSA. The NSA cancelled a lucrative contract worth hundreds of millions of dollars with Qwest as a result of Qwest's refusal to participate in the wiretapping program. Nacchio and six other former Qwest executives were sued by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission accusing them of a $3 billion financial fraud between 1999 and 2002 and of benefiting from an inflated stock price, a price based on the NSA contracts in place at the time. His defense was ruled not admissible in court because the U.S. Department of Justice filed an "in limine" motion to exclude information which may reveal state secrets. Information from the Classified Information Procedures Act hearings in Mr. DiNaccio's case was likewise ruled inadmissible. Nacchio was convicted on 19 of 42 counts of insider trading and sentenced to six years in federal prison and ordered to pay a $19 million fine and forfeit $52 million he gained in stock sales. Nacchio surrendered April 14, 2009 to a federal prison camp in Schuylkill, Pennsylvania to begin serving a six-year sentence. The United States Supreme Court denied bail pending appeal the same day. Nacchio finished serving his sentence on September 20, 2013.