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.
There is a version of this story floating around where Yahoo’s CEO allowed this, and did not tell Yahoo internal security. Internal security spotted the monitoring, thought it was a rogue actor, and brought it to the CEO’s attention, only to be told to shut up. The head of security resigned in protest, and now supposedly works in a similar role at facebook.
If there was no warrant (and I am not sure how you would get a warrant to do this on everyone’s messages before they are even created, so you can watch all of them live), then what you may be seeing is our foreign intel techniques and practices unleashed domestically.
What does that mean? LE wants these emails, so they put Marissa Meyer under surveillance until they find something they can blackmail her with. Are her taxes funky? Is she banging her personal assistant and her husband doesn’t know? Does her son have a smack problem? 99 times out of a hundred, there will be something somewhere, with somebody the target cares for. When you have the power of the US government, you can always find it. Nobody running these important tech companies is really living free.
Once you find that soft spot, you simply offer the target the option – do what you want, or you ruin their life.
There is a reason the CIA was limited domestically with respect to operating on innocent US citizens within US borders. When government uses all of its resources to waltz in and tell a citizen what to do, freedom evaporates very quickly. Never has that been more true than today, where high technology and the myriad of obtuse laws and regulations all combine to create an environment where everybody breaks rules somewhere and it is always able to be discovered by the free-spending government. As domestic agencies adopt these techniques and use them against us, they remove all reason to limit foreign intel domestically. We are all the targets, and freedom only happens if we have no utility.
Risk is inherent to life. The more we adopt the idea that all risk must be ameliorated at all cost, the more life (and freedom) slips away from us.
As with all aspects of the deterioration of nations, it is all amygdala atrophy.
[…] Fedguv Intelligence Was Perusing Yahoo Emails […]
There was the Lavabit thing a few years ago. Lavabit was shut down for undisclosed reasons, but it was obvious at the time that the spooks were unhappy that 1) Snowden had been able to use Lavabit for a secure email account and 2) Lavabit was set up in a way that made it impossible to snoop through people’s emails. Presumably what happened was the spooks ordered the site owner to “fix” that problem,without telling his users of course, and rather than comply, he simply shut down the site. Of course, he never admitted any of this, presumably for the obvious reason. He did mention, though, that if you want email that doesn’t get snooped on, don’t use an American provider.
I found out about all of this at the time thanks to having (and consequently losing) a Lavabit account myself. I was pretty angry about it at the time. Lavabit was a great service which I’d been using for quite a few years, and I haven’t been able to find one that I’ve liked as much.