` "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. According to the two former employees, Yahoo Chief Executive Marissa Mayer's decision to obey the directive roiled some senior executives and led to the June 2015 departure of Chief Information Security Officer Alex Stamos, who now holds the top security job at Facebook Inc."Yahoo is a law abiding company, and complies with the laws of the United States," the company said in a brief statement in response to Reuters questions about the demand. Yahoo declined any further comment." . - Source` [HR][/HR] ` Let's face it, due to corporate acquiescence to the supposed needs of a corrupt government, your online communications, especially personal and private ones, are being intercepted by these companies. Mayer took the easy route and allowed this to happen, despite Yahoo's assurances that this would never happen. She was being a 'good citizen'. Bottom line? You have no privacy....unless of course, you use encryption when you send personal messages.
` Good point. However, the bottom line is; conduct as much of your business, outside of electronic communication, for true privacy.
absolutely, the less public transmission, the safer. change keys often, change message formats often, to be as safe as possible
` If I have to send a private message online, and heavy duty security is not needed, my message looks like this; o0L48TzE9tIL9mabwvUBivRHkYAZfPHw7bzUqbfwNgcPDXHW4Y8r1eARjAGyKUqWI0eW+upGdX7d nTodm3qupY1Y1bBbkmxw2NJXMgFDCD+GkePVm7uiK2ELvZFDXfWR+2ZpvW+E0KYtr9YZWFk+D0qk VoDEaqhGkT16MU2m3Ss= ` ` ` ` `
Obama has assured us that only conspiracy nuts believe the USG/NSA is scanning the email of "ordinary people". Liberals just don't do that sort of thing. "I was a critic of the previous administration for those occasions in which I felt they had violated our values and I came in [to office] with a healthy scepticism about how our various programmes were structured," Obama told the press conference in Berlin's chancellery.” “In Germany the practices have widely been compared to those of the Gestapo and Stasi, the state intelligence arms that operated during the Nazi and communist dictatorships.” The Guardian, Barack Obama: NSA is not rifling through ordinary people's emails, Kate Connolly, 6/19/13. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/jun/19/barack-obama-nsa-people-emails Which begs the question: Is the NSA under Obama more like the Gestapo - or the Stasi?
` The assumption should always be, everything say, type, send and post is being recorded somewhere. Never trust any site. As for Obama, calling him a lying sack of manure doesn't even come close to describing him.
they are all doing it, allowing it, and funding it, irrelevant of party. i am not happy that this admin has continuex it. - - - Updated - - - looks like a hashed message to me
` ...and especially the corporations like Yahoo, Google, Microsoft, Verizon, AT&T, Amazon, Facebook, etc, etc, etc.
Yes, they all steal your data and expose it for smarter thieves. On the bright side, now any American who loses everything after impulsively "bleaching" their hard drives can get it all back for a few bitcoins if they politely ask the right people in Pakistan, Vietnam, Moldova ..... for a copy. Back up is automatic and transnational - what a Brave New World.
Not sure why they needed to build a secret program. This is basically how companies like google keyword scan emails for their cross-platform ad programs.
` Considering this a totalitarian government, they have no problem gathering raw data (legal and illegal). In exabytes I understand. However, processing this data into usable information is another problem. Proprietary search programs can filter data before before it goes to analysis, thus limiting the need for processing unnecessary raw data.
Not defending the practice, but years of court rulings in things like drug cases and whether or not a warrant was needed made this inevitable.
heard of it, just looked it up. i guess its only drawback is it is a symetrical key. i did a cryptography course in my graduate work, yrs ago. in wiki, the originators suggest going to "twofish".
