21st Century Wire says…
This will rank as one of the most egregious miscarriages of consumer trust in US history.
In a brief statement to Reuters, according to these Silicon Valley executives:
“Yahoo is a law-abiding company, and complies with the laws of the United States.”
Actually, Yahoo is in breach of the law. The ‘laws’ they think they are talking about do not allow for flipping a ‘dead switch’ on the 4th Amendment and conducting mass surveillance on all US citizens.
In reality, the US Constitution is meant to be the supreme law of the land and Yahoo just colluded with an out of control US federal government – to trash the 4th Amendment.
So who is Marissa Mayer, the Yahoo CEO who willingly colluded behind closed doors with the NSA and the FBI to submit all of Yahoo’s customer base to unwarranted surveillance? Why was this 37 year old neophyte allowed to walk into the top spot from Google with no real managerial experience, and put in charge of such a large corporation – and then given a $54 million golden parachute after this dark spying debacle? She has quickly amassed net worth of approximately $500 million – half a billion dollars.
It sounds like she was definitely “hand-picked” for this particular job…
SELL OUT: Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer sold out her customer base to an out of control, data-hungry Federal government.
Yahoo last year secretly built a custom software program to search all of its customers’ incoming emails for specific information provided by US intelligence officials, sources have told Reuters.
The company complied with a classified US government directive, scanning hundreds of millions of Yahoo Mail accounts at the behest of the National Security Agency (NSA) or FBI, according to two former employees and a third person who knew about the program.
Some surveillance experts said this represents the first known case of a US 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.
Reuters was unable to determine what data Yahoo may have handed over, if any, and whether intelligence officials had approached other email providers besides Yahoo with this kind of request.
According to the two former employees, Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer’s decision to obey the directive troubled some senior executives and led to the June 2015 departure of the chief information security officer, Alex Stamos, who now heads security at Facebook.
(…) Andrew Crocker, staff attorney with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, said that the use of the word “directive” to describe the program indicated that the request may have been ordered under the section 702 of the 2008 Fisa Amendments Act, which allows the government to target non-US citizens abroad for surveillance.
Revelations by Edward Snowden about the Prism and Upstream programs – of which the Yahoo program looks like a hybrid, Crocker said – show that US citizens were also subject to mass surveillance.
“The fourth amendment and attendant privacy concerns are quite staggering,” Crocker said. “It sounds like they are scanning all emails, even inside the US … the fourth amendment protects that fully. It’s hard to see how the government justifies requiring Yahoo to search emails like that; there is no warrant that could possibly justify scanning all emails”…
Continue this story at The Guardian
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