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Yahoo scanned customer emails for US intelligence

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Re: Yahoo scanned customer emails for US intelligence

#2

Post by jonknee »

It sounds like Yahoo will fit right in at Verizon... It also sounds like another leak designed to damage Marissa Mayer:

> 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.

Re: Yahoo scanned customer emails for US intelligence

#4

Post by mtgx »

jonknee wrote: post #2

It sounds like Yahoo will fit right in at Verizon... It also sounds like another leak designed to damage Marissa Mayer: > 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.

Sounds like she was a pretty terrible CEO all-around. But as a user, I would never use a service run by Marissa Mayer again. She lost that trust for good.

Re: Yahoo scanned customer emails for US intelligence

#5

Post by duaneb »

mtgx wrote: post #4
jonknee wrote: post #2

It sounds like Yahoo will fit right in at Verizon... It also sounds like another leak designed to damage Marissa Mayer: > 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.

Sounds like she was a pretty terrible CEO all-around. But as a user, I would never use a service run by Marissa Mayer again. She lost that trust for good.

> But as a user, I would never use a service run by Marissa Mayer again. She lost that trust for good.

Realistically, this is every American company. Why trust anyone?

Re: Yahoo scanned customer emails for US intelligence

#7

Post by aab0 »

vermontdevil wrote: post #3

Now gotta wonder if Google has succumbed to government pressure to do the same. I'm really hoping and trusting they haven't.

I wouldn't bet a bent penny on it:

"Experts said it was likely that the NSA or FBI had approached other Internet companies with the same demand, since they evidently did not know what email accounts were being used by the target. The NSA usually makes requests for domestic surveillance through the FBI, so it is hard to know which agency is seeking the information.

Reuters was unable to confirm whether the 2015 demand went to other companies, or if any complied.

Alphabet Inc's Google and Microsoft Corp, two major U.S. email service providers, did not respond to requests for comment."

It's not a hard question to answer. You either are or are not searching all emails in realtime at the behest of the NSA.

Re: Yahoo scanned customer emails for US intelligence

#8

Post by greenyoda »

mtgx wrote: post #4
jonknee wrote: post #2

It sounds like Yahoo will fit right in at Verizon... It also sounds like another leak designed to damage Marissa Mayer: > 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.

Sounds like she was a pretty terrible CEO all-around. But as a user, I would never use a service run by Marissa Mayer again. She lost that trust for good.

I'm not a fan of Mayer's, but sounds like she didn't want to fight the order since that hadn't worked in the past:

"Yahoo in 2007 had fought a FISA demand that it conduct searches on specific email accounts without a court-approved warrant. Details of the case remain sealed, but a partially redacted published opinion showed Yahoo's challenge was unsuccessful."

Her real mistake was going directly to the e-mail team to implement the backdoor without telling the security chief about it:

"They were also upset that Mayer and Yahoo General Counsel Ron Bell did not involve the company's security team in the process, instead asking Yahoo's email engineers to write a program to siphon off messages containing the character string the spies sought and store them for remote retrieval, according to the sources.

The sources said the program was discovered by Yahoo's security team in May 2015, within weeks of its installation. The security team initially thought hackers had broken in.

When Stamos found out that Mayer had authorized the program, he resigned as chief information security officer and told his subordinates that he had been left out of a decision that hurt users' security, the sources said. Due to a programming flaw, he told them hackers could have accessed the stored emails."

Re: Yahoo scanned customer emails for US intelligence

#9

Post by greenyoda »

aab0 wrote: post #7
vermontdevil wrote: post #3

Now gotta wonder if Google has succumbed to government pressure to do the same. I'm really hoping and trusting they haven't.

I wouldn't bet a bent penny on it: "Experts said it was likely that the NSA or FBI had approached other Internet companies with the same demand, since they evidently did not know what email accounts were being used by the target. The NSA usually makes requests for domestic surveillance through the FBI, so it is hard to know which agency is seeking the information. Reuters was unable to confirm whether the 2015 demand…

"It's not a hard question to answer. You either are or are not searching all emails in realtime at the behest of the NSA."

It's easy to answer if you're not. If you are, you can't answer (at least not truthfully).

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