The lesson from this is to not trust corporations with out privacy. Sadly, it seems many of us are not learning it.
Do you think a small start-up will be in a better position to stand up against its government?
Yahoo scanned customer emails for US intelligence
141–150 of 417 posts
Re: Yahoo scanned customer emails for US intelligence
#142Earlier quoted context omitted.
I wonder what the actual personal consequences are for someone going public that there is an NSL requested. I seriously doubt they'd destroy a major public company with lots of employees/voters/users; fines, maybe, and going after execs, but the Government loses most of its power to threaten things once the act is done and everything is public. I think you win in the court of public opinion if it's a broad program li…
It's an experiment that I would personally be willing to try were I a high-visibility C-level exec. Been to jail, not that bad, mostly just boring; and certainly the jail that CEO me goes to would likely be better than the jail the real me has been a guest of. But the kind of person willing to tweak the nose of the government doesn't usually get to be C-anything. As you point out, best to wisely pick your battle as y…
Chelsea Manning, who is imprisoned over something similar to this case, may have a different opinion on how nice jail is than you.
Re: Yahoo scanned customer emails for US intelligence
#143I imagine Yahoo! Mail engineers being royally pissed about this. Well, I suppose that includes all Yahoo! folks who are still putting real effort into improving Y!'s services. Every odd day something surfaces about Y!'s execs questionable practices and decisions, every even day problems, leaks, bad press. Moral must have hit rock bottom. Maybe the Yahoo! Board should have surveyed the startups scene, looking for foun…
You may have missed the part where Yahoo engineers implemented this scheme, they are to blame as much as management here, possibly more because they could've walked away and gotten a different job without much trouble, but management had a responsibility to the whole organization.
Contrast with the rumors that Apple engineers were prepared to refuse & resign if ordered to share the iPhone's encryption keys.
Re: Yahoo scanned customer emails for US intelligence
#144I think the attitude here that most tech companies are rolling over and just complying without a single ethical consideration is misplaced. The government has been doing an excellent job of basically extorting these companies into compliance. They threaten the full weight of the US government's wraith and then tie every order up with classifications and gag orders. You aren't legally allowed to talk to other companie…
The most damning part of this story is that Mayer decided to comply without telling her chief security officer. That really does make it look like Yahoo rolled over without a fight.
Weren't high level officials communicating over Yahoo! mail?
Was Yahoo given a contract, or otherwise compensated?
Re: Yahoo scanned customer emails for US intelligence
#145Earlier quoted context omitted.
People like Nacchio are exploiting the good work real privacy advocates do, for their own personal enrichment. Or it's possible for people to be dual-natured: capable both of flagrant chicanery and abuse, as well as acts of conviction and principled defiance.
The entangling of the FISA order and the insider trading scandal actually makes things worse. His most significant trades came just months after he refused the FISA order --- after which he claims NSA arranged to have DoD contracts with Qwest terminated. He did something with an obvious material impact on his shareholders, and secretly profited from it. The reality, though, is that his tenure at Qwest appears broadly…
If you know, what was his defense against the fraud case? It could have been retribution (yes, that's completely speculative).
Re: Yahoo scanned customer emails for US intelligence
#146Earlier quoted context omitted.
I wonder what the actual personal consequences are for someone going public that there is an NSL requested. I seriously doubt they'd destroy a major public company with lots of employees/voters/users; fines, maybe, and going after execs, but the Government loses most of its power to threaten things once the act is done and everything is public. I think you win in the court of public opinion if it's a broad program li…
I've been wondering about this myself. Apple got a mixed response when they pushed back on the FBI, but certainly not a clearly negative one. Lavabit's rather alarming case earned them substantial respect in the tech circles that learned about the matter. Certainly whistleblowers have faced immense consequences, but they've been government or military employees engaged in major disclosures. To jail a 'captain of indu…
Also committing to a "fuck NSLs, we'll just go public and take it all the way legally" stance upfront might deter NSLs in the first place.
Re: Yahoo scanned customer emails for US intelligence
#147Re: Yahoo scanned customer emails for US intelligence
#148Note the attitude toward encryption:
Former NSA General Counsel Stewart Baker said email providers "have the power to encrypt it all, and with that comes added responsibility to do some of the work that had been done by the intelligence agencies."
Re: Yahoo scanned customer emails for US intelligence
#149Earlier quoted context omitted.
I wholeheartedly agree with you, pragmatically. But you also have to take into account why there are special protections on the USPS. Privacy is a quality people generally expect to have. The USPS protections were created after the long social feedback cycle it took for people to realize what they were missing. We're going through another one of those cycles now, where people are finally realizing how surveilled-by-d…
Please, I am absolutely for protections of data privacy even more stringent than what the USPS does with parcels. I would be for something akin to "Swiss Banking requirements for Data" - where companies are NOT allowed to share data unless given exception in writing/cryptographically. I'm sure we can expound on these ideas collectively. I'd also be OK with services that DO treat data as a semipermeable membrane. Thin…
Well, your original comment lacks the ethical understanding that you clearly do have.
My own island of autonomy is tinc/unison. Less scalable namespaces, but more straightforward for now.
The only point I disagree on is your last bit. I don't think waiting out the politicians will suffice. Millenial politicians will still be politicians, still desire power in order to "do good", and still pander to the easily-spooked herd. Modern democracy is a centralized beast, just with everybody encouraged to think as a mini-dictator. True freedom isn't merely protecting the average person from surveillance, but also the social outcasts whom the herd would otherwise persecute. That core of that problem really is technological - our communication patterns need to support individual autonomy.
Re: Yahoo scanned customer emails for US intelligence
#150This shit needs to stop. Immediately.
Like most people, I have no problem with the government using probable cause to get warrants that are in search of something specific (none of these grab-all bullshit orders). If you have a legitimate reason to be looking at someone, then there should be no problem getting a warrant.
These secret FISA court orders are a serious violation to the rights of Americans in many cases. At minimum, if we really do need these secret courts to prevent people from finding out they are the subject of surveillance, then there needs to be an expiration on those gag orders. This crap about never being able to mention it FOREVER has to go. There should be a limit, say 5 years, which is well beyond the length of time most investigations take. At that time, those orders should expire so that these government actions can be brought to light if there is any question of wrong-doing on the part of our overzealous law enforcement.
"Former NSA General Counsel Stewart Baker said email providers 'have the power to encrypt it all, and with that comes added responsibility to do some of the work that had been done by the intelligence agencies.'" Sorry, but no. That's not how it works. There is no obligation to do the work of government unless it is actually written into law (i.e. record-keeping laws). And it currently is not. This is precisely why everyone should be encrypting all communications on the CLIENT side themselves. It should never leave your device (PC, phone, whatever) unencrypted. That way, if the government wants to go on a fishing expedition or has an actual legitimate reason to look at you, they will have to get a warrant for the device itself, which will at least give you a head's up that they are trying to put you in the clink with a bunkmate named Bubba.
The NSA, and the government in general, has completely blown any goodwill they once had with the public. Under no circumstance will I ever advocate for anything that makes their job easier. And it is for no other reason than simply because they have proven time and again they cannot be trusted.
Honestly, I'm still not even clear why every employee of project PRISM isn't rotting a jail cell right now after Snowden shed some light on the program for the rest of us peasants. Every single employee of that program had to know the clear violations of the constitution they were helping to partake in. Keep in mind the constitution protects against unreasonable SEIZURE as well as search. Gobbling up communications in the manner they did clearly counts as seizure because they would not have had them otherwise - whether or not they actually search the records is immaterial.
I'm not an Apple fan, but when they told the government to go pound sand regarding that terrorist phone encryption case, that was the first time that I can recall I actually approved of Apple's political position on something.