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Yahoo scanned customer emails for US intelligence
391–400 of 417 posts
Re: Yahoo scanned customer emails for US intelligence
#392Earlier quoted context omitted.
Which isn't to say that government organizations only ask companies with unquestionably above board accounting to engage in legally dubious initiatives. Plainly, there's no reason to take a company's compliance as a sign that they 'have nothing to hide'. Likelier, it was in part because they did that they complied.
No, it just means, if you're going to dig in and take on the government make sure your house is clean. That's all it means. That applies to dealing with anyone with power, really, not just the government. I'm not sure why I'm being downvoted. They had a case, and while the conclusion I was responding to is extreme, Qwest's accounting fraud ran into the billions and they had a pretty strong case that Nacchio profited…
Lots of other companies, especially lots of other investor-driven telcos in the late 1990s and early 2000s, were guilty of the same and worse, and were never charged.
The proliferation of fake crimes like insider trading gives the state discretion to imprison anyone for basically political reasons. Any executive who owns financial instruments that refer to the firm that employs her can be found guilty of insider trading, if federal prosecutors wish.
Re: Yahoo scanned customer emails for US intelligence
#393Earlier quoted context omitted.
Responding with an ad hominem - whether at the author of the quote or the poster of it by association - is both an ineffective response (the appeal to emotion signals an inability to argue rationally) and lowers the quality of discussion (by taking it away from the point, into emotional territory). Constant appeals to emotion and resorting to a wide array of fallacies allows for strongmen to build tribes which follow…
The Dr. Ferris talk to Mr. Reardon is one of those quotes that rings so true when you read Rand's work for the first time as a teenager. Anecdotally I too had this "They Live" sunglasses moment. You are reading Atlas Shrugged and you think this book is the Truth this is IT. Those other silly teenagers getting into religion or socialism or drugs or music they are so deluded. https://xkcd.com/610/ This is why the John…
I personally have no problem with the John Rogers quote as a response to my comment since I don't think the poster meant to attack me as a person (at least I hope so :) ). After all it's not like I made some broad statement endorsing Ayn Rand.
Funnily enough the xkcd-comic you linked really made an impression on me when it was first posted, since at the time I was having that exact thought almost every day. XKCD showed me how foolish that was and I was and am really thankful for that. (Even though my false sense of superiority was pretty comforting)
Re: Yahoo scanned customer emails for US intelligence
#394Re: Yahoo scanned customer emails for US intelligence
#395Anyone remembers this? > Barack Obama: NSA is not rifling through ordinary people's emails. US president is confident intelligence services have 'struck appropriate balance', he tells journalists in Berlin edit: link fixed https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/jun/19/barack-obama-n...
The way I read this story the NSA is really not rifling through ordinary people's email. They are specifically looking for a certain string. It is highly unlikely that ordinary people's emails contain this string. A story like https://www.wired.com/2010/05/kuok/ is a relevant case here. > Using a Yahoo e-mail address and a different name, Kuok also allegedly contacted an Arizona company this year that had posted on e…
It is highly unlikely that ordinary people's emails contain this string.
I need a new sig. "KG-175 TACLANE" it shall be!
Re: Yahoo scanned customer emails for US intelligence
#396Some people here laud some companies for being good about user privacy and security. This shows they have not yet reached table stakes for privacy and security. This is why no provider can be trusted. Every routine communication should be e2e encrypted. Otherwise this WILL happen.
This is where I remind everyone about S/MIME. A bit awkward to setup for the first time, but with good email clients it is a pretty transparent experience once you have it setup.
That's good, but the correct response from the big internet services/portals should be to make it impossible to comply with such a request without an obvious and public withdrawal of service. And, beyond that, to use their resources to make key exchange and management simple and secure (they do that in some real time communications products) for storage and email. They have your social graph, they can implement web-of-trust features. They can made it both simple to use and exceedingly difficult to subvert. They can provide secure, open endpoint software. They can effectively end dragnet surveillance by providing a refuge from it, AND make burdensome and credibility-destroying requests/orders impossible to implement. And all these years after Snowden, they have not.
Re: Yahoo scanned customer emails for US intelligence
#397Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why should they lose their job and salary to defend someone else? Yahoo users can go to court themselves if they feel that their rights were violated.
Yahoo users can't go to court if they can't prove their rights were violated. Even with this news story there is no court-admissible evidence of collusion with the government. Also, from the perspective of a civil suit against Yahoo, this program is likely somewhat legal unless it was specifically against their privacy policy and terms of use. That doesn't mean the engineers knew they were performing unethical behavi…
Their behaviour might be not very ethical in relation to a customers but they were loyal to the company. This is a good point for an employer. I doubt a company would like to hire a Snowden type person that puts public interest over company's.
Re: Yahoo scanned customer emails for US intelligence
#398Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's easy to say with confidence "These 6 people that I know well and represent are OK losing their jobs when you fine my company out of existence". It's much harder to say "I will defy you and in the process cost 10k+ people their jobs without them having any say or knowledge of this".
> I will defy you and in the process cost 10k+ people their jobs without them having any say or knowledge of this There's no way the govt. would do anything more than skewer (or attempt to) a few sacrificial lambs for violating a gag order. There's no political win otherwise.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/sep/11/yahoo-nsa-laws...
"The US government threatened to fine Yahoo $250,000 a day if it refused to hand over user data to the National Security Agency, according to court documents unsealed on Thursday."
"The size of the daily fine was set to double every week that Yahoo refused to comply, the documents show."
Two years ago
Re: Yahoo scanned customer emails for US intelligence
#399Earlier quoted context omitted.
No. My premise is that of "rational" argument (and I know the word is loaded in the context of Ayn Rand), that of seeking a better understanding of the world. My position is that emotional manipulation leads to a worse understanding of the world and decrease net welfare by encouraging people to be less rational. As such arguments that abuse emotion are not desirable (perhaps "appropriate" is the wrong word: any argum…
>* My position is that emotional manipulation leads to a worse understanding of the world and decrease net welfare by encouraging people to be less rational.* That's circular reasoning. "Emotional is bad because it's less rational" (given that rational is the opposite of emotional). Why would emotional be worse? Or generally worse? It is itself a useful way of deciding, that originated from evolution. In fact there w…
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Re: Yahoo scanned customer emails for US intelligence
#400Earlier quoted context omitted.
The media is mostly controlled and distributed by private companies that collude with the government for their own benefit, Google and Yahoo are exactly such companies.
Well, since most media is advertising dependent, they're dependent on access to information to give you something of value, to in turn sell ads. If investigating or reporting on something shady means, a press operative can no longer be allowed access to an election campaign, or means their correspondents get snubbed at press conferences. They'll cooperate or not report on something, or follow the delivered narrative…
It's much simpler when you stop trying to pretend the people who run these companies are benevolent angels out to do good in a scary scary world. These companies are run by the same class of people that run the government, they have the same interests and they collude in order to further their interests. Very simple.