Yahoo installed a backdoor for the NSA behind the back of the security team

This is apparently pretty much what happened at Yahoo! when the security team found out the rootkit.

this is a really good point, and there are plenty of articles out there suggesting it's fine to terminate SSL on your app proxy since if you can't trust your own datacenter your security is pants anyway ... These semi-informed claims about security often delivered in set-up instructions are annoyingly frequent too. The attitude seems to be it's fine since everyone does it.

I get it why somebody would argue this before but things like letsencrypt make it easy to manage the certificates for your internal hosts. I guess it gets more complex if you have your apps in containers that need their certificates managed etc. Even that shouldn't be this big a deal to make sure renewal is automated with some scripting or even managed properly with a backend CA like r509 ... Also the argument for performance no longer counts when the sales argument could be "we guarantee you e2e encrypted services etc" ...

Also Data Engineering jobs become a lot more complicated when suddenly certain data-points are no longer available for visualization on "BI-dashboards" consumed by wann-be tech-savvy CxO's, so that too may be a factor.

Wrong. I don't even need to cite Snowden slides, congressional testimony will be sufficient:

> Turns out the data collection is not so limited. In testimony yesterday before the House Judiciary Committee, National Security Agency Deputy Director Chris Inglis said that the NSA’s probing of data in search of terrorist activity extended “two to three hops” away from suspected terrorists. Previously, NSA leaders had said surveillance was limited to only two “hops” from a suspect.

> Inglis said that the NSA looks at two to three hops from a suspect. To determine how many hops you are from Osama, for example, the NSA’s data analysis engine software constantly plows through information and builds a model of all the relationships between every phone number on record and every IP address. Other software robots query the graph to discover which “nodes”—phone numbers, IP addresses and email accounts—fall within three degrees of separation from an established suspect.

> If you have a direct relationship with a suspected terrorist or target (you’ve called them, you’ve emailed them, you’ve visited their website) that’s a “one hop” relationship; there’s a solid line connecting you to that person in the NSA’s relationship graph. If you talk with, e-mail, or visit the Facebook page or website of someone who’s got a one-hop relationship, you’re two hops away. Add one more person in between in the graph, and you’re three hops away.

> Under the NSA’s FISA requests, Google, Microsoft, and other Internet services companies can be compelled to hand over relevant data from their servers on any account that falls within the three-hop range and is flagged as belonging to a person of interest. If you’ve won this lottery, the NSA will get access to your e-mails on Gmail or Outlook.com as well as your chats and Web-stored contacts, your documents, your synced data from computers and mobile devices, your backups, and anything else that can be handed over—at least, so the documents Snowden leaked imply.

> Your raw Internet traffic will get more attention as well. Your IP address will be watched more carefully by deep packet inspection hardware at the NSA’s 'Net taps, and what you do online will get extra scrutiny.

https://www.google.ca/amp/arstechnica.com/information-techno...

I'm not sure if you're just a casual spectator, willfully spreading disinformation, or inclined to ignorance but the boogeyman dismissive posturing boat has long sailed. PRISM's only purpose is to fill in the gaps of passive collection by directly sourcing data, otherwise it comes in primarily from submarine wiretaps and the multitude of other various passive collection sources. Or associated five eyes programs.

And yes FISA warrants include 3 hops and if you know anything about the Internet you know that is a hell of a lot of data for a single warrant. And public data shows the FISA court only deny around 0.1% of warrant requests. Even rubber stamps have to pretend they are doing their job.

No - Nelson Mandela first. Martin Luther King first. There's a precedent of people going to jail for standing up to civil rights violations.

I see what you've misread now. To explain: they look two to three hops away using the metadata (phone records and until Obama cancelled the program before Snowden leaked anything, the email envelope data — from and to). They did not actually request the data of everybody three hops away, and nowhere in your quote is that claim made.

PRISM doesn't "fill in gaps." It is their main source of actionable intelligence according to the leaked slides, and it only contains the data of the person being watched, requested via court order, approved by the company, and then sent to the FBI.