[RonPaul2008]

Yahoo Inc last year secretly built a custom software program to search all of its customers' incoming emails for specific information provided by U.S. intelligence officials, according to people familiar with the matter.
The company complied with a classified U.S. government demand, scanning hundreds of millions of Yahoo Mail accounts at the behest of the National Security Agency or FBI, said three former employees and a fourth person apprised of the events.
Some surveillance experts said this represents the first case to surface of a U.S. Internet company agreeing to an intelligence agency's request 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, who did not want to be identified.
Reuters was unable to determine what data Yahoo may have handed over, if any, and if intelligence officials had approached other email providers besides Yahoo with this kind of request.
According to two of the 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.
"Yahoo is a law abiding company, and complies with the laws of the United States," the company said in a brief statement in response to Reuters questions about the demand. Yahoo declined any further comment.
Through a Facebook spokesman, Stamos declined a request for an interview.
The NSA referred questions to the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, which declined to comment.
The request to search Yahoo Mail accounts came in the form of a classified edict sent to the company's legal team, according to the three people familiar with the matter.
U.S. phone and Internet companies are known to have handed over bulk customer data to intelligence agencies. But some former government officials and private surveillance experts said they had not previously seen either such a broad demand for real-time Web collection or one that required the creation of a new computer program.
"I've never seen that, a wiretap in real time on a 'selector,'" said Albert Gidari, a lawyer who represented phone and Internet companies on surveillance issues for 20 years before moving to Stanford University this year. A selector refers to a type of search term used to zero in on specific information.
"It would be really difficult for a provider to do that," he added.
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.
Alphabet Inc's Google and Microsoft Corp, two major U.S. email service providers, separately said on Tuesday that they had not conducted such email searches.
"We've never received such a request, but if we did, our response would be simple: 'No way'," a spokesman for Google said in a statement.
A Microsoft spokesperson said in a statement, "We have never engaged in the secret scanning of email traffic like what has been reported today about Yahoo." The company declined to comment on whether it had received such a request.
CHALLENGING THE NSA
Under laws including the 2008 amendments to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, intelligence agencies can ask U.S. phone and Internet companies to provide customer data to aid foreign intelligence-gathering efforts for a variety of reasons, including prevention of terrorist attacks.
Disclosures by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden and others have exposed the extent of electronic surveillance and led U.S. authorities to modestly scale back some of the programs, in part to protect privacy rights.
Companies including Yahoo have challenged some classified surveillance before the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, a secret tribunal.
Some FISA experts said Yahoo could have tried to fight last year's demand on at least two grounds: the breadth of the directive and the necessity of writing a special program to search all customers' emails in transit.
Apple Inc made a similar argument earlier this year when it refused to create a special program to break into an encrypted iPhone used in the 2015 San Bernardino massacre. The FBI dropped the case after it unlocked the phone with the help of a third party, so no precedent was set.
"It is deeply disappointing that Yahoo declined to challenge this sweeping surveillance order, because customers are counting on technology companies to stand up to novel spying demands in court," Patrick Toomey, an attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union, said in a statement.
Some FISA experts defended Yahoo's decision to comply, saying nothing prohibited the surveillance court from ordering a search for a specific term instead of a specific account. So-called "upstream" bulk collection from phone carriers based on content was found to be legal, they said, and the same logic could apply to Web companies' mail.
As tech companies become better at encrypting data, they are likely to face more such requests from spy agencies.
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."
SECRET SIPHONING PROGRAM
Mayer and other executives ultimately decided to comply with the directive last year rather than fight it, in part because they thought they would lose, said the people familiar with the matter.
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.
Some Yahoo employees were upset about the decision not to contest the more recent edict and thought the company could have prevailed, the sources said.
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.
Stamos's announcement in June 2015 that he had joined Facebook did not mention any problems with Yahoo. (bit.ly/2dL003k)
In a separate incident, Yahoo last month said "state-sponsored" hackers had gained access to 500 million customer accounts in 2014. The revelations have brought new scrutiny to Yahoo's security practices as the company tries to complete a deal to sell its core business to Verizon Communications Inc for $4.8 billion.
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F*ck Yahoo.

[kidcudi92]

I bet all email services did

no heads will roll except the expendable puppets

the puppeteers are all behind closed doors

[funnyb25]

Damn....they prolly think I am good friends with Alfredo Rodrigo Wilmar Gomez from Manila Philippines...

[importmoon]

good work RP2008

[texhooper]

Funny b that's classic

[pavyracer]

The words used in search were "penis enlargement pills".

[funnyb25]

The words used in search were "penis enlargement pills".

JJ exposed again

[Russian Rocket]

The only surprise here is how American public is still getting surprised at the fact that they're being spied on 24/7.

You guys have been secretly spied on by your own government at least since the days of AOL and Netscape. Back in 2000 Newsbytes performed traffic analysis on then heavily used Navigator browser and found that anytime a Navigator user performs a search by typing terms into the browser's URL bar and pressing the adjacent Search button, or by using the Search tab on the browser's My Sidebar feature, the user data is sent to a server at info.netscape.com using a URL forwarding system. -- without end user's knowledge

I also love how Google is denying to ever being involved in something like this. When in fact they've been working with the NSA in terms of contracts since at least 2002. They are even been formally listed as part of the defense industrial base since 2009. They also have been heavily engaged with the PRISM system, where nearly all information collected by Google is available and passed to the NSA.

Google's entire business model is build around spying. It makes more than 80 percent of its money by collecting information about people, pooling it together, storing it, indexing it, building profiles of people to predict their interests and behavior, and then selling those profiles principally to advertisers, but also to others...like the NSA and US government.

If you need an encrypted and safe email acct - use proton mail.

[Auto Donk]

I guess the gig is up.....

the gov't now has access to all those emails from foreign countries i rec'd; mostly from russia and eastern euro countries, saying "hi im olga" and shit like that, and the thousands of viagra/cialis/levitra ads; and of course the nigerian and far east emails telling me I've got $500,000 in an account if I help them get the money out, by giving them my credit card number.....

[RonPaul2008]

Way back in June...

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

Barack Obama has sought to address European concerns over internet privacy in the wake of the National Security Agency surveillance scandal, insisting US authorities are not "rifling through the emails" of ordinary people and he is confident the US intelligence services have "struck the appropriate balance" between security and civil rights.
"I was a critic of the previous administration for those occasions in which I felt they had violated our values and I came in [to office] with a healthy scepticism about how our various programmes were structured," Obama told the press conference in Berlin's chancellery. But, he added, having examined how the US intelligence services were operating: "I'm confident that at this point we have struck the appropriate balance".
Obama's remarks on the NSA dominated the 45-minute press conference, which also covered Syria, the global economic crisis and Guantánamo, with observers suggesting he had used the occasion as an opportunity to confront European scepticism over the US government's attempts to justify their surveillance operations, which have triggered deep concerns both at home and abroad.
In Germany the practices have widely been compared to those of the Gestapo and Stasi, the state intelligence arms that operated during the Nazi and communist dictatorships. Questions surrounding them have dominated the runup to the Obama family's 25-hour visit to the German capital, which comes almost exactly 50 years after John F Kennedy flew into the city and delivered his legendary "Ich bin ein Berliner" speech.
In what came across as something of a charm offensive, Obama even went into a degree of detail over the way the NSA's programme worked, saying he wanted to be very specific about the programmes that "have caused so much controversy".
"Essentially one programme allows us to take a phone number that has been discovered … through some lead that is typical of what our intelligence services do. And what we try to discover is has anybody else been called from that phone." He stressed that initially no check on content took place. "Nobody's listening in on the conversation at that point – it's just determining whether or not if for example we found a phone number in Osama bin Laden's compound after the raid, had he called anybody in New York or Berlin." But from that point, to listen in to the conversation a court's permission would have to be sought, he insisted, adding that the process applied only "very narrowly to leads that we have obtained on issues related to terrorism or proliferation of weapons of mass destruction".
He added: "This is not a situation in which we are rifling through the ordinary emails of German citizens or American citizens or French citizens or anybody else. This is not a situation where we simply go into the internet and start searching any way that we want. This is a circumscribed, narrow system, directed at us being able to protect our people and all of it is done with the oversight of the courts."
Delivering his six-minute defence as a staid Angela Merkel, the German chancellor, looked on, Obama concluded by saying the procedure had saved lives. "We know of at least 50 threats that have been averted because of this information not just in the United States, but in some cases threats here in Germany. So lives have been saved, and the encroachment on privacy has been strictly limited by a court-approved process to relate to these particular categories," he said.
Merkel responded with a distinct air of scepticism, saying it was a reflection of German concerns that she and Obama had discussed the issue "at length and in great depth".
"People have concerns precisely about there having possibly been some kind of across-the-board gathering of information," she said. "The unanswered questions – and of course there are a few – we will continue to discuss." She acknowledged that information received by US authorities had helped foil an Islamist terrorist plot in the Sauerland region of Germany in 2007.

[Auto Donk]

Way back in June...

Barack Obama: NSA is not rifling through ordinary people's emails

"We know of at least 50 threats that have been averted because of this information not just in the United States, but in some cases threats here in Germany.

make it 51, if getting my daily jerk on at pornhub.com constitutes a threat to anyone.....

[jjgold]

I am for it

[GunShard]

I am for it

"Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety." -Benjamin Franklin

[RGG]

No real surprise there, they are probably looking at all our messages too on here. Just how it is.

[DrunkHorseplayer]

This is why I like Edward Snowden and Julian Assange. If these cockroaches want to know everything about the citizenry, the citizenry should know everything about them.

[jjgold]

spying is good

need to watch everything