Yahoo! Spied On ALL Customer Emails At Behest Of NSA

Why hasn't there been a thread about this?

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.

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what's the best email service to avoid this kind of shit?

I assumed Yahoo! did all this despite their denials, just like Microsoft, Google, Facebook, etc.

SIGAINT

I still use Yahoo. I keep telling myself to switch, but I've been using it for so long (over fifteen years), it'd be kind of a hassle.

Sheeeiiiiit….

Smoke symbols

Kek is trying to tell you it's time.

I've been using yahoo since day o e if me being on internet it's hard to move accounts. In any ways the only emails I get are free sample website alters and notifications from eBay. So. .. I don't really know what privacy I'm losing

Because nobody cares, and it has become expected.

If you think any of the other tech companies/organizations in that vein aren't doing the same, you're a fool.

hushmail and scryptmail are pretty good.

I use Yahoo but I don't get or send any e-mails that would attract the attention of the US government anyway so I don't give a shit.

Hushmail has been known to give alphabets info upon request.

Thanks schlomo, i think you convinced me to make a new email account!

be sure to tell your boss for the bonus

this just in! Water is wet!

…fam.

Hey, are you even surprised?
politics.slashdot.org/story/15/09/29/220239/carly-fiorina-i-supplied-hp-servers-for-nsa-snooping

I'm not telling you to do anything. Yahoo is fine for me. If you want to sign up for KKK e-mail lists or something then it might not be a good choice.

Yandex is the russian Yahoo, you can try it.

They will give your e-mails to the russian government that's for sure but you're not russian so I guess it's not as bad.

Hosting your own would be the ideal option.

oh u


screencap for posterity and easier management

leave and never come back

Have seen ppl on # complain that the owner closed their account for basic DB selling.

Place is compromised as fuck.

Setting up a server is a time sink of a few hours.

But goddamn is managing your own server a absolute shit experience. Making sure your domain doesn't get auto spam filtered is almost impossible, especially when spammers start using your TLD as spoofed e-mails. I had to drop my domain because the work of contacting support and getting my address delisted from spam filters became to much.

Well that's never happened to me but I'm on a very reputable IP block. The one time my mail was blacklisted it was on my Russian VPS. Sometime the blacklist services ban entire IP ranges if they are problematic. I wrote them and got delisted in about a day.
I see your point, definitely not easy. However I enjoy hosting my own.

So the NSA is worthless like all other gov agencies without cooperation from private sector?

why should there be? If this comes as a surprise to you user, you really need to re-think your use of the web.


If you've studied (or lived thru) much of the telecommunications revolution and understand it's history of cooperation with legal authority you'd understand.
I'll give you a little run down;
first there was the telegraph, and it was good. It was considered legal communications and was granted all privileges of confidentiality, meaning it took a judge's warrant to learn the contents of the message.
then came telephone, and it was good. For many decades Ma-Bell held the government at bay and had the official position that tracing phone numbers was impossible and tapping them at the central office was also impossible. In the beginning this was true, but in the 1940's with the widespread use of rotary dial telephone systems this changed. The FBI finally got hold of internal phone company documents that proved that modern systems were capable of many surveillance tricks and by the end of the 1960s the government had forced Ma-Bell to roll over and comply with legal court ordered taps and traces.
then along came cellular telephones, and PTT instant communications, and systems with built in encryption and of course the internet and VOIP.
all of these had the legal precedent of past cooperation and have been fully compromised with back-doors and master-keys.

Tl,dr;
what did you expect user?

I've been using the web for longer than some of the anons here have been alive, and if I know 1 thing it's that EVERYTHING you do online leaves traces somewhere and the things you post will live on long after you are dust.
welcome to the wonderful world of the internet

Yes, I use Gandi because I'm not in France and I get EU data laws.