Yahoo “passed through” the mail for millions of users on behalf of the U.S. intelligence: this is the startling revelation contained in a report of Reuters, in which you explain how the company in the past year would have developed it tools to control the messages to the search of certain content, all in response to a request in this sense of the u.s. government.
Have passed only a few weeks from when it emerged as the Yahoo has covered for two years, a colossal security breach that has seen the compromise, something like 500 million accounts. The california-based company at the moment is not releasing any comments on the report, with the exception of a weak justification provided to the same Reuters: “Yahoo is a company that follows the law and respects the laws of the United States”.
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as you can read in the report, the requested analysis of the messages in transit on Yahoo came from the National Security Agency (NSA) or the FBI: the agencies would send their desired Finance in the form of a decree classified and routed to the legal department of the company. In a report, according to a report by Reuters, three sources aware of the matter”, of which two are ex-employees of Yahoo.
it is Not clear if the agencies involved were looking for information or, in the case, which were these information: requests to Finance were related to the scanning of e-mail messages to search for a specific character set, that can mean certain words in a message or in an attachment.
Two of the three “deep throats” on which revelation is based, the report stated that the decision taken by ceo Marissa Mayer to submit to the request coming from the government agencies has been a cause of friction with some of the most senior executives of the company. Among other things, the story may have brought to the departure of the manager of information security, Alex Stamos, which now occupies the same role at Facebook.
In the last few hours, several giants of the computer services and the internet such as Google, Microsoft, Facebook, and Twitter have made it known that they never received requests of this type: “is Not never happened, and if it were to happen there opporremmo in court“, they did know from the social network of the bird.
The laws of the united states, in particular the amendments to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, the intelligence agencies are allowed to require companies to telecommunications information to assist the investigations in certain fields, such as the prevention of terrorist attacks.
However, is not the first time that Yahoo is pulled into the dance from the stories concerning the activities of intelligence, at least, questionable. Already in 2014, the californian company was involved in one of the revelations of Edward Snowden, the documents provided by the ex-employee NSA and gave life to the so-called “Datagate” showed how the agency and british GCHQ and the same NSA had set up a surveillance program code-named Optic Nerve, which was active from 2008 until at least 2012.
The purpose of the program was to capture images through the webcam of the devices of many users Yahoo. At the time, the company denied any involvement in the affair and, when it was contacted by the Guardian, the company gave vent to his indignation, claiming that GCHQ and NSA had resulted in “the violation of users’ privacy to an entirely new level”.
According to some experts, the regulations in force, Yahoo would be able to oppose to this last request both for its scope (it was planned to surveillance to indiscriminate on all incoming mail) both for the need to write a specific software to analyze each e-mail message. A battle in this direction was fought a few months ago from Apple.
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The house of the bitten apple had found itself facing a similar request from the FBI: the Bureau requested the development of a version of the iOS operating system that allow access to iPhone 5c one of the responsible of the massacre of San Bernardino. The company from Cupertino, it opposed the request, arguing as in obeying would have been a precedent dangerous to the privacy of users ‘ data.
After a bitter legal battle, the FBI took out the Apple by hiring an external company that, using a particular procedure, the allowed access to the smartphone of the assassin. Although there are no official confirmations about this, it seems that the Bureau has paid for external consultancy for a million dollars. Just pohi days ago, a researcher from the university of Cambridge explained how to perform the same procedure at a cost of about $ 100.
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