No matter who is president …. George Bush or Barack Obama … top secrecy and whistleblowers hanged to dry in court by the 1917 Espionage Act. Say no more!
Yahoo may have let the government spy on emails. Now will we embrace encryption? | The Guardian |
In a blockbuster scoop, Reuters’ Joseph Menn is reporting that Yahoo secretly built a software program in 2015 that scanned all its millions of customers’ incoming emails at the behest of US intelligence officials, which led to its chief security officer resigning in protest.
We don’t know exactly what the US government might have been searching for, but we do know that this is potentially a massive privacy violation that strikes at the heart of the Fourth Amendment’s prohibition on indiscriminate search and seizure. Yahoo’s reported secret collaboration with the US government also brings up several points that warrant further investigation.
This Yahoo story seems to be an escalation of this type of “about” or “upstream” surveillance, which was once done by the NSA by secretly wiretapping internet cables owned by AT&T and others. Since many email companies have started encrypting their emails in transit since that story came out, the NSA likely can’t do that type of surveillance unilaterally (or with the help of AT&T) anymore. The US government now seems to be moving to force internet companies to do this type of mass surveillance for them, on the companies’ servers, where the data remains accessible.
Unprecedented and Unlawful: The NSA’s “Upstream” Surveillance
- ○ How and Why to Encrypt Your Text Messages
○ Battle of the secure messaging Apps: how signal beats WhatsApp | The Intercept |
