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Yahoo wins motion to declassify court documents in PRISM case
- eastdakota 13y agoWorking link: http://news.cnet.com/8301-1023_3-57593871-93/yahoo-wins-motion-to-declassify-court-documents-in-prism-case/ http://news.cnet.com/8301-1023_3-57593871-93/yahoo-wins-moti...
- michaelxia 13y agoyay! yahoo, the internet giant whose products gather data from evuhreybaddy, is on our side! now all our problems are solved and we can sleep at night oh wait...
- cmwelsh 13y agoThey must have been doing something right. They won commendation from the EFF today for their longstanding secret fight against the United States government. https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2013/07/yahoo-fight-for-users-earns-company-special-recognition https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2013/07/yahoo-fight-for-users-...
- locusm 13y agoAt least they stopped getting Chinese dissidents locked up http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_Yahoo http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_Yahoo!
- rfctr 13y agoIn USA Yahoo complies with US laws. In China Yahoo complies with Chinese laws. Dura lex sed lex.
- Zigurd 13y agoAll of these services could provide convenient key exchange, web-of-trust, secure email and storage, and secure communications services with ephemeral keys. They might have to charge money to do so, but they could all raise the cost of surveillance by orders of magnitude, if not make it impractical, and remain within US law. If they wanted to.
- pyre 13y agoThe company has changed leadership since then. One can hope for things to get better.
- rfctr 13y agoAs long as laws in particular jurisdiction remain the same, nothing could change much. May be gets a little less public, eh.
- pyre 13y agoThe Wikipedia article seems to imply that Google and Microsoft keep their users' private data outside of China, which means they don't have to comply, but IANA(Chinese)L.
- pvnick 13y agoI'm switching back to Firefox and exploring Yahoo equivalents to google products? Hell must be getting pretty cold right about now.
- rfctr 13y agoYahoo won a right to demonstrate they did resist the government. They did resist, but have lost anyway. So... no. Yahoo is not a NSA-free land.
- pvnick 13y agoNobody on the internet is NSA-free as they're siphoning photons off the fiber optic cables. I choose to give my support to those fighting tooth and nail against the surveillance, and right now the evidence points towards Yahoo doing that better than most. Plus they got a glittery gold star from the EFF!
- rfctr 13y ago> right now the evidence points towards Yahoo doing that better than most I see your point. Still, Yahoo may be just the first to win the right to disclose. Similar decisions may follow towards Google and MS, for example, and -- oh horror -- HN.
- pvnick 13y agoI hope you're right, I may have to reconsider. But honestly I love a good comeback story and have been rooting for Yahoo since Mayer took over.
- unimpressive 13y agoHN is all public messages anyway. There's no private message feature. The only data they have to give is what you've upvoted and your email. (Though that former set of data might be interesting.)
- mjolk 13y ago
- count 13y agoHmm, it doesn't say they get to declassify, only that the classification must be reviewed, and then the document published with any properly classified information redacted. Expect a letter of all black lines.
- rfctr 13y ago> "The Government shall conduct a declassification review of this Court's Memorandum Opinion of [Yahoo's case] and the legal briefs submitted by the parties to this Court," the ruling read. What I don't get here: it was told many times that FISA court only hears one side, namely government. Here though Yahoo seems to be named a party in the Court. Has rules change? o_O
- DannyBee 13y agoYou have to understand that contrary to the single story the news presents, the FISA court is actually responsible for hearing a bunch of types of things. There are three categories, and i haven't read hard enough (an don't have time to right now) to distinguish all the use cases. You have 50 USC 1803, which is a one-sided deal currently (and what you hear most about) You also have 50 USC 1861f, which a party can challenge. You also have 50 USC 1881a, which a party can challenge.
- timbrooke 13y agoWe're supposed to have RIOTS all over the world by now. And people do what? Discuss how one NSA partner company is less evil than the others. We are f#cked.
- Groxx 13y agoQuestion: >Yahoo has previously denied the allegations regarding participation in the program, calling them "categorically false." That's what they say, but doesn't this just show that while they fought it, they did participate because they lost the fight?[1] I'm not aiming to say "liar, liar, pants on fire" since they were probably required to say that (if my reading is accurate). I'm just wondering if they were required to say that, as this is nearly evidence of it, which would cast even more doubt on the other companies' denials. [1] https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2013/07/yahoo-fight-for-users-earns-company-special-recognition https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2013/07/yahoo-fight-for-users-... (thanks, cmwelsh!) in particular this quote: >Ultimately, the Court of Review ruled against Yahoo, upholding the constitutionality of the Protect America Act and ordering Yahoo to turn over the user data the government requested. Though they can't say what was turned over.
- haakon 13y ago> I'm not aiming to say "liar, liar, pants on fire" since they were probably required to say that Can a court really order a person to lie, though?
- mindslight 13y agoSo wait, if PRISM is merely the process by which NSA et al request data on individual suspects which are then reviewed and fulfilled with human involvement (as the denials by Google etc purport)... why did Yahoo see fit to challenge their involvement?
- falk 13y agoBingo. We've been misled and lied to by every company implicated. We have no reason to trust them. At least Yahoo! is fighting back. Now if only they would remove that damn exclamation mark from their name.
- kllrnohj 13y agoYahoo didn't challenge their involvement in PRISM according to these court documents. They instead challenged FISA orders. PRISM is not mentioned anywhere. The shitty CNET article is conflating the two, but they are not the same. So no, Yahoo has not contradicted themselves.
- _pmf_ 13y agoSo brave.
- motters 13y agoThe leaked slide says that Yahoo was assimilated into PRISM on 3/12/2008. I assume that must be some time after the secret court decision.
- VladRussian2 13y ago>...Yahoo was assimilated into PRISM... Resistance is futile. Big box data center in the emptiness of Uta desert where the online "you" - your private photos and intimate chirps ...err ... tweets - will be stored for posterity and peered over again and again by lifeless Big Data program ... Not of course that it hasn't been happening for the last 10 years in Mountain View or in Palo Alto/Menlo Park :)
- Mordor 13y agoThis proves nothing, since PRISM likely isn't the only program run by the NSA.
- perlpimp 13y ago.. "redacts any properly classified information" .. Who gets to decide what is property classified information? They can redact the document in such a way that it carry only vacuous material and thus passively aggressively refuse even if they are compelled.
- tomelders 13y agoIt's good, but it's not US Constitution good. None of the companies involved should obey the law in this matter, and they should adhere to their moral responsibilities and reveal everything they know. Plus, I doubt locking up the CEO's of the worlds largest tech companies would work out well for any government.
- oleganza 13y ago"None of the companies involved should obey the law in this matter" Lets see how you will behave when people with guns tell you they will take your property and probably you for not obeying the orders.
- tomelders 13y agoIf it get's that far, then it's safe to assume I've already lost the fight and I'm probably behind bars or dead. Let's see what you do.
- rfctr 13y agoMoral laws are sooooo vastly different among people that an attempt to adhere to them will equal to general anarchy.
- tomelders 13y agoexcuses excuses
- mratzloff 13y agoIf they were arrested, they wouldn't be arrested for "failure to comply with national security requirements" or whatever. They would more likely be arrested for insider trading or something equally plausible.
- adrr 13y agoDon't think current administration would risk that, republican controlled house is looking for any shred of a scandal to have hearings, they are itching to impeach Obama. More than likely you'll see the executive branch would do any business(advertising etc) with yahoo and military would do some knee jerk reaction like ban armed serviced personnel from viewing yahoo properties similarly to what they did with the Guardian. Its easier and safer to cut the money streams. Luckily for Yahoo it isn't much, unlike Microsoft or Att who have more to lose in terms of government contracts.
- brymaster 13y agoWow. First they lie and deny, now this. What does this mean for Google and the others participating in the program? I'd love to read some explanations from Page, Yonatan Zunger, Matt Cutts and friends. These guys were swearing up and down that Google had no involvement.
- myko 13y ago> I'd love to read some explanations from Page, Yonatan Zunger, Matt Cutts and friends. These guys were swearing up and down that Google had no involvement. They swore they didn't allow the NSA to access their servers. All we know that they do is comply with lawful requests for users data. There was no lying involved.
- brymaster 13y agoNo, not quite. > Google had no involvement in the PRISM program and the first we heard of it was when Greenwald's article hit the press. -Yonatan Zunger I'd say that's a pretty big lie right there.
- declan 13y agoWhere's the lie? PRISM is the name of an NSA software package used to collate data the agency receives under a well-known section of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. But because of poor reporting and unintentional errors, the name of a software program used to analyze data has become transmorgrified into (1) a "government program" that companies (2) "participate in" that gives the NSA (3) "direct access" to their servers. Not one of those three assertions is true.
- yaix 13y agoI'd love to switch to ymail, if it didn't suck so bad. I just read, that Y! will be /reassigning/ email adresses that have not been used (no login) for a year.