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Yahoo! Government Privacy Security

Yahoo Offers Non-Denial Denial of Bombshell Spy Report (theintercept.com) 103

Posted by msmash from the caught-off-guard dept.
Reuters reported on Tuesday that Yahoo 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. When The Intercept reached out to Yahoo for an official comment and explanation, the company offered a non-denial response after 20 hours since Reuters's report, a report said. (If a report is inaccurate, the company says so explicitly. Non-denial is something you give when you are caught off guard and things reported are true.) From the report: From Yahoo's PR firm, "The article is misleading. We narrowly interpret every government request for user data to minimize disclosure. The mail scanning described in the article does not exist on our systems." This is an extremely carefully worded statement, arriving roughly 20 hours after the Reuters story first broke. That's a long time to craft 29 words. It's unclear as well why Yahoo wouldn't have put this statement out on Tuesday, rather than responding, cryptically, that they are "a law abiding company, [that] complies with the laws of the United States." But this day-after denial isn't even really a denial: The statement says only that the article is misleading, not false. It denies only that such an email scanning program "does not" exist -- perhaps it did exist at some point between its reported inception in 2015 and today. It also pins quite a bit on the word "described" -- perhaps the Reuters report was overall accurate, but missed a few details. And it would mean a lot more for this denial to come straight from the keyboard of a named executive at Yahoo -- perhaps Ron Bell, the company's general counsel -- rather than a "strategic communications firm."Reuters reported that Yahoo's decision has prompted questions in Europe whether EU citizens' data had been compromised, and this could result in derailing a new trans-Atlantic data sharing deal.
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Yahoo Offers Non-Denial Denial of Bombshell Spy Report More

Yahoo Offers Non-Denial Denial of Bombshell Spy Report

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  • Yahoo? lol (Score:2, Insightful)

    by bazmail ( 764941 )
    They should just take that miserable shit-heel of a company out back and put it out of its misery. What a joke. Take a bow Marissa, well done girlfriend.

    • Re:Yahoo? lol (Score:5, Insightful)

      by danbuter ( 2019760 ) on Wednesday October 05, 2016 @12:13PM (#53017783)
      The sad part is, Yahoo used to be good. They had cool cooking shows, a fantastic sports section, and the email was actually one of the best available. Almost all of that is gone, taken away by this cost-cutting CEO who trashed what was left of the company.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by darkain ( 749283 )

        AGREED! And Yahoo owned Flickr also used to be the absolute best image archive on the internet too, until they tried to rebrand Flickr as a social network instead of an image host.

        • And Yahoo owned Flickr

          I believe they still DO OWN Flickr. Certainly, I need to be signed into Yahoo to get onto my Flickr account.

          Did they try making it into a social network? I didn't notice. Why would I want to do that?

      • The sad part is, Yahoo used to be good. They had cool cooking shows, a fantastic sports section, and the email was actually one of the best available. Almost all of that is gone, taken away by this cost-cutting CEO who trashed what was left of the company.

        My favorite site of theirs was geocities

    • If you're somehow convinced that only Marissa Mayer was bound by Federal Law to implement this type of 'service' for the government, there's something seriously wrong with your brain.

      • There's degrees of compliance, and I doubt Mayer is off the spectrum. Other CEOs have done essentially the same thing.

  • Weasel Words (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 05, 2016 @11:54AM (#53017597)

    I think the more weaselly part of the statement is that they system does not exist "on our systems." So it could exist, but maybe it's on a computer technically owner by the US government.

    • Comment removed based on user account deletion

    • Re:Weasel Words (Score:5, Informative)

      by Anubis IV ( 1279820 ) on Wednesday October 05, 2016 @12:12PM (#53017775)

      Precisely what I was thinking. For all we know, they have a black box from a three-letter agency that filters every piece of mail before it hits their system. It's not theirs, so they can hold up their hands and go, "not on our systems!"

      Hell, just toss some emphasis into different parts of that last sentence alone and you can see how weaselly it really is and what it could really mean:

      The mail scanning described in the article does not exist on our systems.

      ...but we definitely filter stuff and send it to the government. We just don't like to say that we're scanning it.

      The mail scanning described in the article does not exist on our systems.

      ...but something remarkably close is definitely on our systems.

      The mail scanning described in the article does not exist on our systems.

      ...but it did up until a few minutes ago when we finished the 20-hour process of removing it, which explains why our response was delayed. Also, we plan to restore it again in just a minute here.

      The mail scanning described in the article does not exist on our systems.

      ...but we suspect it does on the government's black box attached to our system.

    • Not Accurate: Re:Weasel Words (Score:5, Interesting)

      by ripvlan ( 2609033 ) on Wednesday October 05, 2016 @12:22PM (#53017833)

      You missed part of the statement. it states in part "scanning described in the article does not exist on our systems"

      Which could mean - a scanning system does exist - but as described does not.

    • I think the more weaselly part of the statement is that they system does not exist "on our systems." So it could exist, but maybe it's on a computer technically owner by the US government.

      I'm not making any statements about what Yahoo has or has not done, but I want to point out that writing a statement that can't be interpreted as "weaselly" by someone who wants to see it that way is really, really hard. Seriously, try it yourself. Assume that you work for Yahoo and you have asked all the relevant people and assured yourself that nothing at all like this is going on and that the story is completely bogus. Now try to write a statement that expresses that, without accidentally claiming that t

    • So it could exist, but maybe it's on a computer technically owner by the US government.

      No way. Obama assured the world back in 2013 [theguardian.com], NSA does not spy on ordinary citizens either:

      "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 servi

    • Assuming there is some legal threat over their heads to admit it, just paraphrase the main character in Apocolypse Now and be done with it: "We would be indisposed to discuss such a program if such a program did in fact exist."

  • Marissa Mayer's legacy is at stake (Score:5, Insightful)

    by JoeyRox ( 2711699 ) on Wednesday October 05, 2016 @11:57AM (#53017619)
    Her legacy of declining revenue, disgruntled employees, negative ROI, executive departures, strategic blunders, and oh, designer short-skirts.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Luthair ( 847766 )
      Lets be honest here, Yahoo was already dead prior to hiring Marissa.

    • "negative ROI"

      During Marissa Mayer's tenure, she has increased the value of the company by $10-20 million per day, roughly a 100:1 ratio with her compensation. She is employed by the shareholders to increase the value of their holdings.

      When is the last time *you* provided a 100x return to your employers?

      • She lost of the company billions of dollars in shareholder value during her tenure, mostly through ill-conceived acquisitions. The only reason the stock price went up was due to the company's stake in Alibaba, a stake she inherited when she became CEO.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by ADRA ( 37398 )

      Nope, her only legacy will be how much money she makes for shareholders. If the money doesn't come, she probably won't get the big seat again. Quite frankly, Yahoo was already a heaping pile of crap before Mayer took over. She did 'little' to improve things, but without a welcome external change, its hard to steer such a big ship away from that Iceberg. IBM pivoted from hardware/software into services rather dramatically, but that's a very rosy example.

  • National Security Letter? (Score:3)

    by Luthair ( 847766 ) on Wednesday October 05, 2016 @12:00PM (#53017647)
    If they were subject to an NSL they wouldn't really be able to talk about it no?
    • Comment removed based on user account deletion

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by sl3xd ( 111641 )

      I don't blame the employees of Yahoo at any level. It's easy to armchair quarterback a decision when you're not the one facing certain prison time and possibly execution for treason.

      You don't blame the people who follow the law - you blame the people who made them, and you change the laws.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by AHuxley ( 892839 )
      Just have the other domestic federal agencies doing a few decades of "ongoing" investigations as cover.

  • It's much easier to say "You caught us red handed and now we gotta weasel out by shoveling manure on it 'til you get dizzy".

    See? It is actually THAT easy.

  • Mayhaps this is how Yahoo allowed practically all the accounts info to get hacked...

  • Surprising? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by jenningsthecat ( 1525947 ) on Wednesday October 05, 2016 @12:05PM (#53017693)

    Is anyone surprised? Nope, not a bit. Except maybe by the fact that it took so many hours to get a PR firm to put together a few weasel-words and slimy phrases. I'd have thought they already had lots of in-house expertise in that area, by way of spinning the bad news they've repeatedly delivered to their shareholders.

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by Nidi62 ( 1525137 )

      Is anyone surprised? Nope, not a bit. Except maybe by the fact that it took so many hours to get a PR firm to put together a few weasel-words and slimy phrases. I'd have thought they already had lots of in-house expertise in that area, by way of spinning the bad news they've repeatedly delivered to their shareholders.

      It probably took so long because they had to have lawyers keep going over proposed statements to make sure that they weren't running afoul of any agreements made with the government regarding exposure or release a statement that would imply an admission of guilt and open them up to possible lawsuits.

  • translation (Score:4, Insightful)

    by JustNiz ( 692889 ) on Wednesday October 05, 2016 @12:08PM (#53017729)

    >> "The mail scanning described in the article does not exist on our systems"
    Translation:
    Its actually running on a box that is physically located in our server farm and hardwired right into our backbone, but the NSA owns the hardware.

    • >> "The mail scanning described in the article does not exist on our systems"
      Translation:
      Its actually running on a box that is physically located in our server farm and hardwired right into our backbone, but the NSA owns the hardware.

      *Bill Clinton voice* Could you please define what the word "on" means?
      Heh

    • Alternate translation: "We have a system, but it is not exactly like the description in some unimportant manner"

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by JustNiz ( 692889 )

        Yeah I actually thought of that right after my first post. I strongly suspect this is actually the truth.

  • If this isn't an illegal search I don't know what is.

    I bet even the USPS steams envelops when it can for the NSA.

  • built a custom software program to search all of its customers' incoming emails for specific information

    So basically they wrote a function to search for certain words. A text search.

    This is not news, we've known for awhile now that the Feds can search our email.

    The fact that they wrote "a custom software program" is not some new revelation. It's always software that searches.

    While we're on this topic, let's remember that in Snowden's info was released in 2006: [usatoday.com]

    The National Security Agency has been secret

  • All of this crap is because of idiot politicians pedaling fear in the form of "Terrorists!".

    This is how tyranny triumphs. Fear.

    "Fear leads to anger, anger leads to hate, hate.. to suffering" - Yoda

    If you are voting for Either Clinton or Trump, you're most likely voting based on Fear.

  • While Yahoo is on the coals right now we'd be foolish to assume that the other major tech companies providing emails are not doing something similar. I find it hard to believe that Yahoo is working with the feds on the down low and nobody else is. I have no evidence of it but it would be truly shocking if Yahoo was alone in this behavior.

  • We narrowly interpret every government request for user data to minimize disclosure

    translation: we give them exactly what they ask for, so if they ask for everything, we give it to them.

  • Citizen 4 already showed us that through PRISM Yahoo, M$, Apple, Facebook and others had already been bribed to allow back doors and expose their clients data.

  • The denial says it does not exist on their systems. It does not deny that the software exists or even that it is actually running, just that it is running on the systems they own.

    It is an entirely accurate statement if their systems forward all emails to NSA owned systems in or directly connected to their network.

    • The denial says it does not exist on their systems. It does not deny that the software exists or even that it is actually running, just that it is running on the systems they own.

      It is an entirely accurate statement if their systems forward all emails to NSA owned systems in or directly connected to their network.

      It's a feeder system, technically, so it technically isn't Yahoo's systems, just inside it.

  • Yahoo probably spent the first 18 of those hours trying to figure out who/what is The Intercept.

  • oh wait, that's Google.

    At yahoo, it's the second thing.

  • Comment removed based on user account deletion

  • This is just conjecture... but what if they left out a sentence intentionally?

    "The article is misleading. We narrowly interpret every government request for user data to minimize disclosure. The mail scanning described in the article does not exist on our systems."

    meant:

    "The article is misleading. We narrowly interpret every government request for user data to minimize disclosure. The mail scanning described in the article does not exist on our systems. *COUGH* *COUGH* It DOES however run on systems provid

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