Since they've been fixated on what they deem a Trump-Putin love affair, can't wait to see how they spin this.The Justice Department is set to announce Wednesday the indictments of two Russian spies and two criminal hackers in connection with the heist of 500 million Yahoo user accounts in 2014, marking the first U.S. criminal cyber charges ever against Russian government officials.
WaPo
That is really low.Yahoo was left reeling after a major embarrassment earlier this month. It was revealed that the company opens users’ emails up to government surveillance.
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This led some users to take their emails elsewhere, but Yahoo recently disabled the [mail forwarding] feature “while we work to improve it,” according to a notice on the company’s help site.
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It is not known how many users are looking to leave the server following revelations that the company had built software specifically for US intelligence that allowed them to scan all incoming emails for information.
RT
Yahoo will be needing to improve that, too.For users who aren’t comfortable with that, setting up an out-of-office message is one workaround in lieu of email forwarding. Merissa Silk who told the AP she just set up an out-of-office message that provided her new address and explained she would no longer be using Yahoo due to “recent data and privacy breaches.”
Yahoo and who else?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 directive, scanning hundreds of millions of Yahoo Mail accounts at the behest of the National Security Agency or FBI, said two former employees and a third person apprised of the events.
Some surveillance experts said this represents the first case to surface of a U.S. Internet company agreeing to a spy agency's demand by searching all arriving messages, as opposed to examining stored messages or scanning a small number of accounts in real time.
Reuters
Like Facebook doesn't help the spooks? He was more likely just pissed that Yahoo didn't inform him they were having this program built. Which, when you think about it, was bad, him being the security officer.Experts said it was likely that the NSA or FBI had approached other Internet companies with the same demand, since they evidently did not know what email accounts were being used by the target.
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Alphabet Inc's Google and Microsoft Corp, two major U.S. email service providers, did not respond to requests for comment.
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In a separate incident, Yahoo last month said "state-sponsored" hackers had gained access to 500 million customer accounts in 2014.
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According to the two 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.
I bet.Through a Facebook spokesman, Stamos declined a request for an interview.
But of course.The NSA referred questions to the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, which declined to comment.
U.S. phone and Internet companies are known to have handed over bulk customer data to intelligence agencies. But some former government officials and private surveillance experts said they had not previously seen either such a broad directive for real-time Web collection or one that required the creation of a new computer program.
...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.Theresa May summoned the internet giant Yahoo for an urgent meeting on Thursday to raise security concerns after the company announced plans to move to Dublin where it is beyond the reach of Britain's surveillance laws.
By making the Irish capital rather than London the centre of its European, Middle East and Africa operations, Yahoo cannot be forced to hand over information demanded by Scotland Yard and the intelligence agencies through "warrants" issued under Britain's controversial anti-terror laws.
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In February, the Guardian revealed that Britain's eavesdropping centre GCHQ intercepted and stored the images of millions of people using Yahoo webcams, regardless of whether they were suspects. The data included a large quantity of sexually explicit pictures.
The company said this represented "a whole new level of violation of our users' privacy".
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The move to make Dublin the centre of its headquarters for Europe, the Middle East and Africa (EMEA) was announced last month and will take effect from Friday.
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Emma Carr, deputy director of Big Brother Watch, said: "It should not come as a surprise if companies concerned about maintaining their users' trust to hold their information start to move to countries with more rigorous oversight processes, particularly where courts oversee requests for information." Surveillance laws have a direct impact on our economy and Yahoo's decision should be ring an alarm in Parliament that ignoring the serious questions about surveillance that are being debated around the world will only harm Britain's digital economy."
Guardian
Constitution? What’s that?The National Security Agency has secretly broken into the main communications links that connect Yahoo and Google data centers around the world, according to documents obtained from former NSA contractor Edward Snowden and interviews with knowledgeable officials.
By tapping those links, the agency has positioned itself to collect at will from hundreds of millions of user accounts, many of them belonging to Americans.
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The NSA’s principal tool to exploit the data links is a project called MUSCULAR, operated jointly with the agency’s British counterpart, the Government Communications Headquarters . From undisclosed interception points, the NSA and the GCHQ are copying entire data flows across fiber-optic cables that carry information between the data centers of the Silicon Valley giants.
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Tapping the Google and Yahoo clouds allows the NSA to intercept communications in real time and to take “a retrospective look at target activity,” according to one internal NSA document.
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The infiltration is especially striking because the NSA, under a separate program known as PRISM, has front-door access to Google and Yahoo user accounts through a court-approved process.
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In 2011, when FISC learned that the NSA was using similar methods to collect and analyze data streams — on a much smaller scale — from cables on U.S. territory, Judge John D. Bates ruled that the program was illegal under FISA and inconsistent with the requirements of the Fourth Amendment.
WaPo
National Security Agency Director Keith Alexander on Wednesday denied knowledge of an agency program that reportedly tapped Google and Yahoo data centers around the world without the companies' knowledge.
TPM
