Yahoo! tries!, fails! to! shoot! down! email! backdoor! claim! Almost 24 hours after refusing to deny allegations that it allowed US intelligence free rein on its email systems, Yahoo! has issued a carefully worded non-denial. "The article is misleading," the statement reads, referring to yesterday's Reuters report. "We narrowly interpret every government request for user data to minimize …
It does not exist on their system, and never did. It was located outside of their data center, they only opened up a direct port to their database so that said system could access them. If said find-and-report application had been on their systems, or even in their data center, it would have been vastly more secure, and would not have allowed access to any passing hacker.
It was located outside of their data center, they only opened up a direct port to their database so that said system could access them.
That was my immediate thought as well, albeit I was thinking of piping it through an NSA system rather than allowing direct access, without referring back it seemed to fit was was described better. I was surprised Thomson didn't pick it up given the scrutiny to the rest of the wording.
... had their email service not been up and down today undergoing 'maintenance'...
I'm sure the two things are entirely unrelated, however, and no frantic removal of all trace of this from their systems took place at all. No sir. Just some regular ol' unscheduled maintenance...
"We don't do that. And no court would grant us the authority to do that. We have to make a specific cast. And what the court grants is specific authority for a specific period of time for a specific purpose."
Specific time = As long as we want
Specific purpose = To see if anyone is saying anything "bad"
Sidenote: I just checked the text on the icon I used, and I find it appropriate as I live in Montana.
the "maintenance" is probably largely due to the huge number of customers who wanted to close their accounts after the password hack they didn't tell anyone about for a year, but didn't get motivated to get the messy work of changing their email on tons of web/service logins until yesterday when they immediately started mass exporting of their mail so they can close the accounts.
A brief spasm of operational activity requiring some elastic capacity expansion followed by the sucking sound of lost ad revenue flying out the back door.
'Rogers set up getting blanket access to all emails as a straw man, then proceeded to work on that premise. And doing individual keyword searches in the manner described in the article could be construed as a "specific cast." '
Orwellian doublespeak.
Having Yahoo scan, sort, and filter every customers email and only send .gov the ones that have this particular selector is not any different from the government having full access to the messages and scanning them and sorting them by selector. NSA previously argued that they were not "reading everyone's mail" because only their automated systems were scanning everyone's email and they were only reading the "specific" ones it flagged. Their credibility and the credibility of any tech company that doesn't publicly and immediately refuse such obvious violations of the constitution (no matter what obscure 18th century law the feds abuse in their request) are not worth the paper my emails are not printed on.
Just to make matters worse for long suffering BT customers, still stuck on BTYahoo email, BT are currently making it impossible for us to delete BTYahoo email accounts that we don't want. The online delete facility doesn't work (although it is promised that it will work by end of September - but that deadline has been and gone) - and BTYahoo have also made it impossible for BT customers to configure forwarding of emails to a third party address from their BTYahoo addresses. I understand that many of these problems also affect customers migrated to the new BTMail email provider Critical Path/Openwave. So - Yahoo suffer 500m data breach (not their first), we discover (again) that NSA are scanning our EU originated email data with Yahoo!'s backdoor assistance, and now they won't let us delete our email accounts?
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