Yahoo built specialized software to spy on users for the NSA.

Yahoo built specialized software to spy on users for the NSA. (extremetech).

Ever since the Snowden leaks in 2013, there’s been an ongoing debate over the nature of state surveillance. One of the more interesting things we learned in 2013 was that certain companies had fought the NSA tooth and nail — and Yahoo had led the charge.

When the company was ordered to produce user data in 2007, it challenged the legality of that order at the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC, also sometimes known as the FISA Court). When its challenge failed, it appealed the case to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court of Review. While it also lost on appeal, the company earned accolades for its willingness to stand up for user privacy, even though all of the court proceedings and decisions were classified at the time and couldn’t be milked as a PR opportunity.

If a new report from Reuters is accurate, the Yahoo that went to bat to defend its users is a dim and distant memory today. The news agency reports that last year, Yahoo built a custom search engine to allow the government to search its entire database of email for keywords and terms provided by US intelligence agencies. The decision was apparently highly controversial within Yahoo and reportedly led to the departure of the company’s Chief Information Security Officer, Alex Stamos, who now works for Facebook.

Sources close to Yahoo have previously stated the company was reluctant to upgrade its email security or adopt end-to-end encryption out of fear that any disruption to its service would drive customers away to other email providers.

This new information suggests this may have been a strictly secondary concern. We already know that the federal government pays for access to customer databases; the Snowden leaks showed that the NSA paid AT&T $190 million in 2011.

We don’t know what kind of arrangement the government struck with Yahoo, but it’s not hard to connect the dots here.

Mayer’s company has been in trouble for years, with declining revenue and poor user engagement. The Yahoo that went out on a limb to defend its customers in 2007 – 2008 and decried the government’s collection of millions of webcam images through Yahoo’s own infrastructure is a far cry from the Yahoo of 2016, and Mayer may well have taken the deal as a way to generate additional revenue.

Prior to this, federal agencies have had the right to demand information on specific users. But no other company is known to have built a database that automatically scanned all incoming mail and provided that information to a federal agency, or allowed real-time analysis based on specific criteria (called a selector).

“I’ve never seen that, a wiretap in real time on a ‘selector,'” Albert Gidari, a lawyer who represented phone and Internet companies on surveillance issues for 20 years before moving to Stanford University this year, told Reuters. “A selector refers to a type of search term used to zero in on specific information. It would be really difficult for a provider to do that.”

Yahoo’s sole comment on the matter was terse: “Yahoo is a law abiding company, and complies with the laws of the United States.”  Hmmm.........'We were just following orders' ....'Wir folgen nur den Befehlen'. Read the full story here.

High level Yahoo female Executive Sued for Sexual Harassment

Maria Zhang, Founder and CEO of Alike

Yahoo female Executive Sued for Sexual Harassment. (NDTv)

A high-level woman Yahoo Inc executive has been sued in California by a woman who worked under her and is accusing her former boss of sexual harassment and wrongful termination.

Maria Zhang, a senior director of engineering at Yahoo Mobile, has been sued by Nan Shi, who worked as a principal software engineer in Yahoo from February 2013, according to a complaint filed on July 8 in Santa Clara Superior Court in San Jose, California.

The complaint alleges that Zhang coerced Shi to have oral and digital sex with her on multiple occasions in Sunnyvale, California, and told her she would have a "bright future" at Yahoo if she had sex with Zhang.

Shi is seeking monetary as well as punitive damages. The lawsuit also names Yahoo as a defendant.

"There is absolutely no basis or truth to the allegations against Maria Zhang. Maria is an exemplary Yahoo executive and we intend to fight vigorously to clear her name," a Yahoo representative said in an email.Read the full story here.

Yahoo announces plan to encrypt all customer data, email by 2014.

Yahoo announces plan to encrypt all customer data, email by 2014.(RT).

Mayer published the news in an announcement to customers on Yahoo’s Tumblr page. She acknowledged that the changes are in response to the NSA leaks that began in June, which have outraged the public and challenged internet leaders to come up with an answer. 

“We’ve worked hard over the years to earn our users’ trust and we fight hard to preserve it. As you know, there have been a number of reports over the last six months about the US government secretly accessing user data without the knowledge of tech companies, including Yahoo,” she wrote. 
“I want to reiterate what we have said in the past: Yahoo has never given access to our data centers to the NSA or to any other government agency. Ever. There is nothing more important to us than protecting our users’ privacy.” 

Mayer said the changes will be implemented by the first quarter of 2014. 
The statement comes less than one month after The Washington Post revealed that the NSA infiltrated the main communication links between Yahoo and Google centers located around the world. By doing so, the NSA essentially gave itself the ability to collect information from hundreds of users’ accounts, most of whom are Americans.  
Working in conjunction with the GCHQ, its British intelligence counterpart, the NSA processed 181,280,466 records showing which users sent or received emails, when they did so, and other context such as text, audio, and video. This program is in addition to the court-approved PRISM program, according to the Post report based on documents obtained by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden. 
Yahoo recently announced that the company plans to better protect the privacy of Yahoo Mail by introducing Secure Sockets Layer - known as SSL - encrypting with a 2048-bit key. According to Mayer’s announcement, the company plans to build on that.
“We will encrypt all information that moves between our data centers by the end of Q1 of 2014,” she wrote, adding that Yahoo plans to “offer users an option to encrypt all data flow to/from Yahoo by the end of Q1 2014, work closely with our international Mail partners to ensure that Yahoo co-branded Mail accounts are https-enabled.” 
This announcement comes after Google went public with a similar encryption initiative that aims to turn messages from text into gibberish when Google is forced to turnover data by court order. Eric Grosse, vice president for security engineering at Google, told The Washington Post in September that such efforts are likely to continue. 

“It’s an arms race,” he said. “We see these government agencies as among the most skilled players in the game.”