Yahoo wins motion to declassify court documents in PRISM case

http://news.cnet.com/8301-1023_3-57593871-93/yahoo-wins-motion-to-declassify-court-documents-in-prism-case/

by falk • 13 years ago

477 86 13 years ago

news.cnet.com

eastdakota• 13 years ago

Working link: http://news.cnet.com/8301-1023_3-57593871-93/yahoo-wins-moti...

michaelxia• 13 years ago

yay!

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• 13 years ago

They 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-...

locusm• 13 years ago

At least they stopped getting Chinese dissidents locked up http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_Yahoo!

rfctr7• 13 years ago

In USA Yahoo complies with US laws.

In China Yahoo complies with Chinese laws.

Dura lex sed lex.

Zigurd• 13 years ago

All 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.

pyre2• 13 years ago

The company has changed leadership since then. One can hope for things to get better.

rfctr7• 13 years ago

As long as laws in particular jurisdiction remain the same, nothing could change much.

May be gets a little less public, eh.

pvnick3• 13 years ago

I'm switching back to Firefox and exploring Yahoo equivalents to google products? Hell must be getting pretty cold right about now.

rfctr7• 13 years ago

Yahoo 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.

pvnick3• 13 years ago

Nobody 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!

jevinskie• 13 years ago

Lesser of many evils? What about DDG? How accurately can the NSA track DDG queries that get farmed out to the 3rd party search engines (Bing? and others?)?

deathhand• 13 years ago

Yes all major firms are culpable in this but if their beliefs are in line with mine(We should know what the gov does) then I should support them and use their product.

psbp• 13 years ago

Wait, what? Yahoo is still part of PRISM. We don't really know how Google, Apple, Dropbox, etc. reacted to attempts by the NSA to be put under PRISM.

We only know that Microsoft wilfully made it as easy and accessible as possible, but no other company has revealed to be more culpable (or victimized?) than the rest.

bennyg• 13 years ago

Well, Apple was the last of the bigs to buckle.

ryguytilidie• 13 years ago

I think it is pretty clear that the person you are responding to is pleased with the progress Yahoo is making. Criticizing them for still being a part of PRISM is not entirely fair as I imagine these companies are all being coerced. To see good news about Yahoo taking an anti prism stance, see someone say "I'm going to use Yahoo products more" and then say what you said seems a bit disingenuous honestly.

csoghoian• 13 years ago

Yahoo still doesn't use HTTPS by default, for email or search.

Not using HTTPS is huge, gift-wrapped present to the NSA. It also means that the NSA can get Yahoo users' communications without even having to bother Yahoo, as they can get it with the assistance of backbone networks. Lower legal compliance costs for Yahoo, and the NSA gets what they need.

Seriously, Yahoo is awful on privacy and security. Don't reward them with your business.

enko5• 13 years ago

Hm, I think the HTTPS thing is overblown for sites that are hosted in the US. Almost no large sites do HTTPS termination on the actual app servers; it would be the simplest thing in the world to put the collection device behind the HTTPS endpoint.

Why bother trying to piece together data flows over a bunch of disparate backbone networks when you can just hook up a collector at the wellspring? I'd sure they'd be delighted to be able to tick off that whole company as "done", and set the verizon taps etc to ignore anything to them, secure in the knowledge they were getting it all elsewhere.

unicornporn• 13 years ago

By default, no. But you can easily enable it. At least for mail/calendar/contacts.

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2013/01/yahoo-mail-makes-https...

somesay2• 13 years ago

In fact, Google is the only major company who uses TLS for mail transfers: http://i.i.cbsi.com/cnwk.1d/i/tim2/2013/06/21/Webmailencrypt...

kllrnohj4• 13 years ago

Yahoo still ranks far, far behind Google (and Twitter, and Dropbox, and etc...) according to the EFF: https://www.eff.org/sites/default/files/who-has-your-back-20...

sliverstorm• 13 years ago

As far as this NSA stuff goes though, May 13th is painfully out of date.

mtgx• 13 years ago

Yahoo should buy Blekko, and then try to develop its own search engine again.

celwell• 13 years ago

Chrome > Firefox

count• 13 years ago

Hmm, 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.

rfctr7• 13 years 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• 13 years ago

You 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.

Groxx• 13 years ago

Question:

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-... (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• 13 years 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?

mcguire• 13 years ago

This particular court? Yes. It's required by the law.

mindslight• 13 years ago

So 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• 13 years ago

Bingo. 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.

kllrnohj4• 13 years ago

Yahoo 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_• 13 years ago

So brave.

motters2• 13 years ago

The 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• 13 years 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• 13 years ago

This proves nothing, since PRISM likely isn't the only program run by the NSA.

perlpimp• 13 years 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.

tomelders3• 13 years ago

It'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• 13 years 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.

tomelders3• 13 years ago

If 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.

rfctr7• 13 years ago

Moral laws are sooooo vastly different among people that an attempt to adhere to them will equal to general anarchy.

tomelders3• 13 years ago

excuses excuses

mratzloff• 13 years ago

If 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• 13 years ago

Don'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.

brymaster6• 13 years ago

Wow. 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• 13 years 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.

brymaster6• 13 years ago

No, 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.

yaix• 13 years ago

I'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.

Yahoo wins motion to declassify court documents in PRISM case

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