Yahoo agreed to FBI/NSA order to search all email traffic

[Skybird]

http://www.reuters.com/article/us-ya...-idUSKCN1241YT

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.

I say you can take it for granted that Google, Microsoft and others do the same.

US laws by now are such, as I see it, that American companies cannot avoid to fully obey demands by the intel and security apparatus. Which makes such companies extended arms of the US intel network.

I would not be surprised to learn one day that the aggressiveness by which Micorsoft tries to enforce access to W7 and W8 systems in order to install W10 - which opens tremendous spying and security breaches on such platforms that the user can no longer fully counter - is due to secret orders by the NSA as well. It is a confirmed and even announced policy that the NSA wants to have access to EVERY single computer unit on this planet. That thexy hardfcode backdoors into hardware drivers stored on RAM modules or enforce backdoors in operation systems, then is just a logical step. That W7 also got reverse-installed W10 snoopware technology and profiling software installed via regular Windows Updates, matches this.

"Store it in the cloud", eh? Not even over my cold dead body, darling. Companies and users doing that, are so stupid and naive that they almost deserve to get hit by something malicious.

Recent tests thy ran over here of email services, have devastated all American-based services, with GMX leading the list of shame. All American services failed even most elemental security procedures. No doubt that European altenrtaives are under attack by the NSA, but at least legally they do not fall under US jurisdiction. The mnost popular email service on the planet, is GMX. It is also the most unsafe and compromised one. I have told all my remaining former email contacts running over GMX that I refuse to accept or reply to email accounts of theirs that are based in America.

I know people in overseas, who have to be concerned about their safety and anonymity, who even refuse to communicate over encrypted email clients and via TOR. TOR most likely has been hacked, and it is too dangerous to trust on it any longer if your safety or life depends on it.

If for any reason you have sensitive data to store, or need to communicate but need to be concerned for safety, stay away from electronics. Internet, computers, cellphones - its all a big No-Go. Stay physically disconnected. Not software-controlled and software-blocked - but PHYSICALLY DISCONNECTED. No wire and no electromagnetic wave transmitter.

Thanks to modern computer capacities and automatization you must assume, always, that EVERY communication over phone, wire, internet, gets listened into, gets automatically scanned and filted and searched for for triggers, gets recorded, stored and saved forever.

The last thing should really worry you.

Laws are meaningless here.