Yahoo scan by U.S. fell under foreign spy law expiring next year
reuters.com
reuters.com
The US spying wouldn't be nearly as bad if it was more transparent about it. I know, that sounds crazy, but let me explain. Right now we have secret information dragnets collecting godknowswhat, with no independent oversight (that we, citizens, can examine) and no public definition for when an item moves from automated analysis into the realm of strangers looking at it.
Plus there's no strict definition for where the dragnet's flags begin and end. For example is an illegal poker game a justified flag? Cheating on your taxes? Cheating on your wife? Where is the line? Is it only when human life is endanger? And what about the awkward subject of industrial espionage? Will the US help US companies beat foreign ones? Will it help one US company beat another US company? How much does the US Gov really value free capitalist markets if they cheat?
My point is, the public themselves won't ever allow this spying to stop for the simple reason that people value security over privacy, and they constantly demand more security (e.g. after every terrorist attack ever "why didn't you stop this?!"). So if it is here to stay, we need to have the most transparent and checks-and-balances system we can.
Yes, sure, criticise me. But do you know how many US spying programs have closed since Snowden? ZERO. So if we aren't going to close them let's at least make them less secret, provide better oversight, and provide better controls.
They are not.
The NSA engage in what's known as "strategic listening". This is the 'measuring half' to strategic communication - which means propaganda.
Propaganda messaging gets tracked to see how well it penetrates target societies and knowledge from surveillance about personal associations, trust networks, how information generally flows through society allow propaganda programming to be adaptively retargetted and remessaged.
Similarly, these surveillance programmes are used to give American businesses a leg up in competition (the international oil auctions from a few years ago are a well known example of this). Surveillance capabilities were installed by the CIA in their fake Twitter application "ZunZuneo" because having dossiers on potential future political activists gives US intelligence leverage over potential future public servicepeople.
Surveillance is and has been about power and control - it's a misunderstanding to think that the line stops with some kind of criminal behavior or other. Therein, I think the framing of the question - as much as I like the approach - will inevitably fall short of really addressing the issue.
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foreign_Intelligence_Surveilla...)
But I fear it wouldn't make a difference, and she'd keep pushing for it from whatever high position she would be given as well.
To be clear though, the underlying government behavior is reprehensible, and needs to be curtailed. Governments and LEO's are inherently lazy, and if you let them investigate broadly instead of forcing them to specify, they will.
A lot of normal people may still be using Yahoo account for real communications.
Just Yahoo. WTF? The 90's called, etc... And, when I did a search for similar application forms, I found out it was hardly an outlier.
I started to get interested: More searching uncovered a significant percentage, maybe 10-15% overall, of major technology employers use a job application system that only accept Yahoo identities. It must be some quirk of job application portal vendors. But there it is. Anyone applying to more than one position will find several of these. And since you can't re-use the manually entered identity information across companies, the incentives to use a Yahoo identity are pretty strong. Time-to-payback is the second one you encounter.
Worse in what material way? You might be surprised to know that AOL was doing things like encrypting even intra-datacenter links as early as 2006. While they would probably not have resisted such an order they would have at least implemented it competently.
This is the generalization to the other people. "If I do not use Yahoo, then no one does".
You can't trivially turn money into good oversight, because of the agency problem: quis custodiet?
I don't think "custodet" is a possible form of that verb; the present subjunctive would be "quis custodiat" ('who would guard?').
(On other days I post comments just like yours … something thematic there, I fancy. cui custodiendum?)
I'd disagree. Governments are lazy because citizens don't hold them accountable for not doing their jobs properly. Why? Same reason we collectively complain about politician or gov't office X doing their jobs poorly yet they've been in office/haven't changed for 20 years--we're too apathetic.