Analyzing Yahoo's PRISM non-denial | Hacker News Reader

Analyzing Yahoo's PRISM non-denial

paranoia.dubfire.net

35 pointstimf13 comments

Anything Yahoo! says rings false after the incident in 2002 when they willingly volunteered identifying data to the Chinese government about a user, which landed him in prison for ten years.

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/01/world/asia/wang-xiaoning-c...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wang_Xiaoning

This seems a odd stance to take. Whether or not Yahoo! is/was involved in PRISM seems divorced from their giving up of a Chinese political activist / radical. It might mean that you believe them capable of participating, but we don't even have direct confirmation of what PRISM is exactly. What if PRISM is a worm sitting on Yahoo!'s network? What if PRISM is interception of network activity going to/from Yahoo! and sending it off to some NSA data-center?

More than 10 years have passed. The current Yahoo is very different than the Yahoo of 10 years ago.

Whether they deserve to be given a second chance is to be decided by individual people and you are free to not trust them. Be glad that you are free enough to publicly voice your opinion in the matter.

No, poor article. Yahoo flatly denies involvement in any broad surveillance scheme. Trying to dissect words such as "voluntary" and "requests" and trying to claim they are not actually denying this is absurd.

Don't get me wrong. I believe we live in a surveilance state. I believe the US government collects tons and tons of data on every US citizen whether they are under investigation or not in case some day they are needed, but I don't believe the big public companies like Facebook, Google and Yahoo participate in this scheme.

The US government has more control over the Internet than to need permission from these companies.

The non-denial was written by a lawyer... it would be a common assumption that there is word trickery at hand. I believe this analysis goes into the details of how words can be used to change what the original statement is saying... while looking like it is just an honest non-denial.

That is why I upvoted this post at least.

This is junk -- there is absolutely nothing that the companies can say to satisfy the critics. We're not going to get at the truth via conspiracy theories and making connections in the language of the denials. "Non-denial"??? If you were in the CEO's shoes, and knew that the PRISM issue was false, what would you say DIFFERENTLY?

What frustrates me is that this comes from the assumption that Yahoo & co. are absolutely without a doubt guilty.

'We are not subject to any sort of federal order that requires us to turn over data, as described by Glenn Greenwald' would be a nice place to start.

"We categorically are not making data available voluntarily or under duress to any government or company or organization."

Of course none of them can say that because they're all sharing stuff with someone(s) and who knows where it ends up - Right Media, Twitter button and ScoreCard Research are all on Yahoo's homepage and except the Twitter button, inside Yahoo Mail.

Microsoft is also using "voluntary" in their, surprisingly short, press release: http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/news/Press/2013/Jun13/06-06st...

I think everything is to fresh for us to come up with a picture about what is going on. These companies require their users trust to run and they could face action by governments if they have been giving user data over to the US so they are not going to come out and say. “Hell yeah we did" but for all we know they are telling the truth. We need more information. Right now it is a clusterfuck of claims and denials. Someone is lying, place your bets on who...

Anytime an article starts with 'analyzing' like this, it seems to, more often than not, mean that what follows will be a complete guess based on preconceived notions the author has about the subject in question. The author inevitably seems to just read into it however he wants to reinforce whatever his beliefs already are.

"Yahoo" ... was that one of those twentieth century social networks like Myspace and Friendster?

If anyone is skimming the comments to see if the article is a worthwhile read, it is. Excellent analysis.

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