Yahoo Files Suit Demanding Greater Accountability from the U.S. Government
yahoopolicy.tumblr.com
yahoopolicy.tumblr.com
At the very least, shareholders of companies like Yahoo! are seeing lower shareholder value. That's a loss. They're harmed. There's a lot greater harm than that, but at least it's a starting point.
EDIT: come to think of it, I don't know why I wrote citizen of the country. Citizens aren't the only ones hurt. I'm no lawyer. Can non-citizens sue too?
Re: non-citizens, no, for even better reasons. If one country's policy actions are hurting the citizens of another country, the proper forum isn't a lawsuit, but rather the battlefield.
Hold your horses there, fella. It's 2013, we invented this thing called WTO, and this other thing called UN... I think we could give them a whirl before we start going von Clausewitz on everyone's ass.
As for the WTO, international surveillance is not a trade issue, it's a security issue. It's totally outside the domain of the WTO. One country's maneuverings for its security interests impinging the citizens of another country is the classic use-case for war.
The inanity you're referring to is this: surveillance of the communications of any individual American would reveal that all Americans are under regular surveillance. It's not really as inane as you think, however that doesn't make it any less ridiculous.
This was in the news last week itself: http://news.oneindia.in/international/us-federal-court-summo...
For all we know, there's only been one request, but maybe that request is something like: "Give us a plaintext copy of each email sent and received for all of your users for the last 10 years"
The only thing that will create transparency is to eliminate secret orders all together. That's what these guys should be arguing and I find it strange that they are not. Instead they are all fixated on just being able to show how many requests they've complied with and not what those requests were actually for.
What they're trying to achieve by making a public stink about this is good PR. The real fight -if there is actually a real fight between the tech giants and the government- will happen behind closed doors.
Why? Because it's an easier PR ploy. What these companies really should fight is the government's so far successful attempts to compel them to violate users' privacy.
2) We don't know any of the numbers.
If my apartment was on fire, I'd like to know how many other apartments were burning, and so would my landlord. Yahoo is one apartment on the web, and we are the landlords of our government. Yahoo knows how much of their apartment is on fire, but they know nothing about Google across the hall from them.
2) Wrong again. We know ranges (see link above) and we don't need to know the exact numbers. All we need to know is that the house is on fire, and we already know that.
> they know nothing about Google
Sigh. See above.
The exact number issue is a red herring. Again, this is simply a PR ploy.
This is either a first step or a smokescreen, depending on how one looks at it. It's good to know "the number" in order to determine the scope of the problem. It would be better if service providers could actually stop governments from using overly-broad requests to go after user data of indeterminate intelligence-fighting value.
http://holt.house.gov/index.php?option=com_content&task=view...
It's a much better and much more effective "fix" against all of this, for us individuals, and for the corporations, too, if they want foreign (and local) customers to trust them again.
The real prize is ending the mass surveillance, not just being able to "disclose" it.
They would like you to forget that the real question is their collaboration with the NSA.
The amount of economic damage that has been done to the national infrastructure will be measured in the tens of billions of dollars, at least, and the damage will go on for decades. Twenty years from now, people will be making decisions about technology and these issues will still come up, even if the public manages to wrest control over the ruling class and bring sanity back.
If you are first to market with strong encryption, web-of-trust, zero-knowledge, open-client email, you take all your competitors' customers who care about privacy.
Then you can tell me how many intrusions that thwarted.
That's what "zero knowledge" means: You don't have to trust your own infrastructure. Your mail server could be in Fort Meade. The user's data is still protected.
Perhaps they could be ordered to shut down. But that wouldn't result in your data being compromised.
I do think this is where our technologies have needed to head for at least the past ten years. But real progress occurs slowly, and most of the tech community's attention is captured by the VC-fueled marketing circus.
The direct point I am making is that privacy preserving tools necessarily run on a user's computer completely under their control and need to be open source to be trustable. Which means they're incompatible with business unless you want to fall back on support and custom development. So they won't be promoted or purposely developed by established companies such as Yahoo, or VC-funded startups looking for a big exit.