Hacker News Reader

Comment by okasaki | Hacker News Reader

> Yahoo reacted furiously to the webcam interception when approached by the Guardian.

That's pretty funny.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:PRISM_Collection_Details.... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Upstream-slide.jpg

Why? PRISM is about selected (targeted) collection of data from users that the government has a court order for. Every country in the world does this. This program collects data from traffic passing through the UK regardless of whether the UK government has any reason to suspect the users whose data is collected, let alone present those suspicions to a judge. Yahoo has every reason to be outraged.

I don't think those slides are talking about court order related activities. After all, all companies must comply with court orders, so why would the NSA single out the nine as their "current providers"?

As the companies have repeatedly explained and as the government's declassified documents show, it's because the companies built systems to automatically send new account data to the government for accounts under court-ordered surveillance as new IMs, emails, etc. came in. This contrasts with having an engineer manually send data dumps daily in some format the government has to figure out how to parse.

I don't believe that's true. Much of the controversy centered around the (highly xenophobic) fact that the NSA was unable to guarantee that it wasn't scooping up data belonging to US citizens. If this was only about court ordered surveillence then surely it could have done so?

And second, I specifically remember that all nine companies immediately denied the existence of the program. Then it became too big and it was time to "explain it"? As Bush Jr. would say, fool me once...

You're confusing different programs. PRISM in particular is only court-ordered surveillance of targeted users. That's what companies like Yahoo! participated in without knowing the NSA's code name for it.

Limiting collection to non-Americans applies to bulk collection programs like the email header collection for unencrypted email deliveries crossing national borders and like this program. Those are programs the companies didn't know about and are understandably outraged about.

Yahoo fought/fights this pretty hard:

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2342200/Revealed-Yah...

Now companies are able to release more info about what the government had requested, though it is delayed and limited to giving ranges periods of time instead of absolute numbers.

Translation: "We are shocked, shocked to learn that GCHQ were intercepting our traffic! Certainly had no knowledge of this fact, nope, nosiree...".

Reply on news.ycombinator.com