"Intelligence officials told Reuters that all Yahoo had to do was modify existing systems for stopping child pornography from being sent through its email or filtering spam messages."
But three former Yahoo employee have now said that actually the court-ordered search "was done by a module attached to the Linux kernel -- in other words, it was deeply buried near the core of the email server operating system, far below where mail sorting was handled...
They said that made it hard to detect and also made it hard to figure out what the program was doing."
Now, experts at the EFF and Sen. Ron Wyden say that the order served on Yahoo should be made public according to the text of a law passed last year.
The USA Freedom Act is meant to declassify certain kinds of government orders, and the EFF says the Yahoo order fits neatly into the terms of the law.
"If the reports about the Yahoo order are accurate -- including requiring the company to custom build new software to accomplish the scanning -- it's hard to imagine a better candidate for declassification and disclosure under Section 402," Aaron Mackey of the EFF said.
Yahoo Disables Automatic Email Forwarding Feature, Making It Difficult For Users To Leave (reuters.com)
After it was revealed that Yahoo secretly scanned customer emails for U.S. intelligence agencies, now's as good of time as any to leave Yahoo Mail.
However, the company has made it more difficult to leave by disabling the automatic email forwarding feature.
Reuters reports:
While those who have set up forwarding in the past are unaffected,
users who would want to leave following recent hacking and surveillance
revelations are struggling to shift to rival services, the AP reported
on Monday.
The company has been under scrutiny from investors after
disclosing last month that at least 500 million user accounts were stolen from its network in 2014.
The AP said that several users were leaving or had already left the
service because of the negative headlines.
The company's website says
that the "automatic email forwarding" feature is under development and
has been temporarily disabled.
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