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posted by martyb on Friday October 07 2016, @01:57AM   Printer-friendly
from the that's-the-polite-form-of-the-response dept.

Since word spread that Yahoo! backdoored its own email servers for US intelligence services, we've heard from rival webmail providers denying they have put in place similar arrangements.

That Yahoo! has a cosy relationship with the Feds is not surprising, especially given what we know about PRISM and Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. What is bizarre is that Yahoo!'s engineering team did not, it is claimed, involve its internal security team and introduced exploitable vulnerabilities into the email scanning system.

There's also the issue that this blanket surveillance, as reported, potentially scoops up private and personal communications of millions of innocent people.

We asked Google if it created a similar mechanism in which g-men can search all incoming messages for certain keywords, or if it has been asked to. A spokesman told us:

We've never received such a request, but if we did, our response would be simple: 'No way.'

Previously:
Yahoo "Secretly Scanned Emails for US Authorities"
US Government Threatened Yahoo with $250K Daily Fine if it didn't use PRISM


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  • (Score: 2) by FatPhil on Friday October 07 2016, @09:51AM

    by FatPhil (863) <pc-soylentNO@SPAMasdf.fi> on Friday October 07 2016, @09:51AM (#411410) Homepage
    As an email industry insider (I work for Dovecot, we power the vast majority of the world's email (IMAP/POP) servers[1], so I know what features are being demanded, by whom, and why), google already have a lawful interception facility.

    And the only difference between lawful interception and a backdoor is whether a google hand signs off on the status change of whether to enable sniffing for an indivual or not, there's no technological difference at all.

    [1] http://openemailsurvey.org/ (disclosure - we, Dovecot, perform that survey, but it's done 100% fairly, trust us!)
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