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https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/28/us/politics/nsa-surveillance-terrorism-privacy.html
The National Security Agency said Friday that it had halted one of the most disputed practices of its warrantless surveillance program, ending a once-secret form of wiretapping that dates to the Bush administration's post-Sept. 11 expansion of national security powers.
The agency is no longer collecting Americans' emails and texts exchanged with people overseas that simply mention identifying terms — like email addresses — for foreigners whom the agency is spying on, but are neither to nor from those targets.
The decision is a major development in American surveillance policy. Privacy advocates have argued that the practice skirted or overstepped the Fourth Amendment.
The change is unrelated to the surveillance imbroglio over the investigations into Russia and the Trump campaign, according to officials familiar with the matter. Rather, it stemmed from a discovery that N.S.A. analysts had violated rules imposed by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court barring any searching for Americans' information in certain messages captured through such wiretapping.
Though I'm personally wondering why now.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 01 2017, @06:43AM (2 children)
Why the fuck do we even have email anymore. Doesn't everyone use fucking gmail already. We don't even fucking need smto because gmail can just deliver gmails between gmail accounts by dumping shit directly into the backend database. Why the fuck do we even have email anymore.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by kaszz on Monday May 01 2017, @09:17AM
Because we don't trust American corporations nor Google?
And being dependent on some far away server for personal communication is a bad dependence idea.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 01 2017, @02:13PM
Ah, I think I see what you're complaining about.
At least gmail speaks SMTP, even if retards don't set up their server instances correctly.
In my long-winded comment up there I touched on it briefly. Hospitals wound up turning to proprietary solutions made by the usual suspects (Cerner & Epic). You're bitching about gmail. When you get a "Cerner," all you get is a notification over SMTP that there's an email waiting for you. Then you have to go to the hospital's server, sign up for an account (I think I must have 10 or 20 of those running around now that I've never used for more than a few mails), and then you can read and send mail.
It's as if somebody considered TLS, considered S/MIME, considered PGP/MIME, considered non-MIME PGP, and said to hell with it! We're gonna roll our own cloudy web-based shit because SMTP isn't hip!
I blame Outlook for it mostly with their piss-poor S/MIME support and NIH syndrome with PGP. In a better world, everybody uses KMail from KDE 3.5, everything is encrypted endpoint to endpoint in motion and at rest, and it's happy and everything is perfect.
So no, I don't like that idiots set up misconfigured gmail instances and then blame you because you're the only non-gmail person they're in contact with so it must be your fault. Just stand your ground, and yeah, you'll lose a little business here and there because of arrogant dumbassery. At least gmail speaks SMTP. It could be much, much worse.