Yahoo Receives Special Recognition For Fighting For User Data Privacy 58
An anonymous reader writes "The Electronic Frontier Foundation awarded Yahoo a gold star for its diligence in fighting for user privacy in courts. From the release: 'In 2007, Yahoo received an order to produce user data under the Protect America Act (the predecessor statute to the FISA Amendments Act, the law on which the NSA’s recently disclosed Prism program relies). Instead of blindly accepting the government’s constitutionally questionable order, Yahoo fought back. The company challenged the legality of the order in the FISC, the secret surveillance court that grants government applications for surveillance. And when the order was upheld by the FISC, Yahoo didn’t stop fighting: it appealed the decision to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court of Review, a three-judge appellate court established to review decisions of the FISC. ... Yahoo went to bat for its users – not because it had to, and not because of a possible PR benefit – but because it was the right move for its users and the company. It’s precisely this type of fight – a secret fight for user privacy – that should serve as the gold standard for companies, and such a fight must be commended. While Yahoo still has a way to go in the other Who Has Your Back categories (and they remain the last major email carrier not using HTTPS encryption by default), Yahoo leads the pack in fighting for its users under seal and in secret.'"
Although they did end up losing, and were forbidden from even mentioning the existence of the case until recently.
Same Yahoo? (Score:5, Informative)
Is this the same Yahoo! that turned over data to the Chinese, which resulted in a bunch of people going to prison?
http://money.cnn.com/2006/02/08/technology/yahoo_china_b20/ [cnn.com]
Seems like a convenient PR stunt to me.
Never Forget (Score:5, Informative)
http://www.amnestyusa.org/our-work/cases/china-shi-tao [amnestyusa.org]
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Shi Tao was sentenced in April 2005 to 10 years’ imprisonment and two years’ subsequent deprivation of his political rights. According to the court verdict, part of the evidence for the case was account holder information supplied by Yahoo!. Spokespersons for Yahoo! claimed the company was simply following local laws.
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http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/08/28/yahoo_seeks_dismissal_human_rights_lawsuit/ [theregister.co.uk]
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Yahoo! has asked a US court to dismiss a lawsuit accusing it of "aiding and abetting" acts of torture and other human rights abuses against Chinese dissidents. The company handed over information about its users to the Chinese government, which led to the arrests of the dissidents.
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http://www.marketwatch.com/story/yahoo-helps-china-jail-dissidents-says-rights-group [marketwatch.com]
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Human Rights in China, a New York-based group, said Thursday that Wang Xiaoning was sentenced to 10 years in prison in Sept 2003 for "incitement to subvert state power" after Yahoo provided authorities with his email address.
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and call me a tinfoil hatter all you want, but I do think this and the Snowden-crash issues are related-
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=3929983&cid=44170993 [slashdot.org]
Re:If they want to be heroes (Score:4, Informative)
I remember not long ago, when they helped China prosecute a journalist that supposedly leaked state secrets to a website and helped "out" chinese dissidents and helped the chinese implement and facilitate internet censorship.
Re:Same Yahoo? (Score:5, Informative)
If you look at the timeline it seems they started fighting the NSA after they fucked up with the chinese dissidents. Seems like they made the best out of a bad situation and learned their lesson. They deserve credit for that - it seems like no one, other than perhaps twitter, learned the lesson from watching Yahoo screw up since basically everybody else rolled over for the NSA.