Yahoo Issues Its First Transparency Report 77
Yahoo has joined the ranks of large online businesses like Google and Facebook who have made it a practice to disclose the number and kind (if not all the details) of requests they've received from government agencies for user data. Its first report (you can read it here) lists "12,444 requests from U.S. authorities relating to a total of 40,322 user accounts."
Those numbers are only part of the story, though: at the bottom of the linked report, note this disclaimer from Yahoo: "The numbers reported above include all types of government data requests such as criminal law enforcement requests and those under U.S. national security authorities, including the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) and National Security Letters (NSLs), if any were received. The U.S. Government does not permit us to disclose additional details regarding the number of requests, if any, under national security authorities at this time, or even to separate them in aggregate from other requests. Additionally, the government would not authorize us to separate NSLs from other government data requests or to express the NSLs that we have received, if any, as a range from 0 to 1,000—even though the government allowed other providers to do so in the past."
Re:Heh. (Score:3, Interesting)
I'm slightly amused the Yahoo icon on this story has a transparent background.
For all the good this transparency does to restore our confidence. The Snowden leaks/NSA documents clearly show that the NSA directly taps into the backend systems without any need to reque4st anything from these companies - Google, Yahoo, Facebook etc. The only time these companies receive extra requests like the ones being reported above is when the NSA want's to do more proactive monitoring or targeted individuals that requires hooking into the front end (monitoring search as you type etc). PR departments have been working overtime to try and muddle, confuse and distract from this small detail - do not let them off the hook so easily people - this is not transparancy.