> Intelligence officials told Reuters that all Yahoo had to do was modify existing systems for stopping child pornography from being sent through its email<p>It's such a convenient wedge for getting the technical capabilities and laws in place, isn't it?
Secret courts, secret processes and secret orders are very problematic. They leave the individual or group with no recourse to the rule of law. Essentially one single order by the FISA court 'can' suspend all your democratic rights. Without recourse. Without limits.<p>Given the FISA court cannot be challenged and you can't even speak about it, this is similar to the dehumanizing helplessness one would feel in a totalitarian state.<p>The FISA court is basically a rubber stamp. The hundred percent approval rate puts it in the company of kangaroo courts seen in the most dubious regimes.<p>We need to hold ourselves accountable to the minimum basic values we loudly professes. Or there will be no credibility to call for springs or draw attention to democratic deficiencies around the world.<p>There are serious inconsistencies that are now impossible to brush aside. Without serious pushback this destructive pattern of executive behavior is not going to stop.
Well this is an interesting detail: <i>The court-ordered search Yahoo conducted, on the other hand, 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</i><p>In other words, a lot of effort was spent to hide the very existence of the code. Injected into systems in a stage far from the intended scope, and made to persist across upper level application rewrites.<p>No wonder their security team freaked out when they discovered it.
>secret court directing Yahoo to scan all its users' incoming email...<p>>it appeared to involve new interpretations of at least two important legal issues.<p>>order from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, a secret tribunal...<p>Very sketchy. Shades of Lavabit / Snowden
I am going to bet that it was more than just Yahoo. Google was definitely on it too.<p>Yahoo is just being forced to reveal now it due to the Verizon deal.