Anything Yahoo! says rings false after the incident in 2002 when they willingly volunteered identifying data to the Chinese government about a user, which landed him in prison for ten years.<p><a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/01/world/asia/wang-xiaoning-chinese-dissident-in-yahoo-case-freed.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/01/world/asia/wang-xiaoning-c...</a><p><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wang_Xiaoning" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wang_Xiaoning</a>
No, poor article. Yahoo flatly denies involvement in any broad surveillance scheme. Trying to dissect words such as "voluntary" and "requests" and trying to claim they are not actually denying this is absurd.<p>Don't get me wrong. I believe we live in a surveilance state. I believe the US government collects tons and tons of data on every US citizen whether they are under investigation or not in case some day they are needed, but I don't believe the big public companies like Facebook, Google and Yahoo participate in this scheme.<p>The US government has more control over the Internet than to need permission from these companies.
This is junk -- there is absolutely nothing that the companies can say to satisfy the critics. We're not going to get at the truth via conspiracy theories and making connections in the language of the denials. "Non-denial"??? If you were in the CEO's shoes, and knew that the PRISM issue was false, what would you say DIFFERENTLY?<p>What frustrates me is that this comes from the assumption that Yahoo & co. are absolutely without a doubt guilty.
Microsoft is also using "voluntary" in their, surprisingly short, press release: <a href="http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/news/Press/2013/Jun13/06-06statement.aspx" rel="nofollow">http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/news/Press/2013/Jun13/06-06st...</a>
I think everything is to fresh for us to come up with a picture about what is going on. These companies require their users trust to run and they could face action by governments if they have been giving user data over to the US so they are not going to come out and say. “Hell yeah we did" but for all we know they are telling the truth. We need more information. Right now it is a clusterfuck of claims and denials. Someone is lying, place your bets on who...
Anytime an article starts with 'analyzing' like this, it seems to, more often than not, mean that what follows will be a complete guess based on preconceived notions the author has about the subject in question. The author inevitably seems to just read into it however he wants to reinforce whatever his beliefs already are.