This story's been blowing up my Twitter feed today. Definitely of interest to the General Forum.

Exclusive: Yahoo secretly scanned customer emails for U.S. intelligence - sources

So what? It's legal

Yahoo is not alone. I suspect all major email providers have scanned emails for the intell community. It is legal, but there is a difference between scanning all email and scanning the email of particular persons of interest.

There i also often a huge difference between "what is legal" and "what is right".

How is that news to anyone ?.
I just started getting a bunch of phony invoices on my yahoo account - maybe the NSA has finally figured out how to bypass congress for funding ....

If you are content (as millions of people are ...) to send your "tweets" and your "text messages" and your "Facebook posts" and your "e-mails" in the clear, then far more than "US Intelligence Agencies" are reading your every word.

For instance, one day my wife and I agreed to send a few e-mails talking about the impending death of our "Uncle Filbert." Within 48 hours, we were getting junk e-mails about death insurance, funeral homes, cemetery plans, and stress-management courses for survivors.

The real story has not yet broken: that foreign terrorists, on their own soil (where our "cloud data centers" are now very-conveniently located, due to cheap labor and electric power ...), now know: where you are, where your children are, your every daily habit, whether or not your neighbors are at home, and exactly where in your house her bedroom is located ... all due to the little GPS-enabled phone in your pocket, maybe that "app" that you downloaded which has permissions you never checked, and simple "data mining." Thanks to the fact that your daughter's friends "tagged" her picture (thereby feeding a facial-recognition engine), they also know what she looks like and can automatically identify her as she walks by any one of now-thousands of cameras that fill our city streets.

Perversely, "in the name of counter-terrorism," we have now both created and widely-deployed the technology that one day will be used to make attacks ... attacks directly upon individuals ... and, thanks to our hubris and to our disregard for people whom we think that we can confine to a lesser social strata than ourselves, we have handed both this technology and this data into the hands of enemies that we have been warring with for over fifteen years.

This statement, outrageous though it might seem, is technically quite true. We have been fools beyond description.

Did they find any, or were they only looking at Trumplings?

More from the person who broke the story:

http://www.wbur.org/hereandnow/2016/...d-users-emails

Google have just said that "no way" would they do this. But I understand that if the NSA ask an American company for information, the company has to cough up. So who are they fooling?

"Yahoo secretly scanned customer emails for U.S. intelligence"

Sadly they didn't find much intelligence in their customers.

But way to keep those secrets secure! Hate to think how well they'd safeguard credit card information.

That's a little harsh - I find yahoo quite handy for subscribing to things like this board. Enables me to narrow down where my id may have been leaked from.