Malachi Smith's List: ABC AGENCIES (govt)

• Yahoo Sells All Its Users Private Email Contents to U.S. Agencies for Small Price
• Posted: 2009/12/05
    From: Mathaba
•    

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  Something Mathaba has alleged since 10 years, has now come into the open with the proof of U.S. email companies spying on their users.
• (Mathaba) Yahoo isn’t happy that a detailed menu of the spying services it provides to "law enforcement" and spy agencies has leaked onto the web.
• After earlier reports this week that Yahoo had blocked an FOIA Freedom of Information release of its "law enforcement and intelligence price list", someone helpfully provided a copy of the Yahoo company’s spying guide to the whistleblower web site Cryptome.org.
• The 17-page guide, which Yahoo has tried to suppress via legal letters to the Cryptome.org site run by freedom of information champion John Young, describes Yahoo’s policies on keeping the data of Yahoo Email and Yahoo Groups users, as well as the surveillance and spying capabilities it can give to the U.S. government and its agencies.
• The Yahoo document is a price list for these spying services and has already resulted in many people closing down their accounts in protest.
• However, closing a Yahoo account is not as easy as one might expect: users have reported great difficulty in finding the link to delete their account, and, Yahoo will still keep data for another 90 days.
• If you ask Yahoo! to delete your Yahoo! account, in most cases your account will be deactivated and then deleted from our user registration database in approximately 90 days. This delay is necessary to discourage users from engaging in fraudulent activity.
  
   Please note that any information that we have copied may remain in back-up storage for some period of time after your deletion request. This may be the case even though no information about your account remains in our active user databases.
• Many government leaders and officials around Africa, Asia and Latin America are known by Mathaba to widely be using Yahoo, Gmail, and Hotmail in spite of these Email services being hosted on U.S. computers and the ease that gives the hosts to access their data..
• Mathaba has also long been aware of a great many business people, politicians and even Presidents who use the "free" web-based email services of Yahoo for their Email communications, thus making it easy for the U.S. and its owners to spy on them with negligible cost.
• Cryptome also published lawful data-interception guides for Cox Communications, SBC, Cingular, Nextel, GTE and other telecoms and Internet service providers.
• But of all those companies, it appears to be Yahoo’s lawyers alone who have been stupid enough to try to issue a "DMCA takedown notice" to Cryptome demanding the document be removed.
• Yahoo claims that publication of the document is a copyright violation, and gave Cryptome owner John Young a Thursday deadline for removing the document.
• We estimate Yahoo stand a near-zero chance of success given that Young has thousands of intelligence and other leaked documents on his site and in the past decade has yet to remove a single document upon legal threats, the same 10-year track record held by Mathaba on documents on British Intelligence in spite of having computers seized and properties raided.
• Mathaba is now also hosting the Yahoo leaked document on its servers around the world, and the cat is long out of the bag with the original document having been downloaded and distributed by many already.
• When John Young was asked if there was anything he wouldn't reveal on his site -- a fault in the President's Secret Service detail, for instance -- he said, "Well, I'm actually looking for that information right now", much to the chagrin of those who believe that the U.S. government and its hopelessly corrupt agencies should have a right to supress information from the public.
• The Compliance Guide reveals, as has been known to Mathaba prior to the leak via our own sources, that Yahoo does not retain a copy of e-mails that an account holder sends unless that customer sets up the account to store those e-mails.
• Yahoo also cannot search for or produce deleted e-mails once they’ve been removed from a user’s trash folder.
• The guide also reveals that the company retains the IP addresses from which a user logs in for just one year.
• But the company’s logs of IP addresses used to register new accounts for the first time go back to 1999.
• The contents of accounts on Flickr, the photo sharing and storage site which Yahoo also owns, are purged as soon as a user deactivates the account.
• Chats conducted through the company’s Web Messenger service may be saved on Yahoo’s server if one of the parties in the correspondence set up their account to archive chats. This pertains to the web-based version of the chat service, however.
• Yahoo does not save the content of chats for consumers who use the downloadable Web Messenger client on their computer.
• Instant message logs are retained 45 to 60 days and includes an account holder’s friends list, and the date and times the user communicated with them.
• Young responded to Yahoo’s takedown request with a defiant note:
  
  

  I cannot find at the Copyright Office a grant of copyright for the Yahoo spying document hosted on Cryptome. To assure readers Yahoo’s copyright claim is valid and not another hoary bluff without substantiation so common under DMCA bombast please send a copy of the copyright grant for publication on Cryptome.

   

  Until Yahoo provides proof of copyright, the document will remain available to the public for it provides information that is in the public interest about Yahoo’s contradictory privacy policy and should remain a topic of public debate on ISP unacknowledged spying complicity with officials for lucrative fees.

    

  Note: Yahoo’s exclamation point is surely trademarked so omitted here.
• The company responded that a copyright notice is optional for works created after March 1, 1989 and repeated its demand for removal on Thursday. For now, the document remains on the Cryptome site.
• Threat Level reported Tuesday that muckraker and Indiana University graduate student Christopher Soghoian had asked all agencies within the Department of Justice, under a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request, to provide him with a copy of the pricing list supplied by telecoms and internet service providers for the surveillance services they offer government agencies.
• But before the agencies could provide the data, Verizon and Yahoo intervened and filed an objection on grounds that the information was proprietary and that the companies would be ridiculed and publicly shamed were their surveillance price sheets made public.
• Yahoo wrote in its objection letter that if its pricing information were disclosed to Soghoian, he would use it “to ’shame’ Yahoo! and other companies — and to ’shock’ their customers.”
• “Therefore, release of Yahoo!’s information is reasonably likely to lead to impairment of its reputation for protection of user privacy and security, which is a competitive disadvantage for technology companies,” the company added.
• The price list that Yahoo tried to prevent the government from releasing to Soghoian appears in one small paragraph in the 17-page leaked document.
• According to this list, Yahoo charges the government about $30 to $40 for the contents, including e-mail, of a subscriber’s account. It charges $40 to $80 for the contents of a Yahoo group.
• Facebook, Twitter, MySpace and other U.S. "social networking" sites are at minimum providing information in similar fashion to U.S. agencies, and in some cases  have also received substantial funding by U.S. government related entities as a most efficient and cost-effective means of spying on their users around the world. -- Mathaba
• -- Includes extensive reporting by Wired.com's Kim Zetter

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• On A Parent’s Death And Minding Your Tongue In The U.S.A.
• Posted by thomaspainescorner on December 20, 2009

• By Emily Spence

   

  12/20/09
• I’ll be quite frank. I’m never completely comfortable in discussing certain persons, such as Fidel Castro, on the phone, nor forwarding e-mail content concerning them, such as his Visiones Alternativas – Reflections of Fidel: The moment of truth about the recent Copenhagen events.
• Certainly, it would be so much easier to simply avoid certain topics altogether in communications because there so often are direct or indirect repercussions for involvements in particular matters, as is inferred at Ex-Snoop Confirms Echelon Network – 60 Minutes – CBS News:
• “Everywhere in the world, every day, people’s phone calls, emails and faxes are monitored by Echelon, a secret government surveillance network. No, it’s not fiction straight out of George Orwell’s 1984. It’s reality…”
• We learn more fully about this spy activity from a Transcript of 60 Minutes on Echelon:
• Is it possible for people like you and I, innocent civilians, to be targeted by Echelon?
• “KROFT: …
• “Mr. FROST:
• Not only possible, not only probable, but factual.
• While I was at CSE, a classic example: A lady had been to a school play the night before, and her son was in the school play and she thought he did a–a lousy job. Next morning, she was talking on the telephone to her friend, and she said to her friend something like this, ‘Oh, Danny really bombed last night,’ just like that. The computer spit that conversation out. The analyst that was looking at it was not too sure about what the conversation w–was referring to, so erring on the side of caution, he listed that lady and her phone number in the database as a possible terrorist.
• This is not urban legend you’re talking about. This actually happened?
• “KROFT:
• Factual. Absolutely fact. No legend here.
• “Mr. FROST:
• “KROFT: (Voiceover)
• Back in the 1970s, the NSA was caught red-handed spying on anti-war protesters like Jane Fonda and Dr. Benjamin Spock, and it turns out they had been recording the conversations of civil rights leaders like Martin Luther King in the 1960s. When Congress found out, it drafted strict, new laws prohibiting the NSA from spying on Americans, but today, there’s enough renewed concern about potential abuses that Congress is revisiting the issue.

• “Representative BOB BARR (Republican, Georgia): (From C-SPAN) One such project known as Project Echelon engages in the interception of literally millions of communications involving United States citizens.

   

  “(Footage of Barr; NSA sign; Goss and Kroft)
• But even members of Congress have trouble getting information about Echelon. Last year, the NSA refused to provide internal memoranda on the program to Porter Goss, the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee…”
• Meanwhile, my mother, who died last month, knew of the prospective backlash for stating certain taboo words of the sort that Danny’s relative, who was discussed above, had used. She, also, knew of outcomes for being outspoken or involved in social activism. So she repeatedly asked me, during her last several years, about whether I was making sure that I was being sufficiently self-protective when passing along information on the internet or phone.
• As a former friend of left-leaning individuals like Howard Fast, Andy Goodman and other remarkable martyrs, she knew well about the tragic consequences stemming from one’s bucking the status quo. In addition, she, over the years, became increasingly worried for others’ well-being when they did so because it was her opinion that the U.S.A. was likely turning into a fascist police state.
• She had further reasons to be apprehensive since she well remembered the U.S. Senator Joseph McCarthy and had refused to sign loyalty papers while serving as a junior high school teacher during the Second Red Scare.
• Similarly, she realized that huge amounts of funds were currently being transferred by the federal government to internet service providers and telecommunications companies in exchange for records of their customers, as is discussed in The Secret State’s Surveillance Machine. Further, she was aware that such collected information is stored in perpetuity to build profiles, as can be deduced from the report at FISA – Salon.com:
• “This summer, on a remote stretch of desert in central Utah, the National Security Agency will begin work on a massive, 1 million-square-foot data warehouse. Costing more than $1.5 billion, the highly secret facility is designed to house upward of trillions of intercepted phone calls, e-mail messages, Internet searches and other communications intercepted by the agency as part of its expansive eavesdropping operations. The NSA is also completing work on another data warehouse, this one in San Antonio, Texas, which will be nearly the size of the Alamodome.”
• At the same time, she knew about many of the actions undertaken against peaceful individuals and groups, and remembered the march in NY discussed in my essay “Who’s A Low Level Terrorist? Are You?”:
• “… Indeed the participants of the first antiwar protest against the Vietnam incursion, put together in the mid-1960’s by peaceable Quakers and FOR members after having discussed Gandhi’s Salt March as a model for a nonviolent demonstration, faced government operatives filming them face by face from rooftops as they moved en masse down Broadway to the UN Plaza. (My mother, a pacifist married to a World War II Conscientious Objector, and I, a child at the time of the march, both were in attendance. When the film crew focused on us, she stood tall, faced the agents with their telephoto lens, glared in disdainful defiance and, simultaneously, throw the corner of her coat over my face. Afterwards, she muttered, ‘How dare they try to intimidate us!’)”
• All things considered, she understood perfectly well the reason that members of Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta (Mend) would attack an oil pipeline operated by international oil giants Shell and Chevron. Yet she, also, recognized that, incredibly, someone in the USA does NOT have to carry out any attacks whatsoever to be a target of one.
• As such, she wasn’t surprised one bit that Bette Hoover, the sixty-one year old Clerk (religious leader) of a Quaker Meeting that one of our relatives attends, was in trouble with law enforcement agencies, as THE ENEMY WITHIN - Victims of Md. State Police spying still uneasy explains.
• It’s simply par for the course and, on account, it was equally hard for her to be astonished that members of American Friends Service Committee (AFSC), recipient of the 1947 Nobel Peace award, were harassed, as well as investigated by eleven federal agencies, including the FBI and the CIA.
• In fact, any individuals or groups at all could have a serious problem if they somehow managed to upset members of particular federal or State agencies tasked with maintaining the social structure going forward exactly as planned.
• No one is to disrupt that process and certainly not peace advocates or picayune troublemakers pointing out an inflammatory report discussing the United States’s agenda by a despised rebel named Fidel Castro.
• So it is with reluctance that I passed along the text of his evaluation to friends even though my mother asked me, on her deathbed, to promise that I would continue to work very, very hard to ensure that the Earth in the future would be a fit place for habitation by humans and other forms of life. While envisioning the world carrying onward without her, she was less concerned about her personal existence ending than furtherance of the underlying purposes to which she had dedicated her time while alive.
• Emily Spence is an author living in Massachusetts. She has spent many years involved in human rights, environmental and social services efforts.

• Jeannon Kralj said

   

        December 28, 2009 at 7:18 am    

  If people are really concerned about the impending fascist police state in the USA, they won’t do the estotertic capitalization of the word “earth.’ They won’t be concerned about problems, issues, and “the planet.” They will be concerned about the sovereighty of the USA and the sovereignty of every nation state on earth. They will care about getting back to the U.S. Constitution and an honest money system.

• As for the Quakers, they are responsible, in Texas anyway, of promoting the illegal immigration of people from south of the border into Texas. They are totally supportive of massive illegal immigrants taking over Texas.

   

  Let’s liberate the humans and do everything to promote and support the dignity and value of every individual human being ont his earth and let’s stop calling them “human animals.”

   

  Out congress members, our presidents, our left wing and our right wing activists are all owned by Rockefeller and like internationalist globalists.
• If I am going to rebel and revolt, it will be for my people and my country and my Consitution, not for some collectivist utopian one worlder dream.
• One world government is by its very nature a death and slavery system. It could be nothing else.
• The original Thomas Paine said some good things about freedom, but he really did not believe in the dignity and value of the intividual and he did not value the values of the USA, liberty and just for all under God.

• David said

   

        December 28, 2009 at 8:56 am    

  There is only 3% of Americans worthy to shine the boots of the founding fathers the rest are useless eaters

• Ken D. Webber said

   

        December 28, 2009 at 9:11 am    

  The person who wrote this article is a coward. Afraid? YOU are in the majority and hunkering down like a coward. It is people like you that said nothing when the American Government orchestrated 9/11 and blamed it on Muslims. When they used that as a lever to launch an illegal war of aggression to steal the oil resources of a foreign country you probably waved a tiny flag.
• Now troops are in Afghanistan securing the opium fields so the CIA can import cheap heroin.
• Pull your head out of your ass and be not afraid to speak your mind about the criminals. So what if some ass is listening, their heads roll just as easily when the people move. The American Government declared war upon its own people when it killed close to 3,000 people with their controlled demolition job. Get some backbone and say what needs to be said.

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