Miscellaneous News

plawolf

Lieutenant General
It's just like the French Mistral deal with Russia. It was a domestic US law not and international one used to fine BNP Paribas a billion dollars to get the French to kill the deal. The US government was behind that maneuvering. Civilians who don't care about geopolitics are going to be driving this one. No country is going to be investing in the US for fear their assets will be seized and taken away from them.

I wouldn't go that far, the US is too big and too important a market for any nation to ignore.

Sovereign wealth funds of some Gulf states and others would most certainly be thinking long and hard about investing in the US, but for everyone else, at the end of the day, unless the US gets into a habit of abusing this new law to seize foreign assets on a whim, most investment managers will decide that the risks from this are too low to stop them from investing in the Us full stop.

It may well push some marginal investments from worthwhile to too risky, but for the most part will not have that big of an impact, provided the US is sensible in the application of this law.

The far bigger threat to US interests from this is the possible flood of lawsuits against the US government that this law would theoretically allow.

Think drone strike victims' families, Syrian refugees who could quite legitimately argue that US financial, technical, material and direct battlefield tactical support of some 'moderate' rebels amounts to state sponcered terrorism when it comes to cases like those prisonior executing, human heart and liver eating 'moderates'.

Same deal with Libyans suing the British and French over their support of 'moderate' rebel groups who then became ISIS, or Palestinians suing Israel etc.

Even for apparent 'favourable' cases, like Ukrainians suing Russia over its backing of the rebel movement, that could also create massive headaches for the US government, because any ruling against Russia would be seen by the Russians as an American move against them, even if the US government of the time was keen to improve relations and/or desperately needed Russian help and co-operation to achieve some important goal of great importance to US interests.

In effect, the US could end up underwriting, and effectively assuming much of the fallout from actions of foreign states, interest groups or even individuals who's aims and interests may not be at all aligned with that of the US government's.

That could impose massive costs on the US, as well as potentially allow those other parties to hijack US foreign policy.
 
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solarz

Brigadier
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Yahoo Inc. last year secretly built a custom software program to search all of its customers’ incoming e-mails for specific information provided by U.S. intelligence officials, according to people familiar with the matter.

The company complied with a classified U.S. government directive, scanning hundreds of millions of Yahoo Mail accounts at the behest of the National Security Agency or FBI, said two former employees and a third person apprised of the events.

Some surveillance experts said this represents the first case to surface of a U.S. Internet company agreeing to a spy agency’s demand by searching all arriving messages, as opposed to examining stored messages or scanning a small number of accounts in real time.

It is not known what information intelligence officials were looking for, only that they wanted Yahoo to search for a set of characters. That could mean a phrase in an e-mail or an attachment, said the sources, who did not want to be identified.

Reuters was unable to determine what data Yahoo may have handed over, if any, and if intelligence officials had approached other email providers besides Yahoo with this kind of request.

According to the two former employees, Yahoo Chief Executive Marissa Mayer’s decision to obey the directive roiled some senior executives and led to the June 2015 departure of Chief Information Security Officer Alex Stamos, who now holds the top security job at Facebook Inc.”Yahoo is a law abiding company, and complies with the laws of the United States,” the company said in a brief statement in response to Reuters questions about the demand. Yahoo declined any further comment.

Through a Facebook spokesman, Stamos declined a request for an interview.

The NSA referred questions to the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, which declined to comment.

The demand to search Yahoo Mail accounts came in the form of a classified directive sent to the company’s legal team, according to the three people familiar with the matter.

U.S. phone and Internet companies are known to have handed over bulk customer data to intelligence agencies. But some former government officials and private surveillance experts said they had not previously seen either such a broad directive for real-time Web collection or one that required the creation of a new computer program.

“I’ve never seen that, a wiretap in real time on a ‘selector,’” said Albert Gidari, a lawyer who represented phone and Internet companies on surveillance issues for 20 years before moving to Stanford University this year. A selector refers to a type of search term used to zero in on specific information.

“It would be really difficult for a provider to do that,” he added.

Experts said it was likely that the NSA or FBI had approached other Internet companies with the same demand, since they evidently did not know what email accounts were being used by the target. The NSA usually makes requests for domestic surveillance through the FBI, so it is hard to know which agency is seeking the information.

Reuters was unable to confirm whether the 2015 demand went to other companies, or if any complied.

Alphabet Inc.’s Google and Microsoft Corp., two major U.S. e-mail service providers, did not respond to requests for comment.

CHALLENGING THE NSA

Under laws including the 2008 amendments to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, intelligence agencies can ask U.S. phone and Internet companies to provide customer data to aid foreign intelligence-gathering efforts for a variety of reasons, including prevention of terrorist attacks.

Disclosures by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden and others have exposed the extent of electronic surveillance and led U.S. authorities to modestly scale back some of the programs, in part to protect privacy rights.

Companies including Yahoo have challenged some classified surveillance before the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, a secret tribunal.

Some FISA experts said Yahoo could have tried to fight last year’s directive on at least two grounds: the breadth of the demand and the necessity of writing a special program to search all customers’ e-mails in transit.

Apple Inc. made a similar argument earlier this year when it refused to create a special program to break into an encrypted iPhone used in the 2015 San Bernardino massacre. The FBI dropped the case after it unlocked the phone with the help of a third party, so no precedent was set.

Other FISA experts defended Yahoo’s decision to comply, saying nothing prohibited the surveillance court from ordering a search for a specific term instead of a specific account. So-called “upstream” bulk collection from phone carriers based on content was found to be legal, they said, and the same logic could apply to Web companies’ mail.

As tech companies become better at encrypting data, they are likely to face more such requests from spy agencies.

Former NSA General Counsel Stewart Baker said e-mail providers “have the power to encrypt it all, and with that comes added responsibility to do some of the work that had been done by the intelligence agencies.”

SECRET SIPHONING PROGRAMME

Mayer and other executives ultimately decided to comply with the directive last year rather than fight it, in part because they thought they would lose, said the people familiar with the matter.

Yahoo in 2007 had fought a FISA demand that it conduct searches on specific e-mail accounts without a court-approved warrant. Details of the case remain sealed, but a partially redacted published opinion showed Yahoo’s challenge was unsuccessful.

Some Yahoo employees were upset about the decision not to contest the more recent directive and thought the company could have prevailed, the sources said.

They were also upset that Mayer and Yahoo General Counsel Ron Bell did not involve the company’s security team in the process, instead asking Yahoo’s e-mail engineers to write a program to siphon off messages containing the character string the spies sought and store them for remote retrieval, according to the sources.

The sources said the program was discovered by Yahoo’s security team in May 2015, within weeks of its installation. The security team initially thought hackers had broken in.

When Stamos found out that Mayer had authorized the program, he resigned as chief information security officer and told his subordinates that he had been left out of a decision that hurt users’ security, the sources said. Due to a programming flaw, he told them hackers could have accessed the stored e-mails.

Stamos’s announcement in June 2015 that he had joined Facebook did not mention any problems with Yahoo.

In a separate incident, Yahoo last month said “state-sponsored” hackers had gained access to 500 million customer accounts in 2014. The revelations have brought new scrutiny to Yahoo’s security practices as the company tries to complete a deal to sell its core business to Verizon Communications Inc. for $4.8-billion.

The days of the wild internet are gone. Everything you use now is monitored. It's 1984 and it's all good.
 

kwaigonegin

Colonel
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The days of the wild internet are gone. Everything you use now is monitored. It's 1984 and it's all good.

I'm more surprised that the CEO went behind the back of the CIO on things directly related to the company's I.T. No wonder he quit. I never trusted this Marrisa anyway from the stories and news you read about her. There is zero trust.

As to the NSA/CIA retriving emails of folks including all US citizens, that is the biggest non-secret secret. Why do you think more sophisticated and organized crime and terror orgs use old fashion ciphers etc?
 

solarz

Brigadier
I'm more surprised that the CEO went behind the back of the CIO on things directly related to the company's I.T. No wonder he quit. I never trusted this Marrisa anyway from the stories and news you read about her. There is zero trust.

As to the NSA/CIA retriving emails of folks including all US citizens, that is the biggest non-secret secret. Why do you think more sophisticated and organized crime and terror orgs use old fashion ciphers etc?

I'm guessing she knew the CIO would never agree to it. Tech guys tend to have these pesky principles. ;)

As for the story, it's not so much that it's a "secret", as Yahoo effectively defeated their own security measures and allowed foreign hackers to steal their data.

This is exactly the kind of thing Snowden was warning against: by trying to spy on their own citizens, the NSA has also made it easier for foreign spies to gather intelligence on the US.
 

Jeff Head

General
Registered Member
Look, allowing these families to take their cases to court is one thing...and I understand why the bill me forwrd and why it passed so overwhelmingly against this feckless administration.

But having any family actually succeed in winning such a law sute is another thing entirely.

It would have to be a case where they actually tid a Saudi to the attack in some way that is direct and unassailable and very clear.

if they could, and if a Saudi government official was shown to be involved, I imagine the Saudis would make an example of such an indiidual.

Otherwise...these people are going to end up spending a lot of monry on lawyers and getting jotting for it, other than perhaps the satisfaction that they tried to do soemthing.

It will be very difficult at this point, the point of almost impossibility, to prove it.

Perhaps there is something in the files that they may be able to get a hold of to help...but enve then...very, very improbable.

OTHO, if they could make such abslute ties and find such absolute proof, then they shoukld have the opportunity to go fr it. That's a good thing.

But the burden of proof is going t be high and difficult,,,w chih is why I d nt have a real problem with it,.

Any back lash against the US would have to have the same high burden and it is simply not likely.
 
Look, allowing these families to take their cases to court is one thing...and I understand why the bill me forwrd and why it passed so overwhelmingly against this feckless administration.

But having any family actually succeed in winning such a law sute is another thing entirely.

It would have to be a case where they actually tid a Saudi to the attack in some way that is direct and unassailable and very clear.

if they could, and if a Saudi government official was shown to be involved, I imagine the Saudis would make an example of such an indiidual.

Otherwise...these people are going to end up spending a lot of monry on lawyers and getting jotting for it, other than perhaps the satisfaction that they tried to do soemthing.

It will be very difficult at this point, the point of almost impossibility, to prove it.

Perhaps there is something in the files that they may be able to get a hold of to help...but enve then...very, very improbable.

OTHO, if they could make such abslute ties and find such absolute proof, then they shoukld have the opportunity to go fr it. That's a good thing.

But the burden of proof is going t be high and difficult,,,w chih is why I d nt have a real problem with it,.

Any back lash against the US would have to have the same high burden and it is simply not likely.

Ultimately the power rests with the US government to help or not help the families prove or win their case, which means it can be additional leverage for the US government when dealing with the Saudis.
 

Equation

Lieutenant General
Ultimately the power rests with the US government to help or not help the families prove or win their case, which means it can be additional leverage for the US government when dealing with the Saudis.

Yeah, but either way it's going to cost money for the tax payers to pay for the lawyers fees and services. How much money means how much the US government can help these families will all depend? We have to wait and see.
 
I'm surprised no one brought this up, might get uglier.

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WORLD NEWS | Wed Oct 12, 2016 | 6:14am EDT
China rebuffs South Korea over sinking of coast guard vessel

China said on Wednesday South Korea's coast guard should not have been operating in part of the sea where one of Seoul's patrol boats sank last week during an operation to crack down on a group of Chinese fishing boats.

South Korean coast guard vessels regularly chase Chinese boats for fishing illegally off its coast, at times resulting in violent confrontations.

The disputes are an irritant in relations between China and U.S. ally South Korea, even as their economic relations grow close and they share concerns about North Korea's nuclear weapons and missile programs.

South Korea's Ministry of Public Safety and Security, which oversees the coast guard, said one of its patrol boats sank last week during an anti-illegal fishing operation off the Korean peninsula's west coast.

Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Geng Shuang said where the incident happened was an area where, according to a bilateral fishing agreement, South Korean vessels should not be carrying out law enforcement operations.

China had lodged a protest with South Korea and demanded the country "calmly and rationally" handle the incident, Geng told a daily news briefing.

South Korea's coast guard said on Tuesday that its officers would be authorized to use firearms, including handguns and onboard cannon, against illegal Chinese fishing vessels if deemed threatening.

Chinese spokesman Geng said such actions would not resolve anything and could only worsen the problem.

"China again demands South Korea strengthen their controls on law enforcement personnel."

South Korea's coast guard captured two Chinese fishing boats illegally operating off the west coast early on Wednesday and brought them to a South Korean port, an Incheon Coast Guard official told Reuters by telephone.

Three Chinese fishermen were killed last month in a fire that broke out on their boat when a South Korean coast guard crew trying to apprehend them for illegal fishing threw flash grenades into a room in which they were hiding, according to a South Korean official.

(Reporting by Ben Blanchard; Additional reporting by Ju-min Park in Seoul; Editing by Nick Macfie)
 
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