Yahoo Inc's secret scanning of customer emails at the behest of a U.S. spy agency is part of a growing push by officials to loosen constitutional protections Americans have against arbitrary governmental searches, according to legal documents and people briefed on closed court hearings.
The order on Yahoo from the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) last year resulted from the government's drive to change decades of interpretation of the U.S. Constitution's Fourth Amendment right of people to be secure against "unreasonable searches and seizures," intelligence officials and others familiar with the strategy told Reuters.
I remember a presentation by Appelbaum (sth like 3 years ago) that based on some whistle-blower's info that the NSA's favorite mail client to snoop into is yahoo for various reasons....
The real problem is that Yahoo can't go bankrupt any more now, the government has the same problem as with banks lol... fasco-capitalist governments create too much structural accomplices, especially in the financial sector, the security sector (private paramilitary/military entrepreneurs and law enforcement), and the electronic surveillance and manipulation sector (large ITC and digital mass entertainment/press). Sooner or later these companies fail, and you can only make so many people do the Olson dive or concentrate so many people and data in twin towers, so it comes to a situation whereby you can't let these companies go bankrupt and reveal their secrets to potential foreign investors and stuff... it becomes very expensive, to the point of threatening the entire fasco-capitalist super-construct.
China is just waiting for the self-destruction of the Anglo-American fasco-capitalism, they already have a larger military than the US, the US is already seeking war between the EU and Russia to convince the EU of the importance of NATO, just to have the NATO military on their side, but the moment this necessarily fails, the US will have no more protection against Russia, especially not against Russia+China or Russia+India or Russia+Germany or Japan+Korea or any other combination of superpowers. The moment the Russians get cocky against the US, is the moment where you know that Russia or any of its allies has some kind of system in place where they know that they have a hack that prevents the US from firing its missiles. That moment is very close if not already there.
The constitution means nothing to the fasco-capitalists. The problem is that the last ennemy the Anglo-American fasco-capitalists will have left over whom they think they still have control, will be their own population, and they will inevitably turns against them in a last effort to maintain power... like it always goes...
This is empirically not true. China may have more military trained personnel, but the U.S. forces are FAR better armed and equipped than any military in the world. For example, the U.S. currently operates 9 Nimitz class nuclear powered aircraft carriers. 5 of those are post soviet era warships. The new class, the Gerald R. Ford class, is scheduled to join the fleet early next year, bringing the total to 10 active carriers. China by comparison has 1 active carrier, a soviet designed and built carrier christened the Liaoning.
Make no mistake, i don't think anyone with a brain would expect the U.S. to win an invasion of mainland China, but pretty much any nation, including Russia, knows that attacking the U.S. is the equivalent of poking an angry grizzly bear with a sharp stick.
Lol invasion is not the issue. Occupation of the natural resources is what it's all about. Nuclear doesn't amount to nothing. It's all about actual men in the field. If you nuke oil fields, you can't get the oil. If you nuke gold mines, you can't get the gold, etc... Only the Anglo-American world is still interested in military invasion. Russia has actually given that concept up since the 1980's, even before the fall of communism. China has never really done it, not even in Vietnam or Nepal or Taiwan... they have all the time and man power in the world.
I recall leaked documents from years back that were guides for perhaps any government agency describing all the information Microsoft keeps from users of all their different services, for how long, etc, and how to contact them to get any information (no need for a warrant or whatever), including a hotline for if the info is needed immediately. Likely enough Yahoo has some similar arrangement.
The interesting legal bit that I would think up is this: if a private company is willing to give over the information held on their servers in accordance with privacy agreements that third party users previously agreed to, there is no need for a warrant or anything else really, and it's arguably not a violation of constitutional protections. It's like if you agree to allow police into your home and give them permission to search the premise, or put a sign out for some reason granting such general permission. In this case, you happen to be holding onto a bunch of boxes that other people have given to you for storage or some other purposes, after having obtained written permission to do whatever you want with it. This is certainly not a good situation, nor should we be happy about the abuses of such a setup for spying purposes.
That just goes to say, it's better, when feasible, to either control your own content (mail, docs, whatever) on your own property, or entrust to places where you have specific agreements against disclosure, if you really want to retain rights against arbitrary searches and seizures.
NATO already is on their side. It's obligated to be. The importance of NATO is the exact opposite. It's supposed to prevent a war with Russia. If there's a war it means that NATO wasn't a good enough deterrent. If Putin wasn't afraid of NATO he wouldn't be trying his best to stop its expansion. He knows that he can't fight it so he wants to destroy it or at least weaken it. That's also one of the reasons he was so much in favor of Trump. Trump has a sort of a anti-NATO stance and he doesn't understand or care about what's at stake. His victory can strengthen anti-NATO sentiment in Europe. Combined with the poorly thought out and ultimately failed refugee policies in Europe, right-wing parties are gaining momentum, and they don't particularly care about NATO either. And that's bad. Because as bad as the US is with spying now, right-wing politicians tend to be much worse. Make no mistake, under Trump, rights of Americans will deteriorate even further. And if right-wing parties in Europe take over, they'll do the same. And don't even get me started on China and Russia and complete lack of personal privacy in those countries.
Unless the US military is using Yahoo's servers to maintain their missiles, I wouldn't worry about it. Those are closed systems. The US nuclear program for instance is run by 8'' floppy disks.
I would frankly like to separate myself from yahoo, and i mean porting accounts over to a possible Gmail or else kind of client, but i do not know where to even start.
That still does not address my refute of your postulation that the Chinese military is larger than the U.S. army, which it is not and is demonstrably not true even if you combine it with the current russian army. Invasion is no longer feasible in the modern world, the last few wars have proven as such, but destruction of infrastructure is. The current state of the middle east is a template that could be applied to any major power in the world. Destroy enough infrastructure and create enough instability and even Russia or China could turn into a failed state. Imperialism is no longer the goal of military conquest, destabilization is. It's a twisted partnership produced by the current (fucked) military-industrial complex.
So the government (by that I mean intelligence agency of said government) is looking for reasons to violate the 4th amendment? This is dirty stuff, but it's nothing new.
The ironic War on Terror did just that, instill terror into people to give up their freedoms for this illusion of security.