Yahoo has been subject to an order by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court to plant software within its systems that would capture emails with certain highlighted words for the purpose of determining threats through email communication. The article discusses Yahoo’s request to the court through the National Director of Intelligence to get all or part of the order declassified for the purpose of determining the content of the order (Kirk, 2016).
Notably, the FISC has the ability to maintain classification of orders against those it issues against and implement changes to systems based on national security concerns. This has kept Yahoo out of the loop regarding the nature of government operations within their email system since 9/11 through to June 2015. The company requests the declassification of this order pursuant to the USA Freedom Act. Nonetheless, the Act is not legally capable of declassifying information from before its enactment in June 2015. This Act goes on to protect the collection of bulk information of US citizens by intelligence agencies as well as engaged further protections for data access.
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Concerns have been present that the presence of government information tracking software within the Yahoo servers could lead to security breaches by hackers. This was evident when the account information of half a billion accounts was leaked to the public. This brings to light the extent of US spying as Yahoo has constantly fought legal battles to have spying orders released. This was the case in 2007 and 2008. The company has once again complied with another order in 2015, bringing ethical concerns among its senior officials.
In conclusion, one reflects to see that despite the security concerns from 9/11, the US government might be overstepping in blindly ordering communication companies to follow unknown orders that present security risks to American people’s data. Such arbitrary controls should stop.
References
Kirk, J. (2016). Yahoo Asks US Government to Declassify Spying Order . Retrieved from Info Risk Today: http://www.inforisktoday.com/yahoo-asks-us-government-to-declassify-spying-order-a-9467 .
