Yahoo in legal spat over sensitive document

By Rosalie Marshall on Dec 8, 2009 5:56 AM
Filed under Strategy

Web firm embarrassed by disclosures.

Yahoo is in a legal dispute with web site Cryptome after discovering that private information regarding services provided by Yahoo to law enforcement bodies is being made publically available online.

Represented by US law firm Steptoe & Johnson, Yahoo has written to Cryptome arguing that it has breached copyright laws by hosting the documents.

"We ask that Cryptome immediately remove all such infringing material on its web site. We are sure you appreciate the importance of this matter, as disclosure of this information will assist criminals to structure their communications to evade apprehension," said the letter issued by lawyer Mike Gershberg.

Cryptome, however, has not yet taken the document down, saying that it cannot find a grant of copyright at the US Copyright Office.

The company claims to promote online freedom by publishing documents that big businesses do not intend the public to see.

The PDF document hosted on the site includes the range of services offered by Yahoo's legal compliance team to legal bodies, and the costs associated with providing the information.

Yahoo will hand over information such as the IP address associated with a user login, emails including the IP addresses used to send them from, friends lists in Yahoo Messenger, and the contents of files stored with Yahoo. Costs range from US$20 ($21.81) for an individual's basic subscriber records, to US$80 for groups.

Yahoo would not provide further comment on the legal battle.

However, while Yahoo is fighting to hide some documents from the public, the company has announced plans to give consumers more transparency in the area of online advertising in an effort to build more trust.

Today the company released a privacy tool beta called the Ad Interest Manager where Yahoo users can see a summary of their online activity, and the information used to deliver interest-based advertising.

The tool can be turned off for users who do not want to see interest-based ads.

Yahoo in legal spat over sensitive document

1 comment in this discussion

"Homeland Security's needs trump the 'ad hoc' law enforcement agency requests dealt with in the article. The 'offerings' listed apply ONLY to smaller law enforcement agencies. I think the US ..."

By Graeme Harrison (prof at-symbol post.harvard.edu)

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Comments: 1

Graeme Harrison (prof at-symbol post.harvard.edu)

Dec 8, 2009 10:21 AM

Homeland Security's needs trump the 'ad hoc' law enforcement agency requests dealt with in the article. The 'offerings' listed apply ONLY to smaller law enforcement agencies.

I think the US Department of Homeland Security would be 'data mining' ALL US-based public webmail systems (Hotmail, Yahoo, Google etc). It wouldn't surprise me to learn if the US government pays for some of Google's hard drives, just to ensure that the US is the lowest cost jurisdiction in which to host public email, to 'prevent' companies in other countries from setting up such large-scale mail systems (away from Homeland Security's prying eyes).

HOmeland Security would be using the totality of data from US webmail systems to update its own large matrix of who is contact with whom (every person, US citizen or other) and also looking for keywords and phrases and 'scoring' individuals based on the number of such occurrences. This of course would be to complement their monitoring of US telcos to track SMS trails and 'who calls who' database. The CIA has monitored foreign telcos' microwave links for years, just by setting up a receiver in a building within the 'focus' of a beam linking two centres. That lets any person monitor 20,000 concurrent calls between population centres within a foreign country, without 'breaking in' to anything, but simply monitoring the public airwaves.

With good funding, it isn't so hard to set-up the database technology, hard drives and computers to 'link' the 6 billion people's contacts with the 100 or so people each is in regular contact with. Once you gathered that data, it fits in a very small amount of disk space. See Endnote below as to sample calculations.

And even with unidentifiable pre-paid mobile SIMs (purchasable in US but not Oz), by the time someone makes a few calls using it, you know if they are in a 'cell' of people of interest. Add selective voice-to-text and voice-recognition software, and you know a fair bit even about those who try to remain anonymous. So if you have terrorist suspect, it is very easy to go to first-level contacts, and even contacts of theirs ('two degrees of separation') and check people who may have similar intentions. We all leave a very large digital trail!
Graeme (fmr Harvard consultant to The White House on IT)

Footnote on how to store 6 billion people's contacts list on a single hard drive:
For each person's record, you might store one byte for country number (there are fewer than 256 countries in the world); four byte 'long integer' for citizen number within country (no country has more than four billion citizens); Full name (say 21 bytes); Mobile number (10 bytes); Email address (say 25 bytes); DOB if known (4 bytes); the list of IDs of the top-75 other people that person is in contact with (75x5bytes). For 4 billion records, all that info can be stored in less than 1.5TB - it could fit on an off-the-shelf USB-connected US$200 PC hard drive. Now, given you know very little about those living in rural China and rural India, and under 14yo's have few electronic contacts, the matrix will actually be very 'sparse', so it would compress ('zip') to well under 500GB. That means you could carry this knowledge of who is in contact with whom (on a worldwide basis) on a disk drive that would comfortably fit in your shirt pocket. To use it quickly, you'd need indexes to be built, but the raw data could be quite small in size. The point of the above is that, if you can collect the data, storing the links is easily within the bounds of current technology. Now of course, Homeland Security would have thousands of terabyte drives, and would not be seeking to squeeze all its key data onto just one such device!