Yahoo is incandescent with rage after proof that it was flogging customer's personal details to the US security services was published online.
Yahoo attempted to block an FOIA Freedom of Information release of its "law enforcement and intelligence price list", but someone provided a copy to Cryptome.org. The 17-page guide 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.
However those who are trying to delete their yahoo accounts are discovering that their personal data will be available to the spooks for another 90 days. The news is a bit of a shocker to government leaders and officials around Africa, Asia and Latin America who use Yahoo, Gmail, and Hotmail. Although they knew that the information was stored in the US they thought that free democracy would stop that sort of snooping.
Yahoo’s lawyers are now dumb 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. It is now being hosted all over the world wide wibble so the cat is long out of the bag, moved on, had several litters of kittens and forgotten about bags altogether.
Yahoo wrote that if its pricing information were disclosed it would be used “to ’shame’ Yahoo! and other companies and to ’shock’ its customers.” In that regard they were right. 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. This is peanuts when you consider how much the spooks would have to pay to wiretap such a person.
