[governance] FW: [IP] Forget the NSA. Tech Companies May Be Reading Your Email Too

[michael gurstein]

Some information on another Internet Freedom supporter and significant IG
"stakeholder"...

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-26677607

M 

-----Original Message-----
From: David Farber [mailto:farber at gmail.com] 
Sent: Friday, March 21, 2014 4:34 AM
To: ip
Subject: [IP] Forget the NSA. Tech Companies May Be Reading Your Email Too

Begin forwarded message:

From: Dewayne Hendricks <dewayne at warpspeed.com>
Subject: [Dewayne-Net] Forget the NSA. Tech Companies May Be Reading Your
Email Too
Date: March 21, 2014 at 7:22:35 AM EDT
To: Multiple recipients of Dewayne-Net <dewayne-net at warpspeed.com>
Reply-To: dewayne-net at warpspeed.com

Forget the NSA. Tech Companies May Be Reading Your Email Too By ROBERT
MCMILLAN Mar 21 2014
<http://www.wired.com/wiredenterprise/2014/03/transparency_reports/>

Ever since Edward Snowden revealed the NSA's widespread efforts to eavesdrop
on the web's most popular services - including Google and Microsoft and
Facebook - the leaders of these companies have called on the government to
be more transparent about the data it's lifting wholesale from their private
operations.

But lost in this debate over privacy and national security is another
question: How often are these internet companies snooping on their customers
themselves? You can now read polished and detailed "transparency reports"
that explain how often Google, Facebook, and Microsoft respond to government
requests for user data, but these reports don't say how often the companies
are doing this on their own.

It's a question that came to the fore this week when Microsoft helped U.S.
authorities arrest Alex Kibkalo, a Microsoft employee who allegedly leaked
company secrets to an outside blogger. Microsoft identified Kibkalo after
rummaging through the blogger's private email account, which happened to run
on its own email service, Hotmail.

All of the big web companies have detailed privacy policies, but they
generally give themselves broad rights to access customer email if they're
protecting their own rights, says Nicole Ozer, technology and civil
liberties policy director at the ACLU. "This situation should be a bit of a
wakeup call," she says of the Microsoft incident. "These email services are
not free. We're playing a high price for these email services when we click,
'I agree.'"

How big of a wakeup call? On Thursday, after fielding questions from
reporters about the Kibkalo situation, Microsoft suddenly announced that, in
its bi-annual transparency reports, it will start publishing information
about how often it accesses private customer data in this way.

That's a major policy change. Here's what led to the incident. Upset over a
bad performance review, Kibkalo allegedly leaked an unreleased version of
Microsoft's Windows 8 operating system to a blogger in France. According to
court documents, the August 18, 2012, Windows leak sparked an intense
internal investigation, and the turning point came in September 2012, when
an unnamed source tipped off Steven Sinofsky, the president of Microsoft's
Windows Division at the time.

The source gave Sinofsky a Hotmail address that belonged to the French
blogger (also not named) and said that the blogger was the person who had
received the leaked software. Microsoft had already been interested in the
blogger, but apparently, after the tip-off, the company's security team did
something that raised alarm bells with privacy advocates. Instead of taking
their evidence to law enforcement, they decided to search through the
blogger's private messages themselves. Four days after Sinofsky's tip-off,
Microsoft lawyers "approved content pulls of the blogger's Hotmail account,"
the court filings state.

By trolling through the Hotmail email messages and MSN Messenger instant
message logs, Microsoft learnt how Kibkalo and the blogger pulled off the
leak, says Federal Bureau of Investigation special agent Armando Ramirez
III, in an affidavit filed in connection with the case. Microsoft handed
over the results of its investigation to the FBI in 2013, and Kibkalo was
arrested on Wednesday.

In a statement, Microsoft said that this kind of search happens "only in the
most exceptional circumstances." But the company couldn't say how many of
these searches it has done in the past.

[snip]

Dewayne-Net RSS Feed: <http://dewaynenet.wordpress.com/feed/>






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