Yahoo selling out to Verizon, the NSA surveillance front-end that spies on everyone
06/11/2017 / By D. Samuelson
The billion or more Yahoo accounts that were hacked in two separate cyber attacks didn’t dissuade Verizon from purchasing the security frazzled company, although the price was shaved by $350 million in Verizon’s final bid of $4.5 billion, reports Foxbusiness.com. Even though Yahoo’s CEO Marissa Mayer didn’t accomplish what she was hired to do, she’ll still walk away with $186 million from the deal. But why did Verizon even purchase a company known for the worst security breaches in U.S. history?
Verizon is ripe with cash, says The Washington Post, so they’re not worried about the money. They did investigate just how many of Yahoo’s active customer base “walked away” after the security breaches. It was negligible. Dealmakers from both companies have figured out complicated liability risk scenarios, if more breaches occur. The real reason Verizon is salivating for Yahoo’s core properties such as email, Yahoo Finance, Flickr, “and a whole lot of news and fantasy sites,” is so Verizon can sell advertising to millions of people who visit online, “and gather up all the behavioral data they generate each month.”
Verizon has a reputation for gathering behavioral data. In fact, they are experts in handing over your private information to government authorities in the deep state. In April 2013, The Guardian reports that the National Security Agency (NSA) asked for a court order from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISA) that required Verizon “to give the NSA information on all telephone calls in its systems, both within the U.S. and between the U.S. and other countries.” For three months, Verizon obediently turned over 24/7 communication metadata to the NSA. But aren’t FISA court orders supposed to target terrorists? Not in this case. Unless speaking on the phone with your friend who had a Verizon account is a terrorist act.
This wasn’t the first time Verizon had turned over metadata. And they’re not alone. After 9/11 and the Patriot Act, President Bush secretly authorized the collection of all sorts of internet, email and telephone records. In 2006 it was finally revealed that tens of millions of Americans who used “AT&T, Verizon and BellSouth” were having communications analyzed by the NSA. Instead of President Obama stopping it, he partook in the crimes of illegal surveillance of American citizens. No one is immune.
In fact, when President Trump accused the Obama administration of wiretapping and monitoring his phones, William Binney says the president wasn’t lying. Binny is the career NSA man who quit his job in protest in 2001, after watching the construction of the illegal surveillance state in America. He has since become an outspoken whistleblower. As reported in the U.S. News and World Report, Binny was very clear in his assessment:
“I think the president is absolutely right. His phone calls, everything he did electronically was being monitored. Everyone’s are being monitored and stored.”
Verizon may have well hit a jackpot with Yahoo’s billion user accounts. But hey, they only want to sell you things and create custom on-line advertising, right? That’s doubtful, but there is hope. Why would the NSA want all the data from every single person in the United States? Perhaps it’s a case of extreme paranoia, since the American people are waking up to their illegal totalitarian data collection systems. Evil always eats its own tail. And that’s good news.
Sources include:
Tagged Under: FISA court, Marissa Mayer, metadata, NSA, Obama spied, surveillance, Trump was wiretapped, William Binney, Yahoo and Verizon
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