Yahoo Surveillance Report Rekindles FISA Fight

Privacy advocates are hitting hard at the government process that likely led Yahoo Inc. to create software and scan all of its users’ incoming e-mails on behalf of US intelligence agencies. The reaction was immediate to a report that said a classified government order directed the Internet company to scan hundreds of millions of Yahoo Mail accounts searching for a specific “set of characters.” Advocates agree that many questions remain unanswered about the case.

Still, the Washington (DC) backlash coalesces around a foreign surveillance law, set to expire at the end of 2017, that privacy-minded lawmakers want to change. Privacy advocates are zeroing in on a controversial provision of the 2008 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Amendments Act as the likely avenue that brought forth the government order. Provisions in the law allow US intelligence officials to request consumer data from phone and Internet firms to spy on targets believed to be outside the US. Even before the Yahoo report, lawmakers and civil liberties advocates were pushing for changes to that provision, Section 702. They say US intelligence agencies abuse it, conducting mass surveillance on Americans that shouldn’t be targeted in the first place. In the wake of the Yahoo news, these advocates say the administration now has a duty at least to tell people if it is conducting mass searches.