Civil Rights and Social Justice
Rep. Lieu questions government agencies at the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee’s IT Subcommittee hearing on how to better protect our electronic voting machines and democratic process.
Rep. Lieu:
My understanding from the main thrust of your testimony is that because we’ve got 50 states, thousands of different jurisdictions, the American election system is complex, diverse, and robust because it is really hard to hack all of that.
Letter: “it is our responsibility to have accurate information.”
On Friday, dozens of members of Congress wrote an open letter to the attorney general and the director of National Intelligence. In it, they requested a briefing regarding the recent Reuters story that Yahoo complied with a secret court order to search all of its customers’ e-mail.
They wrote:
A bipartisan group of 48 U.S. lawmakers wants two government agencies to explain a surveillance program in which Yahoo reportedly scanned all the messages of its email users on behalf of the FBI.
After recent news reports of the email scanning program, the Department of Justice and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence need to brief Congress about the efforts, the lawmakers said in a letter to the two agencies.
WASHINGTON, Oct 14 (Reuters) - A bipartisan group of 48 lawmakers in the U.S. House of Representatives on Friday asked the Obama administration to brief Congress "as soon as possible" about a 2015 Yahoo program to scan all of its users' incoming email at the behest of the government.
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
ICYMI: CONGRESSMAN LIEU ON CYBERSECURITY AND ENSURING THE INTEGRITY OF THE BALLOT BOX
Online, Rep. Lieu questions government agencies at the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee’s IT Subcommittee hearing
on how to better protect our electronic voting machines and democratic process.
Not long after Edward Snowden's revelations of massive government surveillance of the American public, Yahoo was one of the eight tech giants that called for strong reforms that would protect their customers.
And back in 2007, Yahoo went to court to challenge a government surveillance program in order to protect its users' privacy.
Well, that was then.
According to a new report by Reuters citing anonymous former employees, in 2015, Yahoo covertly built a secret “custom software program to search all of its customers' incoming emails for specific information.”
Demonstrating that allegedly allowing the US government to scan hundreds of millions of your users' emails may not just be abetting a violation of the 4th Amendment but also a huge financial liability, we learn via the New York Post that Verizon is seeking a $1-billion discount on the purchase price of Yahoo following
Collette Cobb holds a flag during a news conference outside of the White House following a meeting that members of DC Marijuana Justice had with White House officials in April. (Matt McClain/The Washington Post)