Do ISPs spy on secret services?

After the latest revelation about Yahoo, the question that arises again is: who are all those reading our digital communication?

Secretly, Internet giant Yahoo is believed to have spied on the e-mails of hundreds of millions of users last year. At least this is what former associates of the concern claim.

According to this information, in 2015 Yahoo received a secret order from the US secret service to check in real time all the emails entering the accounts of its customers. According to former associates, the order came either from the NSA service or from the federal police, the FBI.

In the 2015 transparency report, Yahoo does not talk about cooperation with the US secret service. In this report, the concern mentions requests from various institutions in the US, which have ordered the surveillance of emails. According to this, 39.000 email accounts were affected.

"We have known that US corporations forward data since Snowden's revelations. The Yahoo case sounds similar," says political activist and journalist Markus Beckedahl. "Google and all other providers deny that there are such procedures as then, but if this is true, it is debatable"!

"We have never received such requests, and if this had happened, we would not have responded in any way," says a Google spokesperson.

Even Apple told the Washington Post that it has never received requests to develop its own spying program. Meanwhile, Microsoft announced that the concern has never received requests to secretly control email communication.

But how can users protect themselves from this type of surveillance?

Journalist Beckedahl says that such real-time control is not known in Germany.

"There are indeed instances of surveillance, which internet providers prepare for the German Intelligence Service (BND), the so-called SINA-Box which is a computer hardware and software, developed by the Federal Office for Security and Information Technology for the processing of sensitive data materials on unsecured networks. This system aims to ensure communication between enterprises and authorities. Users cannot influence what is stored there and what is not," says Beckedahl.

The new law of the Information Service allows that in the future Internet connections will also be intercepted and the data will be stored for six months instead of three months. A surefire defense against snoopers is still email encryption. Encryption helps prevent the contents of emails from being understood by authorities. /DW/