Not known what the US Govt. was looking for.
Yahoo! built a custom software for secretly searching the incoming emails of its hundreds of millions of users to comply with a classified US government demand last year, reported Reuters.
Three former employees of Yahoo and a person who has knowledge of the events told Reuters that the company had scanned the incoming emails of its users at the request of a government intelligence agency.
It is not known what information the agency was looking for. The report said that Yahoo was the only email provider asked to scan the emails of its users. Reuters was unable to determine whether Yahoo had handed over any data to the agency.
Yahoo Chief Executive Marissa Mayer’s decision to comply with the agency order led to the resignation of chief information security officer Alex Stamos and another security staff due to ethical concerns.
“Yahoo is a law-abiding company, and complies with the laws of the United States,” said a statement issued by Yahoo in response to Reuters report.
Stamos who is holding a high-level security position at Facebook declined to comment on the report.
“It is deeply disappointing that Yahoo declined to challenge this sweeping surveillance order because customers are counting on technology companies to stand up to novel spying demands in court,” Patrick Toomey, a staff attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union, was quoted as saying by The Washington Post.
The request from the agency came to the legal team of Yahoo in the form of a classified edict. It is unclear which intelligence agency made the request.
While it is not uncommon among US phone and internet companies to hand over bulk customer data to intelligence agencies, some experts opined that an order to collect real-time data was issued for the first time.
“I’ve never seen that, a wiretap in real time on a ‘selector. It would be really difficult for a provider to do that,” Albert Gidari, a lawyer who represented phone and Internet companies on surveillance issues for 20 years, told Reuters.
In the wake of the report, major email providers Google, and Microsoft made it clear that they have never received any such orders from the government.
“We’ve never received such a request, but if we did, our response would be simple: ‘no way’,” Google said in a statement.
“We have never engaged in the secret scanning of email traffic like what has been reported today about Yahoo,” said Microsoft.
In 2007, Yahoo had challenged a demand of the intelligence community to hand over user data in the secretive Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court. Though some details of the case remain undisclosed, the files declassified in 2014 showed the Government pressurized Yahoo by threatening to impose a huge fine of $250,000 per day for obeying its order.
Under US laws, intelligence agencies can demand customer data from the US phone and internet companies to support their foreign intelligence data collection.