Yahoo Secretly Scanned Customer Emails For U.S. Intelligence
MEP: Yahoo has secretly scanned millions of its users’ email accounts by creating a custom software program to search all of its customers’ incoming emails for specific information provided by U.S. intelligence officials, according to a report.
The report published by Reuters on Tuesday, saying the company secretly built the software program last year complied with a classified US government demand, scanning hundreds of millions of Yahoo Mail accounts at the behest of the National Security Agency or FBI.
“Yahoo is a law abiding company, and complies with the laws of the United States,” the tech firm said in a statement provided to the BBC.
“The request to search Yahoo Mail accounts came in the form of a classified edict sent to the company’s legal team,” several former employees of the Internet company said.
Some surveillance experts said this represents the first case to surface of a U.S. Internet company agreeing to an intelligence agency’s request by searching all arriving messages, as opposed to examining stored messages or scanning a small number of accounts in real time.
The news agency says that the software scanned for a string of characters within all incoming emails, but adds that it was unable to determine what information was handed over or if other internet companies had received a similar demand.
In a separate incident last month, Yahoo said “state-sponsored” hackers had gained access to 500 million customer accounts in 2014.
