Yahoo Scanned Emails of Users Gave it to US Government
Yahoo Scanned Emails of Users Gave it to US Government
As per Reuters and Media reports Yahoo Inc. last year secretly built a custom software program to search all of its customers' incoming emails for specific information provided by U.S. intelligence officials, according to people familiar with the matter.
Yahoo's request came under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, the sources said. The two sources said the request was issued under a provision of the law known as Section 702, which will expire on Dec. 31, 2017, unless lawmakers act to renew it.
As per media reports Yahoo complied with a classified U.S. government demand, scanning hundreds of millions of Yahoo Mail accounts at the behest of the National Security Agency or FBI
The request to search Yahoo Mail accounts came in the form of a classified edict sent to the company's legal team.
This is the first case in USA where 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.
According to two of the former employees, Yahoo Chief Executive Marissa Mayer's decision to obey the directive roiled some senior executives and led to the June 2015 departure of Chief Information Security Officer Alex Stamos, who now holds the top security job at Facebook Inc.
"Yahoo is a law abiding company, and complies with the laws of the United States," the company said in a brief statement in response to Reuters questions about the demand. Yahoo declined any further comment.
Yahoo security team wasn’t aware about this spying
Mayer and Yahoo General Counsel Ron Bell did not involve the company's security team in the process, instead asking Yahoo's email engineers to write a program to siphon off messages containing the character string the spies sought and store them for remote retrieval, according to media reports.
As per reports spying program was discovered by Yahoo's security team in May 2015, within weeks of its installation. The security team initially thought hackers had broken in.
When Stamos found out that Mayer had authorized the program, he resigned as chief information security officer and told his subordinates that he had been left out of a decision that hurt users' security, the sources said. Due to a programming flaw, he told them hackers could have accessed the stored emails.
Google and Microsoft two major U.S. email service providers, separately said on Tuesday that they had not conducted such email searches.
"We've never received such a request, but if we did, our response would be simple: 'No way'," a spokesman for Google said in a statement.
A Microsoft spokesperson said in a statement, "We have never engaged in the secret scanning of email traffic like what has been reported today about Yahoo." The company declined to comment on whether it had received such a request.
It’s sad that Yahoo did not challenge the order of FBI or NSA in the court of law before spying for the government.
Yahoo saved millions of dollars by not contesting in court of law but lost the trust of millions resulting in loss of billions.
Reality views by sm –
Thursday, October 6, 2016
Tags – Yahoo Email Spying US
