Yahoo Secretly Scanned Customer Emails For US Intelligence (reuters.com)

An anonymous reader shares with us an exclusive report from Reuters: 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. The company complied with a classified U.S. government directive, scanning hundreds of millions of Yahoo Mail accounts at the behest of the National Security Agency or FBI, said two former employees and a third person apprised of the events. Some surveillance experts said this represents the first case to surface of a U.S. Internet company agreeing to a spy agency's demand by searching all arriving messages, as opposed to examining stored messages or scanning a small number of accounts in real time. It is not known what information intelligence officials were looking for, only that they wanted Yahoo to search for a set of characters. That could mean a phrase in an email or an attachment, said the sources, who did not want to be identified. Reuters was unable to determine what data Yahoo may have handed over, if any, and if intelligence officials had approached other email providers besides Yahoo with this kind of request. The two former employees say that the decision Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer made to obey the directive resulted in the June 2015 departure of CISO Alex Stamos, who left to work for Facebook. The company said in response to Reuters questions about the demand, "Yahoo is a law abiding company, and complies with the laws of the United States."

Comments

and this is news because?

[Anonymous Coward]

...was there anybody left who didn't know that?

Re: and this is news because?

[Anonymous Coward]

Ahhhhh the old "this isn't news cos it's the ravings of paranoid conspiracy nuts" to "this isn't news cos everyone knows about it" gambit.

Re:and this is news because?

[NatasRevol]

The scale is what wasn't know. this is every email going through there servers. Which is unconstitutional. Oh, and their poor implementation led to back door access as well.

Other questions still to be answered: Did google & microsoft do the same thing? So far, they've said 'no comment'. Which isn't good.

Re:and this is news because?

[NatasRevol]

Also remember, this happened in the timeframe (mid 2015) that Apple was actively fighting the FBI to not build a software hack into iOS. So it can be fought. And won.

Re:and this is news because?

[Killall -9 Bash]

People old enough to remember when AOL was in BIG BIG TROUBLE in the 90's because they couldn't figure out how to install the FBI's carnivore mail server plug-in already knew the government was already actively scanning all of our telecommunications.

Everyone ignores the fact that the FBI has been doing this for the last 20 years, but makes a big commotion about the NSA doing it. Yawn.

Obama

[Anonymous Coward]

Obama had the most transparent administration in history. If you don't agree, you will be subject to double enhanced surveillance.

Re:Obama

[Opportunist]

That's true. No administration before lied so transparently.

Re:Obama

[omnichad]

The transparency is supposed to be on the government side, not the citizen side.

..and the rest

[JustNiz]

I'll bet a whole dollar that Microsoft, Google and Apple have been secretly doing this for ages too.

So Marissa ignored everyone but the NSA

[JoeyRox]

She ignored employees who wanted to continue the company practice of working from home, executives who wanted to take the site in a different direction, and shareholders who wanted her to be competent in her job and actually increase shareholder value in ways other than just ridding her inheritance of the Alibaba position.

Re:GOV'T NEEDS MORE MONEY!!! Pay your fair share!

[Princeofcups]

That's correct. When the baby boomers are retired, retirees outnumbers workers, and two-thirds of the federal budget goes to Social Security and Medicare in 2030, taxes will have to go way up to pay for everything else.

We could always set up public health care like any other reasonable country and take the health care corporations' extortion out of the equation. Nah.

Re:GOV'T NEEDS MORE MONEY!!! Pay your fair share!

[__aaclcg7560]

Because everyone wants the government to swallow 1/8th of the economy, and then make all of our healthcare become just as efficient and safe as the VA Medical system!

You're comparing apples and oranges. Extending Medicare for everyone is the public option. The problem with the VA system is that the country went to war without allocating resources for all the damaged bodies that got chewed up and spit out on the battlefield.

Re:laws huh?

[Ungrounded Lightning]

If they were a law-abiding company, they would DENY requests for warrantless wiretaps.

Indeed. Because, if the law or regulation under which they are demanded is unconstitutional, it was unconstitutional from the moment it was passed. It "never existed":

An unconstitutional act is not a law; it confers no rights; it imposes no duties; it affords no protection; it creates no office; it is in legal contemplation as inoperative as though it had never been passed.
- U.S. Supreme Court: Norton v. Shelby County, 118 U.S. 425 (1886)

If the law is unconstitutional, not only does Yahoo not have any legal requirement to grant the access, but the non-existent legal framework doesn't protect them from any action against them by people who were harmed, or against prosecution for the violation of any laws they broke in the process of "obeying" the non-law.

Re:GOV'T NEEDS MORE MONEY!!! Pay your fair share!

[ganjadude]

is that the problem??? or is the problem the government , as usual

why is it everytime the president doesnt get what he wants, the people in the most need suffer. (with government shutdowns)

I dont want them in charge of whether or not i can go see a doctor