Yahoo built a secret software program last year to search all of its customers’ incoming emails at the behest of U.S. intelligence officials, according to a Reuters report.
Citing sources familiar with the matter, Reuters reported that Yahoo has scanned hundreds of millions of email accounts at the direction of the National Security Agency and the FBI.
The news comes at a bad time for Yahoo, which is already dealing with blowback from revelations that a 2014 data breach had exposed the information of 500 million users. Sen. Mark Warner (D-Va.) is calling for an SEC investigation into Yahoo’s handling of the breach.
The company’s decision to scan customer emails for the government led to tensions among senior executives and led to the departure last year of Alex Stamos, the company’s chief information security officer, Reuters reported. Stamos is now the head of information security at Facebook.
According to Reuters, a classified directive, demanding to search Yahoo Mail accounts, was sent to the company’s legal team. While phone and internet companies have handed over data to intelligence agencies before, former government officials told Reuters they’d never seen such a broad directive for real-time data collection – or one that required the creation of a new, dedicated program.
“Yahoo is a law abiding company, and complies with the laws of the United States,” the company said in a statement sent in response to Reuters inquiries about the matter.
