Yahoo Scanned Customer Emails for US Intelligence Agencies

Yahoo searched hundreds of millions of Yahoo Mail accounts. They did this at the request of the National Security Agency or FBI, according to report published Tuesday.

The Internet company ran the operation last year after receiving a classified demand from intelligence or law enforcement agency. Three former Yahoo employees and one unidentified person familiar with the matter, made that statement.

The four individuals said that the government pressed Yahoo to search for a set of characters. It wasn’t clear what the intelligence officials were looking for but it could mean finding a specific phrase or code in an email or an attachment.

Two of the former employees said that Yahoo Chief Executive Marissa Mayer’s decision to comply with the demand and not involve the company’s security team in the process upset some senior executives. Mayer instead asked Yahoo’s email engineers to develop a special software to fulfill the government’s request.

This has led to the departure of Chief Information Security Officer Alex Stamos in June 2015.

The security team initially thought hackers broke in when they discovered the program in May 2015, a few weeks after it was installed.

Yahoo declined to comment further on the matter but said in a brief statement that the company ”complies with the laws of the United States.” The FBI and the Department of Justice did not immediately respond to requests for comments.

FBI or NSA did not know which email accounts the target used. Experts believe that they had contacted other Internet companies with the same demand.

Aversion to government scrutiny

It is difficult to know which agency is pursuing the information. However the NSA normally makes requests for local surveillance via the FBI.

Google, the world’s largest email service, said Tuesday that it hadn’t received any related request from the US government. If it had, its response would be, “No way,” a spokesman for Google said in a statement.

Microsoft refused to comment on whether they received the same request. In a statement they said that they “have never engaged in the secret scanning of email traffic.”

Twitter, which does not offer email service though let users exchange direct messages, said it has never received such a request as well. If it did, they said they would challenge it in court. Likewise, Facebook said that it would “fight” such a demand should it ever receive one.

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