Big Brother's Helping Hands

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.

  Reuters

Yahoo and who else?

Experts said it was likely that the NSA or FBI had approached other Internet companies with the same demand, since they evidently did not know what email accounts were being used by the target.

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Alphabet Inc's Google and Microsoft Corp, two major U.S. email service providers, did not respond to requests for comment.

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In a separate incident, Yahoo last month said "state-sponsored" hackers had gained access to 500 million customer accounts in 2014.

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According to the two 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.

Like Facebook doesn't help the spooks? He was more likely just pissed that Yahoo didn't inform him they were having this program built. Which, when you think about it, was bad, him being the security officer.

Through a Facebook spokesman, Stamos declined a request for an interview.

I bet.

The NSA referred questions to the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, which declined to comment.

But of course.

U.S. phone and Internet companies are known to have handed over bulk customer data to intelligence agencies. But some former government officials and private surveillance experts said they had not previously seen either such a broad directive for real-time Web collection or one that required the creation of a new computer program.

UPDATE: