An exclusive report has reveled that web giant Yahoo Inc last year built a custom software program to search all of its customers’ incoming emails for specific information provided by U.S. intelligence officials.
Yahoo complied with a classified U.S. government directive and scanned hundreds of millions of Yahoo Mail accounts, making it the first case to surface of a U.S. Internet company agreeing to a spy agency’s demand by searching all arriving messages.
At the moment, its unknown what the officials were looking for, only that they wanted Yahoo to search for a set of characters.
The sources revealed that 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.
There is no indication whether the same requests were sent to other email providers.
