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Home > Technology

Yahoo secretly scanned customer emails for US intelligence: Sources

>> Reuters
Published: 2016-10-05 12:21:41.0 BdST Updated: 2016-10-05 20:28:15.0 BdST

It is not known what information intelligence officials were looking for, only t
hat they wanted Yahoo to search for a set of characters. Reuters file photo
It is not known what information intelligence officials were looking for, only t
hat they wanted Yahoo to search for a set of characters. Reuters file photo

Yahoo Inc last year secretly built a custom software program to search all of it
s customers' incoming emails for specific information provided by US intelligenc
e officials, according to people familiar with the matter.

The company complied with a classified US government demand, scanning hundreds o

f millions of Yahoo Mail accounts at the behest of the National Security Agency
or FBI, said three former employees and a fourth person apprised of the events.

Some surveillance experts said this represents the first case to surface of a US
Internet company agreeing to an intelligence agency's request by searching all
arriving messages, as opposed to examining stored messages or scanning a small n
umber of accounts in real time.
It is not known what information intelligence officials were looking for, only t
hat they wanted Yahoo to search for a set of characters. That could mean a phras
e in an email or an attachment, said the sources, who did not want to be identif
ied.
Reuters was unable to determine what data Yahoo may have handed over, if any, an
d if intelligence officials had approached other email providers besides Yahoo w
ith this kind of request.
According to two of the 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.
"Yahoo is a law abiding company, and complies with the laws of the United States
," the company said in a brief statement in response to Reuters questions about
the demand. Yahoo declined any further comment.
Through a Facebook spokesperson, Stamos declined a request for an interview.
The NSA referred questions to the Office of the Director of National Intelligenc
e, which declined to comment.
The request to search Yahoo Mail accounts came in the form of a classified edict
sent to the company's legal team, according to the three people familiar with t
he matter.
US phone and Internet companies are known to have handed over bulk customer data
to intelligence agencies. But some former government officials and private surv
eillance experts said they had not previously seen either such a broad demand fo
r real-time Web collection or one that required the creation of a new computer p
rogramme.
"I've never seen that, a wiretap in real time on a 'selector,'" said Albert Gida
ri, a lawyer who represented phone and Internet companies on surveillance issues
for 20 years before moving to Stanford University this year. A selector refers
to a type of search term used to zero in on specific information.
"It would be really difficult for a provider to do that," he added.
Experts said it was likely that the NSA or FBI had approached other Internet com
panies with the same demand, since they evidently did not know what email accoun
ts were being used by the target. The NSA usually makes requests for domestic su
rveillance through the FBI, so it is hard to know which agency is seeking the in
formation.
Alphabet Inc's Google and Microsoft Corp, two major US email service providers,
separately said on Tuesday that they had not conducted such email searches.
"We've never received such a request, but if we did, our response would be simpl
e: 'No way'," a spokesperson for Google said in a statement.
A Microsoft spokesperson said in a statement, "We have never engaged in the secr
et scanning of email traffic like what has been reported today about Yahoo." The

company declined to comment on whether it had received such a request.

Challenging the NSA
Under laws including the 2008 amendments to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillanc
e Act (FISA), intelligence agencies can ask US phone and Internet companies to p
rovide customer data to aid foreign intelligence-gathering efforts for a variety
of reasons, including prevention of terrorist attacks.
Disclosures by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden and others have exposed the
extent of electronic surveillance and led US authorities to modestly scale back
some of the programs, in part to protect privacy rights.
Companies including Yahoo have challenged some classified surveillance before th
e Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, a secret tribunal.
Some FISA experts said Yahoo could have tried to fight last year's demand on at
least two grounds: the breadth of the directive and the necessity of writing a s
pecial program to search all customers' emails in transit.
Apple Inc made a similar argument earlier this year when it refused to create a
special programme to break into an encrypted iPhone used in the 2015 San Bernard
ino massacre. The FBI dropped the case after it unlocked the phone with the help
of a third party, so no precedent was set.
"It is deeply disappointing that Yahoo declined to challenge this sweeping surve
illance order, because customers are counting on technology companies to stand u
p to novel spying demands in court," Patrick Toomey, an attorney with the Americ
an Civil Liberties Union, said in a statement.
Some FISA experts defended Yahoo's decision to comply, saying nothing prohibited
the surveillance court from ordering a search for a specific term instead of a
specific account. So-called "upstream" bulk collection from phone carriers based
on content was found to be legal, they said, and the same logic could apply to
Web companies' mail.
As tech companies become better at encrypting data, they are likely to face more
such requests from spy agencies.
Former NSA General Counsel Stewart Baker said email providers "have the power to
encrypt it all, and with that comes added responsibility to do some of the work
that had been done by the intelligence agencies."
Secret siphoning programme
Mayer and other executives ultimately decided to comply with the directive last
year rather than fight it, in part because they thought they would lose, said th
e people familiar with the matter.
Yahoo in 2007 had fought a FISA demand that it conduct searches on specific emai
l accounts without a court-approved warrant. Details of the case remain sealed,
but a partially redacted published opinion showed Yahoo's challenge was unsucces
sful.
Some Yahoo employees were upset about the decision not to contest the more recen
t edict and thought the company could have prevailed, the sources said.
They were also upset that Mayer and Yahoo General Counsel Ron Bell did not invol
ve the company's security team in the process, instead asking Yahoo's email engi
neers to write a programme to siphon off messages containing the character strin

g the spies sought and store them for remote retrieval, according to the sources
.
The sources said the programme was discovered by Yahoo's security team in May 20
15, within weeks of its installation. The security team initially thought hacker
s had broken in.
When Stamos found out that Mayer had authorised the programme, he resigned as ch
ief information security officer and told his subordinates that he had been left
out of a decision that hurt users' security, the sources said. Due to a program
ming flaw, he told them hackers could have accessed the stored emails.
Stamos's announcement in June 2015 that he had joined Facebook did not mention a
ny problems with Yahoo
In a separate incident, Yahoo last month said "state-sponsored" hackers had gain
ed access to 500 million customer accounts in 2014. The revelations have brought
new scrutiny to Yahoo's security practices as the company tries to complete a d
eal to sell its core business to Verizon Communications Inc for $4.8 billion.

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