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Yahoo 'secretly scanned the incoming emails of hundreds of millions of customers for the FBI and NSA'
Daily Mail
Mon October 3, 2016
Yahoo secretly scanned the emails of hundred of millions of customers, it has been revealed.
The company complied with a classified U.S. government directive to search its customers' incoming emails.
It secretly built a custom software program in 2015 to scan hundreds of millions of Yahoo Mail accounts at the behest of the National Security Agency or FBI last year, two former employees and a third person apprised of the events told Reuters.
Yahoo Chief Executive Marissa Mayer's decision to obey the directive sparked a huge rift in the company, roiling some senior executives and leading to the June 2015 departure of Chief Information Security Officer Alex Stamos, who now holds the top security job at Facebook.
It is not known what information intelligence officials were looking for, only that they wanted Yahoo to search for a set of characters - that could mean a phrase in an email or an attachment, said the sources, who did not want to be identified.
Some surveillance experts say this represents the first case to surface of a U.S. Internet company agreeing to a spy agency's demand by searching all incoming messages, as opposed to examining stored messages or scanning a small number of accounts in real time.
Reuters was unable to determine what data Yahoo may have handed over, if any.
However, it raises questions about whether intelligence officials have approached other email providers besides Yahoo with this kind of request.
In a brief statement, Yahoo said: 'Yahoo is a law abiding company, and complies with the laws of the United States.' The company declined to make any further comment.
Through a Facebook spokesman, Stamos declined a request for an interview.
The NSA referred questions to the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, which declined to comment.
The demand to search Yahoo Mail accounts came in the form of a classified directive sent to the company's legal team, according to the three people familiar with the matter.
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.
'I've never seen that, a wiretap in real time on a 'selector',' said Albert Gidari, 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 companies with the same demand, since they evidently did not know what email accounts were being used by the target.
On Twitter, NSA leaker Edward Snowden called it a 'shameful practice' and urged people to delete their Yahoo email accounts.
He also put the pressure on other providers, writing: 'Heads up: Any major email service not clearly, categorically denying this tomorrow -- without careful phrasing -- is as guilty as Yahoo.'
Microsoft and Google have since issued statements reassuring people with accounts on Outlook, Hotmail and Gmail.
'We have never engaged in the secret scanning of email traffic like what has been reported today about Yahoo,' a Microsoft spokesperson said.
A Google spokesperson also said: 'We"ve never received such a request, but if we did, our response would be simple: "No way."'
According to the Intercept, an Apple spokesperson declined to comment, pointing to a public letter from CEO Tim Cook instead.
It stated: 'Finally, I want to be absolutely clear that we have never worked with any government agency from any country to create a backdoor in any of our products or services. We have also never allowed access to our servers. And we never will.'
Twitter's public policy communications chief also told the website: 'We"ve never received a request like this, and were we to receive it we"d challenge it in a court.'
The NSA usually makes requests for domestic surveillance through the FBI, so it is hard to know which agency is seeking the information.
Patrick Toomey, a staff attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union, issued a statement calling the order 'unprecedented and unconstitutional'.
He said: 'The government appears to have compelled Yahoo to conduct precisely the type of general, suspicionless search that the Fourth Amendment was intended to prohibit.
'It is deeply disappointing that Yahoo declined to challenge this sweeping surveillance order, because customers are counting on technology companies to stand up to novel spying demands in court.'
Reuters was unable to confirm whether the 2015 demand went to other companies, or if any complied.
Under laws including the 2008 amendments to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, intelligence agencies can ask U.S. phone and Internet companies to provide 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 U.S. authorities to modestly scale back some of the programs, in part to protect privacy rights.
Companies including Yahoo have challenged some classified surveillance before the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISA), a secret tribunal.
Some FISA experts said Yahoo could have tried to fight last year's directive on at least two grounds: the breadth of the demand and the necessity of writing a special program to search all customers' emails in transit.
Apple Inc made a similar argument earlier this year when it refused to create a special program to break into an encrypted iPhone used in the 2015 San Bernardino massacre.
The FBI dropped the case after it unlocked the phone with the help of a third party, so no precedent was set.
Other 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.'
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 the people familiar with the matter.
Yahoo in 2007 had fought a FISA demand that it conduct searches on specific email accounts without a court-approved warrant.
Details of the case remain sealed, but a partially redacted published opinion showed Yahoo's challenge was unsuccessful.
Some Yahoo employees were upset about the decision not to contest the more recent directive and thought the company could have prevailed, the sources said.
They were also upset that Mayer and Yahoo General Counsel Ron Bell did not involve the company's security team in the process, instead asking Yahoo's email engineers to write a program to siphon off messages containing the character string the spies sought and store them for remote retrieval, according to the sources.
The sources said the program was discovered by Yahoo's security team in May 2015, within weeks of its installation. The security team initially thought hackers had broken in.
When Stamos found out that Mayer had authorized the program, he resigned as chief 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 programming 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 any problems with Yahoo.
In a separate incident, Yahoo last month said 'state-sponsored' hackers had gained 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 deal to sell its core business to Verizon Communications Inc for $4.8 billion.
BIGGEST HACK IN HISTORY AND YAHOO DIDN'T REALIZE: 500MILLION USERS' DETAILS WERE STOLEN IN 2014
The details of 500million Yahoo users were stolen in the biggest hack in history - but the internet giant admitted it happened in 2014 and they didn't notice.
News of the hack led to critics calling on the company's $36million-a-year boss Marissa Mayer to quit after it emerged the business was warned of the hack around two months ago but only confirmed it late in September.
The hackers are believed to have grabbed names, email addresses, phone numbers, birthdays, encrypted passwords and the 'unencrypted' security questions and answers of its 500million users.
And they are reportedly selling the stolen data on the 'dark web' for just 3 bitcoin - around $1,800 - and the 'treasure trove of secrets' could be used to defraud or blackmail money from Yahoo users or even steal their identities.
Yahoo claims that its 500million users' card details and bank account details are safe, adding the hack was 'state-sponsored' but refused to name the country.
Later, it was reported Mayer refused to offer users an automated password reset after the major hack because she feared it would scare away customers.
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