Yahoo scanned hundreds of millions of its emails accounts for information wanted by U.S. intelligence agencies without customer knowledge, according to a report by Reuters.
The internet company built software into its system last year that would secretly search incoming messages to Yahoo Mail accounts for a particular set of characters. The exact content the security agencies were looking for isn’t known.
The request was sent to Yahoo’s legal team in a classified directive, Reuters reported. The scope of the collection in real time appears to be unprecedented.
Reuters could not verify what, if any, information Yahoo may have provided to either the National Security Agency or the FBI. It is also unclear if a similar request was placed with other internet companies.
“Yahoo is a law abiding company, and complies with the laws of the United States," the company told Reuters when asked for comment.
Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer okayed the move, which caused controversy within the company. She reportedly agreed to the data collection because the company thought it would lose any fight against the surveillance. Yahoo’s security team wasn’t informed of the decision and only discovered that the company was providing the information requested by the security agencies when they discovered what they thought was a hack. The security team made the discovery weeks after the program was installed.
Chief information Security Officer Alex Stamos left in protest in June 2015 and now works for Facebook. He declined to comment.
The NSA also declined to comment to Reuters, referring questions to the Office of the Director of National Intelligence.
Yahoo announced last month over 500 million customer accounts were compromised in 2014 by “state-sponsored” hackers.
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