US spy agencies receive order to scan customers email accounts:Yahoo agreed
By Prempal Singh
Yahoo cooperated with the US government in scanning hundreds of millions of its consumers’ email accounts on part of the country’s secret agent agencies, it is often reported.
Past Yahoo employees said the internet giant followed purchases of the National Protection Agency and FBI in secretly constructing custom software which allowed it to search the inboxes of its customers, Reuters reported.
Yahoo’s legal team received a classified directive to search Yahoo Mail documents, data files in line with the former employees who said that chief professional Marissa Mayer’s decision to obey it led to the departure of the chief information officer Alex Stamos.
Phone and internet companies have paid data to intelligence agencies before. However, surveillance experts have said that this was the very first time an US internet company had decided to search all coming messages rather than examining stored messages or scanning a tiny number of accounts instantly.
Surveillance legal professional Albert Gidari told Reuters: “I’ve never seen that, a wiretap in real time on a ‘selector, ‘” mentioning to a search term that could pinpoint specific information.
“It would be really difficult for a supplier|a service provider to do that, ” he added.
Reuters could hardly confirm if the demand produced in 2015 by the US government went everywhere else, although experts do point out that other internet companies would have likely been approached.
Intellect agencies can legally ask for customer data from internet companies but this type of surveillance has recently been modestly scaled back following the revelations of snooping by former NSA contractor Edward cullen Snowden.
Yahoo has recently been among companies which have during the past challenged surveillance purchases in the Foreign Intellect Surveillance Court (FISA) but the sources said they did not challenge this because they thought they might lose.
In a declaration to Reuters, Yahoo Incorporation said: “Yahoo is a law abiding company, and complies with the laws and regulations states. ”
Yahoo’s security has been around the headlines after it surfaced in September that the hacker got access to 500 Million customer accounts in 2014.
Apple successfully argued to not create a program to break into an protected iPhone utilized in the 2015 San Bernardino massacre.
Source: ibtimes.co.uk