Civil and human rights groups issued denunciations and some cybersecurity experts urged their clients to stop using the popular Yahoo Mail service after a news agency reported Tuesday that the internet service provider had secretly scanned hundreds of millions of clients’ emails at the behest of U.S. intelligence agencies.
The report by the Reuters news service said Yahoo complied with a classified U.S. government directive last year that demanded that it scan all incoming emails of its users for certain phrases. The report said Yahoo’s engineers wrote a program that complied with the blanket spying request.
“Enough is enough. It’s time to close your Yahoo account,” Graham Cluley, a British cybersecurity expert, tweeted following the report.
The report was the second piece of challenging news in recent days for the Sunnyvale, California, company as it attempts to finalize a $4.8 billion sale of its core business to Verizon. On Sept. 22, Yahoo acknowledged that the passwords of 500 million Yahoo account holders had been stolen.
Yahoo did not immediately respond to the Reuters report. A chief rival for global email, Alphabet Inc.’s Google, said it had not been approached by the intelligence agencies.
“We’ve never received such a request, but if we did, our response would be simple: ‘No way,’ ” Aaron Stein, a Google spokesman, said in a statement posted online.
Another large tech firm, Twitter, also weighed in, saying it would reject a similar directive.
“We’ve never received a request like this, and were we to receive it, we’d challenge it in a court,” Twitter spokesman Nu Wexler said. “Separately, while federal law prohibits companies from being able to share information about certain types of national security related requests, we are currently suing the Justice Department for the ability to disclose more information about government requests.”
Civil and human rights groups directed their criticism not at Yahoo but at the U.S. government, saying its request had undermined trust in the internet.
“The government appears to have compelled Yahoo to conduct precisely the type of general, suspicionless search that the Fourth Amendment was intended to prohibit,” said Patrick Toomey, an attorney for the American Civil Liberties Union. “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.”
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SOURCE: McClatchy DC
Tim Johnson
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