Yahoo secret e-mail search tool ordered by feds

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Pigeon
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Yahoo secret e-mail search tool ordered by feds

Post by Pigeon » Wed Oct 05, 2016 12:59 am

Yahoo’s CISO resigned in 2015 over secret e-mail search tool ordered by feds

According to a new report by Reuters citing anonymous former employees, in 2015, Yahoo covertly built a secret “custom software program to search all of its customers' incoming emails for specific information.”

Reuters noted that Yahoo “complied with a classified US government directive, scanning hundreds of millions of Yahoo Mail accounts at the behest of the National Security Agency or FBI, said two former employees and a third person apprised of the events.” It is not clear what data, if any, was handed over.

Presuming that the report is correct, it would represent essentially the digital equivalent of a general warrant—which is forbidden by the Fourth Amendment, as Electronic Frontier Foundation lawyer Andrew Crocker noted on Twitter.

This seems to be the first known case of an American Internet company acting on behalf of the government to search messages in near real time—previous operations captured stored data or intercepted only a handful of target accounts.

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Bad Yahoo

Bang Ding Ow

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