Image copyright Getty Images A report from the news agency Reuters just bringing to light an alleged covert operation by government agencies in the united States to spy on millions of email accounts of users of Yahoo in 2015.
According to him they told the news agency, three former employees of Yahoo and a fourth person involved -on the condition of anonymity – the technology giant built a special software to meet a confidential request from the u.s. government.
Reuters said that the agencies analyzed a string of characters of all emails incoming in the hundreds of millions of accounts.
according To the document, the chief executive of Yahoo, Marissa Mayer made the decision to “obey the order” of the government, which angered some employees and caused the resignation of the director of security of the company, Alex Stamos, who now works for Facebook.
the only reaction that is known of Yahoo on the topic, the company said that “it is a company that respects the law and compliance with laws AndE. UU.“.
The report of Reuters says that those who were behind the alleged spying were either the National Security Agency (NSA) or the BureauFederal of Investigation (FBI) of the U.S.
however, could not specify what their content , or what information it was, or if other companies received such a request.
The u.s. laws allow (since 2008) that the intelligence services can request the data of users that are considered to be useful to “prevent a terrorist attack”, among other reasons.
The companies can challenge this type of requests closed in the Court of Foreign Intelligence Surveillance, as Apple did with the iPhone case used in the attack of San Bernardino in 2015.
But Reuters says that Yahoo decided not to fight because he thought he would lose. And that some of their employees were not in agreement.
Other tech giants were not slow in responding to the Reuters report.
“we Never receive such a request. But if we did, our answer would be simple: ‘no way’,” said a Google spokesman.
Microsoft, for its part, said it “has never participated in the espionage of the traffic of e-mail”.
And Facebook stated that “never received a request like the one described in the report (from Reuters) on the part of any government, and if you do oppose“.
Twitter also spoke out saying that “I never received such a request, and if it did the challenge in a court of law“.
Some security experts have claimed that this is “the first case that comes to light in which a U.s. company that (supposedly) agrees to a request by an agency (government) to analyze all messages received, and not only the stored or of a small number of accounts in real-time.”
The exanalista of intelligence Edward Snowden also responded.
“do you Use Yahoo? Analyzed secretly all what you wrote, and went beyond the demands of the law. the Close your account today“, wrote the exempleado of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) on his Twitter account.
The company has just been acquired by another technology giant, Verizon, for a sum of US$ 4.830 million. The telecom provider did not want to make a statement about it.
The Reuters report came to light two weeks after Yahoo confirmed that it had suffered a hack, massive hit 500 million accounts of its users in 2014.
it Was one of the biggest cyber attacks of its history and the company said that do not believe that was sponsored by “some government”.
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