A new storm hits Yahoo. Right in the middle of the most serious corporate crisis in its history and the most delicate being sold to Verizon and a few weeks after the case of the half a billion accounts hacked by hackers, the group faces another scandal. According to Reuters, Yahoo secretly allowed US intelligence services, from the FBI to the NSA, to spy on hundreds of millions of emails from its users.
Last year Yahoo would have come up with a software to search among all e-mail messages incoming of its clients those suspicious on the basis of the criteria provided by US secret service officials (which they searched for emails containing specific phrases). This way the group would have obeyed a federal directive, putting hundreds of millions of accounts at the disposal of security agencies. It would be the first time that a web giant agrees without question to submit to a similar surveillance system.
According to the two former employees cited by Reuters as sources, CEO Marissa Meyer's decision to obey the federal directive prompted the Chief Information Security Officer Alex Stamos resigned in June 2015, then moved to Facebook. It would have been Stamos himself who discovered the spy program inside the company's servers: at first he destroyed it, thinking it was the work of hackers.
Meanwhile Edward Snowden, the computer scientist who with his revelations on US surveillance started Datagate, immediately invited all Yahoo customers via Twitter to close their accounts: “Do you use Yahoo? They secretly scan everything you write far beyond what the law requires. Close your account today."
Use @Yahoo? They secretly scanned everything you ever wrote, far beyond what law requires. Close your account today. https://t.co/dJrJUyyxk6
- Edward Snowden (@Snowden) October 4, 2016
“Yahoo is a company governed by and abides by the laws of the United States,” the Sunnyvale group wrote in a brief official statement in response to the news released by Reuters
