Yahoo Inc. in 2015 “secretly built a custom software program to search all of its customers’ incoming emails for specific information provided by U.S. intelligence officials,” according to a new Reuters article.
On behalf of the National Security Agency, the company scanned “all arriving messages” of “hundreds of millions of Yahoo Mail accounts” for an unknown “set of characters,” such as “a phrase in an email or an attachment”), according to Reuters.
“The demand to search Yahoo Mail accounts came in the form of a classified directive sent to the company’s legal team,” the Reuters article said, citing three sources who were “familiar with the matter.”
“Experts said it was likely that the NSA or FBI had approached other Internet companies with the same demand, since they evidently did not know what email accounts were being used by the target,” Reuters wrote. It’s not yet known, however, whether any companies — if asked — chose to comply.