Making firewood from a fallen tree is never a good idea (unless the action is really recovering wood), but based on recent reports, Yahoo! keeps jumping from one scandal to another. After the "massive sponsored attack" that compromised 500 million accounts, a report now indicates that the company openly collaborated with the U.S. NSA and FBI by developing a custom program to share specific information from the incoming emails of all its customers.
Supporters of the concept "privacy is a myth" now have an enormous revelation to add to their arsenal. Personally, I can swear I can hear the laughter of Richard Stallman and Edward Snowden in the background, but more than "funny", it is something very sad and disappointing. The suspicion of constant collaboration between the major companies in the market and the authorities always existed; however, once reality beats fiction, the main loser is the user. What brings us here today is an article published by Reuters in which it announces that three former Yahoo! employees and a fourth person "with knowledge of the matter" confirmed a collaboration process that began in 2015 between the company and two U.S. agencies, the NSA and the FBI. Two of the interviewees, who did not share their identity for security reasons, also added that the order to deliver information to the agencies was issued by Yahoo!'s CEO, Marissa Mayer.
Although the exact type of information the authorities were looking for is not known precisely, the request speaks of "a package of characters", raising the possibility of a name, a phrase, or an attached file. The most chilling thing is that the customized search extended to "all" Yahoo! email accounts. Of course, the story has several unknowns, but there is a detail that seems to be in line with its main points. In June 2015, Yahoo!'s head of security Alex Stamos left that company to join the ranks of Facebook, after having a clash with the NSA director in February of that year, Admiral Michael Rogers. The fact that Mayer decided to obey the classified order would have caused Stamos's departure, who preferred not to give an interview to Reuters.
What did Yahoo! say? "Yahoo! is a law-abiding company, and complies with the laws of the United States", with no further comment. I think that is enough to conclude that the Reuters article hits the mark, or hits pretty close. Google and Twitter issued statements announcing that they did not receive such an order, and if they did, they would reject it immediately. In the case of Microsoft, its spokesperson said that the company never analyzed email content the way Yahoo! did, but said nothing about requests. Although we can no longer do anything about it, one thing is certain: Yahoo! has run out of credibility.
Reuters
