Yahoo Inc last year 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 people familiar with the matter.
The company complied with a classified U.S. government demand, scanning hundreds of millions of Yahoo Mail accounts at the behest of the National Security Agency or FBI, said three former employees and a fourth person apprised of the events.
Damn.
According to Russell Brandom, this level of access is unprecedented:
It’s the first known instance of a company proactively scanning its own traffic on behalf of a US intelligence agency. The Snowden documents showed the NSA aggressively watching for “selector” terms similar to the string of characters described by Reuters, but those systems typically collected traffic in bulk from undersea data cables or other networks and searched for terms in the resulting database.
Damn. Damn.