According to Reuters the company would have acted on behalf of the US intelligence, possible contacts also with other e-mail services
According to the press agency Reuters Yahoo last year spied on hundreds of millions of its accounts on behalf of the US intelligence. The news is an important one and it won’t please Yahoo! Mail users, already annoyed many times by the rumors of hackers able to elude the security of the service.
What was Yahoo looking for?
People close to the story specified that Yahoo! followed a government directive under the request of the National Security Agency or the FBI. It is still unclear what the intelligence officials’ actual search was. It would seem that the software has spied on hundreds of accounts to find some words, useful to reconstruct a code phrase, inside emails or attachments. Non si hanno notizie sui risultati della ricerca, e quali dati siano stati effettivamente trattenuti. Non è chiaro nemmeno se i servizi segreti abbiano contattato anche altri provider oltre Yahoo!.
Decisione critica
Yahoo! Mail, mail spiate
Stando a quanto riporta Reuters, due ex dipendenti dell’azienda hanno dichiarato che la decisione di sottostare alle richieste dell’intelligence, presa dall’amministratore delegato, Marissa Mayer ha creato una vera e propria rivoluzione all’interno dell’azienda. Non tutti erano d’accordo con la scelta. Tra questi anche Alex Stamos, all’epoca responsabile della sicurezza in Yahoo! e ora al servizio di Facebook. In a note in answer to the Reuters news agency, the company declared to have respected the laws of the United States, while Stamos didn’t want to express himself on the matter.
Google and Microsoft?
According to the Reuters article, it’s probable that to enlarge the target of the search the secret services have requested the visualization of accounts of other providers too. On this subject both Google and Microsoft have answered. The first ones have denied to have ever received such a request, and they have declared that in any case the answer would have been an absolute no. Negative also the answer of Microsoft that declares to have never carried out secret scans on behalf of the government.