Yahoo allowed the U.S. government to search all incoming emails for specific intelligence

Yahoo and the U.S. government are working together.
(Image credit: Getty Images)

Yahoo built a program to search all of its customers' incoming emails for a specific combination of characters at the request of the U.S. government last year, people familiar with the situation revealed to Reuters. The surveillance program scanned emails in real time for the characters that intelligence officials had identified.

The program was written without the involvement of Yahoo's security team, meaning when the siphon was discovered in May 2015, security originally thought it was put in the system by hackers. Former Chief Information Security Officer Alex Stamos subsequently resigned from Yahoo, citing his exclusion from a decision that made users' emails vulnerable. He claimed a programming flaw made stored emails accessible to hackers.

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Jeva Lange

Jeva Lange was the executive editor at TheWeek.com. She formerly served as The Week's deputy editor and culture critic. She is also a contributor to Screen Slate, and her writing has appeared in The New York Daily News, The Awl, Vice, and Gothamist, among other publications. Jeva lives in New York City. Follow her on Twitter.