After the loud exposures of Edward Snowden, you will not be surprised at the fact that the governments of large countries closely monitor their citizens, and sometimes also the citizens of other states. Another revelatory article was published by the news agency Reuters. The material sheds light on the fact that Yahoo, whose postal services is still used by millions of people around the world, under pressure from the NSA and the FBI, wrote an algorithm that scans personal correspondence of its users.
The software, which scans the mail correspondence for the given parameters, was written by Yahoo programmers last year. Previously, Yahoo's management had already entered into a confrontation with the NSA, when special services tried to get personal access to their users' correspondence. Then the company opposed this and even introduced end-to-end encryption of e-mail messages. But, as it turned out, the US government found a way to press on the second most popular search giant.
The decision to meet the NSA was taken by the head of the company, Marissa Mayer. At the same time, such a "concession" made the head of the information security of Yahoo Alex Stamos, who immediately left his post and got a job at Facebook. Over the years, he was opposed to anyone getting access to personal information, but the company's management decided the issue in its own way, not taking into account his opinion.
The department of information security decided not even to involve in writing the algorithm. Instead, the creation of the necessary software was handled by programmers who are responsible for the operation of the mail service. They created a convenient application that filtered mail and looked for symbols, words and whole phrases of interest to the special services. After the letters were found, they were uploaded to a separate server, accessed by high-ranking FBI and NSA employees.
Of course, no one will officially confirm this information in the search company and will hardly even comment on it. But Reuters employees are sure that their sources are not mistaken. Yahoo really scans mail correspondence of hundreds of millions of its users and shares the results with special agents. It remains an open question whether other large American corporations such as Google and Apple have gone to meet their government.
The article is based on materials .
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