People have been rightly asking Yahoo a heap of questions ever since news broke earlier this month that Yahoo scanned customers’ incoming emails for the feds. Now, Yahoo wants the government to speak up about the issue.
Yahoo General Counsel Ron Bell on Wednesday sent a letter [PDF] to the Director of National Intelligence James R. Clapper urging his office to clarify the matter. Bell specifically wants Clapper and his office to confirm whether the order was issued, and, if so, to declassify it and “make a sufficiently detailed public and contextual comment to clarify the alleged facts and circumstances.”
The note follows an Oct. 4 Reuters report claiming that Yahoo, at the request of US intelligence officials, built a custom software program last year to search its customers’ incoming emails for specific information. According to the report, the program was designed to “siphon off messages containing the character string the spies sought and store them for remote retrieval.”
Yahoo initially didn’t confirm or deny the claims, but later pushed back on the Reuters report, calling it “misleading.”
In his letter to the government this week, Yahoo’s Bell suggested that the public doesn’t know the whole story of what went down.
“Yahoo was mentioned specifically in these reports and we find ourselves unable to respond in detail,” he wrote. “US laws significantly constrain — and severely punish — companies’ ability to speak for themselves about national security related orders even in ways that do not compromise U.S. government investigations.”
“We trust that the US government recognizes the importance of clarifying the record in this case,” Bell added.
A spokesman in Clapper’s office said that they have received the letter and “will respond to Yahoo directly.”
The issue reportedly led to the resignation of Yahoo’s former Chief Information Security Officer Alex Stamos, who now works at Facebook. Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer and Bell reportedly left Stamos and the security team in the dark about decision, instead asking the company’s email engineers to write and deploy the program.
The issue over how much tech companies can reveal when it comes to government requests has been in the news since the Snow