So many in the US are still reeling from the recent announcement of a massive breach of Yahoo accounts, as well as the news that the NSA may have worked with Yahoo to check out our private content on the Internet giant…and here’s more fuel for the fire: a group of 48 congress members has requested in-depth information on the cooperative effort between Yahoo and NSA.
On Friday, the bipartisan group appealed to the Obama administration for details about the governmental request in 2015 for information from Yahoo users’ accounts.
“As legislators, it is our responsibility to have accurate information about the intelligence activities conducted by the federal government,” according to the request in letter form, organized by Republican Representative Justin Amash of Michigan and Democratic Representative Ted Lieu of California that is addressed to Attorney General Loretta Lynch and Director of National Intelligence James Clapper.
According to a Reuters story published on Oct. 4, Yahoo apparently complied with a “classified” governmental request – either from the NSA or the FBI – to scan the private emails of millions of its users.
Public outcry has been loud, but perhaps not as loud as one would imagine. Now, however, the group of Representatives have determined that there needs to be an inquiry and made a formal request for more details.
“Yahoo is a law abiding company, and complies with the laws of the United States,” the company said in a brief statement in response to Reuters questions about the demand. Yahoo declined any further comment.
Reportedly, Yahoo developed a program that would collect certain types of information, as requested from government officials, from emails. It may be easy to speculate on the nature of the data sought, but as of yet, there has been no further information on this.
“It is deeply disappointing that Yahoo declined to challenge this sweeping surveillance order, because customers are counting on technology companies to stand up to novel spying demands in court,” Patrick Toomey, an attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union, said in a statement.
Likely the ACLU will not be the only organization following this development. Cybersecurity companies and Internet giants like Google will certainly be paying attention. This could be a precedent-setting situation, for good or bad, and it is something we should all be concerned about.
