Yahoo secretly scanned customer emails for U.S. intelligence read more at here www.spinonews.com/index.php/item/1152-yahoo-secretly-scanned-customer-emails-for-u-s-intelligence

Yahoo built a custom software program to search all of its customers’ incoming emails for specific information provided by US intelligence officials, according former employees of the company.

According to the first report by Reuters, The custom software program was secretly built last year to comply with a classified US government directive. The Software program scanned hundreds of millions of Yahoo Mail accounts.

In a statement, the company said: "Yahoo is a law-abiding company, and complies with the laws of the United States."

Read: Yahoo Confirms Massive Data Breach, 500 Million Accounts Swiped

“We’ve worked hard over the years to earn our users’ trust and we fight hard to preserve it,” Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer says in the opening to the company’s transparency report, in which it documents government requests for user data. 

Remember during US-EU data sharing negotiations (#PrivacyShield), US said this would never happen? https://t.co/IODSJuaw8e CC: @maxschrems

— Edward Snowden (@Snowden) October 4, 2016

The incident has also raised questions whether other companies’ intelligence agencies may have created or requested similar situations.

Google said, "We've never received such a request, but if we did, our response would be simple: 'No way'." A Microsoft spokesperson did not comment on whether it had received a request, but added: "We have never engaged in the secret scanning of email traffic like what has been reported today about Yahoo." 

In a separate incident, Yahoo confirmed that information associated with at least 500 million user accounts was stolen. From its network in 2014.