Reuters just reported that the Internet/email company Yahoo Inc. created a custom software program to search all of its customers’ incoming emails to comply with a “classified government directive.”

The company complied with a classified U.S. government demand, scanning hundreds of millions of Yahoo Mail accounts at the behest of the National Security Agency or FBI, said three former employees and a fourth person apprised of the events.

Some surveillance experts said this represents the first case to surface of a U.S. Internet company agreeing to an intelligence agency’s request by searching all arriving messages, as opposed to examining stored messages or scanning a small number of accounts in real time.

Reuters could not determine what data, if any, Yahoo Inc. may have handed over, if any, and if the government approached other companies in addition to Yahoo. Of course, Edward Snowden had something to say about this:

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

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— Edward Snowden (@Snowden) October 4, 2016

Reuters adds:

U.S. phone and Internet companies are known to have handed over bulk customer data to intelligence agencies. But some former government officials and private surveillance experts said they had not previously seen either such a broad demand for real-time Web collection or one that required the creation of a new computer program.

Article reposted with permission from Constitution.com