Yahoo’s alleged scanning of emails of hundreds of millions of users at the request of US intelligence raises serious human rights concerns, according to a United Nations advocate.

“Government monitoring of digital communications, when conducted as described in recent reports, could undermine the privacy that individuals depend on in order to seek, receive and impart information online,” said David Kaye, UN special rapporteur on the right to freedom of opinion and expression.

Kaye, an independent expert, was appointed by the UN’s human rights council in 2014 to examine and report on specific situations or human rights issues. He was responding to reports that Yahoo complied with a secretive US government request to scan emails in 2015.

Yahoo, based in Sunnyvale, California, said this week that the reports were “misleading” but declined to specify its objections.

The revelations rekindled a long-running debate in the United States over the proper balance between digital privacy and national security, and sparked criticism from privacy and human rights officials in Europe.

Privacy advocates said the Yahoo case may amount to an unprecedented use of the authorities granted to the National Security Agency by Congress.



Addressing students at Georgetown University on Tuesday, the fugitive former NSA contractor Edward Snowden – who leaked a trove of classified documents to journalists in 2013 exposing NSA surveillance programs – said the Yahoo report renewed questions about whether government surveillance was subject to sufficient congressional oversight and public scrutiny.

“That’s not to say that this Yahoo program is sinister,” Snowden said via satellite. “It could be related to cyber security, where it is related to known malware actors.”

US government officials have sought to defend US surveillance operations as appropriately balanced and transparent, though they did not deny the reports about Yahoo.

“The United States only uses signals intelligence for national security purposes, and not for the purpose of indiscriminately reviewing the emails or phone calls of ordinary people,” said Richard Kolko, a spokesman for the US Office of the Director of National Intelligence.

White House spokesman Josh Earnest told reporters on Tuesday that he could not confirm the existence of specific intelligence programs or intelligence tools, but defended the checks and balances placed on what information or methods the intelligence community could seek.

With Reuters

