Mailstrom

Crypto-wars, continued: If you thought that reform legislation passed by Congress in the wake of Edward Snowden’s disclosures put a stop to mass surveillance by U.S. intelligence agencies on Americans, think again. That’s the upshot of Joseph Menn’s big scoop for Reuters, reporting that last year Yahoo built a secret custom software program to search all of its users’ incoming emails at the behest of a classified request from the U.S. government. Upon learning that Marissa Mayer, Yahoo’s CEO, had approved the secret program, Yahoo’s chief information security officer resigned from the company, Menn reports.

The ACLU’s senior technologist, Chris Soghoian, commented that the Reuters report was “a useful reminder that we still need whistleblowers and leaks to the press. The surveillance oversight system totally failed to stop this.”

Tech companies are chafing against Justice Department gag orders related to secret requests for customer information, Nicole Perlroth and Katie Benner report for the New York Times. In one case, the government asked Open Whisper Systems, the maker of Signal, for “subscriber details, addresses, telephone numbers, email addresses and method of payment…. [as well as] information on internet addresses, browsers and internet providers that the account holders could have used,” but since the company only tracks when a user creates an account and the last time it connected to the service, that is all it handed over.

This is civic tech: GitHub has committed to host Sunlight Labs’ code repository as an open source community project, outgoing Labs director Kat Duffy reports. The Internet Archive is also setting up a special collection to preserve all of Sunlight’s content and data.

Jason Shueh reports that the U.S. Government Accountability Office is raising questions about 18F’s funding source, the Acquisition Services Fund, and pointing to concerns that its funding may be squeezed.

The U.S. House of Representatives has launched a public-facing phone directory of all of its staff. Daniel Schuman of Demand Progress calls it a “tremendously useful tool,” noting that this information used to only be available through private vendors for a fee.

Election elections: Tech VC firm Union Square Ventures, a bulwark of the New York tech community, has endorsed Hillary Clinton for President.

No kids, last night’s vice presidential debate didn’t take place here.