Yahoo Executive Confronts NSA Director Over ‘Backdoors’

blogs.wsj.com In one of the most public confrontations of a top U.S. intelligence official by Silicon Valley in recent years, a senior Yahoo Inc.YHOO -0.38% official peppered the National Security Agency director, Adm. Mike Rogers, at a conference on Monday over digital spying. The exchange came during a question and answer session at a daylong summit on cybersecurity hosted by the think tank New America. Mr. Rogers spent an hour at the conference answering a range of questions about his agency’s practices and the global cyber threat. The tense exchange began when Alex Stamos, Yahoo’s chief information-security officer, asked Mr. Rogers if Yahoo should acquiesce to requests from Saudi Arabia, China, Russia, France and other countries to build a “backdoor” in some of their systems that would allow the countries to spy on certain users. “It sounds like you agree with [Federal Bureau of Investigation Director James] Comey that we should be building defects into the encryption in our products so that the US government can decrypt,” Mr. Stamos said, according to a transcript of the exchange compiled by the Just Security blog.