Imagine a futuristic society in which robots are deployed to everybody’s house, fulfilling a mission to scan the inside of each and every residence. Does that mental image look far-off and futuristic? Well, this week’s Yahoo e-mail surveillance revelations perhaps prove this intrusive robot scenario has already arrived in the digital world.

Days ago, Reuters cited anonymous sources and reported that Yahoo covertly built a secret “custom software program to search all of its customers’ incoming e-mails for specific information.” Yahoo, the report noted, “complied with a classified US government directive, scanning hundreds of millions of Yahoo Mail accounts at the behest of the National Security Agency or FBI.”

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In the most extreme sense, the Yahoo revelation highlights a new tool in the quiver of US spies. When metadata queries and e-mail scanning combine, such tools provide enormous precedent for wanton, science-fiction-like spying by machines on humans, according to Jennifer Granick, the civil liberties director at the Center for Internet and Society at Stanford Law School.

“They’re saying we can spy on everybody. It doesn’t count as spying unless you’re guilty,” she told Ars. The Yahoo disclosure, she added, “[Is] part of a constellation of tools, each with its own intelligence benefits and each with its own privacy and security safeguards, and lack of safeguards.”

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