Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer wrote in her blog that Yahoo has never given access to its data centres to the NSA or to any other government agency. This means that if any traffic has been snuffled by the spooks it did so illegally. She said that to make Yahoo’s systems more secure, she added, the company is introducing SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) encryption to Yahoo Mail with a 2048-bit key. That security measure will supposedly be in place by January 8, 2014.

Beyond that, Yahoo plans on encrypting all information that moves between its datacenters by the end of the first quarter of 2014. The Washington Post was first to report about the agency’s attempts at snooping Silicon Valley’s IT infrastructure, drawing its information from top-secret documents provided by government whistleblower Edward Snowden.