Kenji Fei, the senior vice president of global corporate communications, explained to Reuters that:

“The company does not believe that there is any security risk related to either Yahoo’s customer data or the government request. We do have some questions but they are not that high-level, nor complex. I don’t expect any quick solution to any of this at this point.”

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According to the government’s request, Yahoo must provide “any information” as well as “all unencrypted user communications containing any and all sensitive or other information”.

In return, Yahoo is asking the government to “remove or disable Yahoo Mail service for three months”, remove “a copy of all unencrypted user or subscriber information from all current and future Yahoo accounts”, force “Google to remove” and “remove all existing and future Yahoo emails” to “provide them to the Intelligence Community”.

Other companies will be subjected to similar conditions, according to the letter.

The government agency has also asked Yahoo to install the necessary equipment, according to the official, meaning that the tech giant will need to change the way it deals with users’ data.

The company would then be able to ask that it retain access to “any and all privileged or protected user content” for a set period of time.

Yahoo has yet to respond to the request.

In the past few years, internet firms have also faced lawsuits from governments who have been pressing them to make their data more searchable.

Last month, the German government decided to seize the data of three German-language companies, including Yahoo, after suing them for their inability to hand over some data that German authorities had requested to be handed over via the US. The governments feared that the companies were aiding terrorists due to their use of encryption, and argued that by handing over their data, the companies could be committing a crime.

In 2014, the German government also brought its case against Yahoo in Berlin over its failure to help with counterterrorism.

In a similar case last year, the Guardian reported that Britain’s security services had asked