Yahoo says company was threatened by the U.S. government over access to user data
On Thursday, Yahoo released courts documents revealing that the U.S. government threatened the company with a harsh financial punishment if its requests for user data were rejected.
Yahoo, released a blogpost titled " Shedding Light on the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC): Court Findings from our 2007-2008 case." The post was written by the company's General Council member Ron Bell.
The blogpost reveals that the company had battled the U.S. government and tried to reject the demands for Yahoo to cooperate with the National Security Agency, more specifically with the agency's surveillance programme called "Prism". Prism is the NSA's controversial surveillance program that collects digital communications and web histories. The programme came under public scrutiny when Edward Snowden leaked secret documents to journalist Glenn Greenwald. The leaks revealed that many tech companies like Google, Microsoft and Facebook were cooperating with government requests for private user data. Yahoo announced that they tried to fight the demands of the government and failed. Then the company appealed to the FISC and FISC-R which are "secret courts that oversee requests by the U.S. Government for surveillance orders and other types of legal process in national security investigation," according to the blogpost. "The released documents underscore how we had to fight every step of the way to challenge the U.S Government's surveillance efforts. At one point, the U.S. government threatened the imposition of $250,000 in fines per day if we refused to comply," Bell said in the blogpost. . FISC and FISC-R documents and hearings are not available to the public and they are considered "classified." The once-secret court documents which were from the case between 2007-2008, were unsealed in 2013 upon Yahoo's request to the F.I.S.C. The company said they are currently working on making the 1,500 documents available to the public. "We treat public safety with the utmost seriousness, but we are also committed to protecting users' data. We will continue to contest requests and laws that we consider unlawful, unclear or overbroad."
