Court Records: Yahoo Faced $250K Daily Fine For Failing To Hand Over User Data

Chuck Bednar for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online
The US government threatened Yahoo with fines of $250,000 per day if it failed to comply with demands to turn over the online communication data of international customers, officials at the web portal have revealed.
According to Associated Press (AP) reporter Pete Yost, legal representatives from the company viewed surrendering the online information as unconstitutional, and launched a secret court battle against federal officials that ultimately proved unsuccessful.
Some court records from those proceedings were unsealed on Thursday, explained Craig Timberg of the Washington Post, and those 1,500 pages worth of documents revealed how Yahoo ultimately became one of the first websites to provide information to the National Security Agency (NSA) under the controversial PRISM program.
“The ruling by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court of Review became a key moment in the development of PRISM, helping government officials to convince other Silicon Valley companies that unprecedented data demands had been tested in the courts and found constitutionally sound,” Timberg said. “Eventually, most major US tech companies, including Google, Facebook, Apple and AOL, complied.”
In a statement, Yahoo general counsel Ron Bell said that both the original challenge, which occurred in 2008, and a later appeal were unsuccessful. The newly unsealed court records illustrate “how we had to fight every step of the way to challenge the U.S. government’s surveillance efforts,” Bell added, according to Yost. “At one point, the US government threatened the imposition of $250,000 in fines per day if we refused to comply.”
Yahoo’s legal challenge to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act was originally reported by the New York Times last year, and the law prohibits those companies that receive data requests from the NSA or other government agencies from publically acknowledging that they had been contacted or commenting on the substance of those requests.
The release of the court documents on Thursday “adds new details to the public history of a fight that unfolded in secret at the time, as Yahoo challenged the constitutionality of a statute that legalized a form of the Bush administration’s program of warrantless surveillance of foreigners – and lost,” Times reporters Vindu Goel and Charlie Savage explained.
“The documents released on Thursday show that the government expected Internet providers to begin complying with orders under the law… before the intelligence court had approved the procedures for targeting specific accounts and protecting any private information about Americans collected,” they added. “The records also provide perhaps the clearest corroboration yet of the Internet companies’ contention that they did not provide the government with direct access to vast amounts of customer data on their computers.”
A heavily redacted version of the same court ruling was originally released in 2009, Timberg said, but so much information was removed that it was impossible to determine which company was involved. The uncensored version of the records make it clear that the surveillance program allowed NSA officials to order American tech companies to surrender emails and other communications sent to or by foreign parties without search warrants.
Yahoo had reportedly been advocating for the release and declassification of the documents for months, Goel and Savage said. Bell called the unsealing of the records “an important win for transparency,” adding that he and his Yahoo colleagues “hope that these records help promote informed discussion about the relationship between privacy, due process and intelligence gathering.”
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