Internet pioneer Yahoo has revealed for the first time the intense legal and financial pressure it was placed under by the US government seven years ago to comply with sweeping new surveillance laws.
The firm claimed in a Tumblr post that, thanks to the release of more than 1,500 pages of court documents from a case held in secret back in 2007-8, it can now share the details of its challenge to an amended law which it viewed as unconstitutional.
“The released documents underscore how we had to fight every step of the way to challenge the U.S. Government’s surveillance efforts,” Yahoo general counsel, Ron Bell, explained.
“At one point, the US Government threatened the imposition of $250,000 in fines per day if we refused to comply.”
The amendment in question meant agencies could demand access to Yahoo databases, but the firm said it resisted, refusing to comply with what it viewed as “unconstitutional and overboard surveillance.”
Its challenge and subsequent appeal failed and the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) upheld the predecessor to Section 702 of the FISA Amendments Act.
FISC and FISC-R are secret courts which oversee requests by the government for surveillance and other orders in national security investigations.
“A decision to open FISC or FISC-R records to the public is extremely rare. Now that the FISC-R has agreed to unseal the proceedings at our request, we are working to make these documents available,” explained Bell.
“We consider this an important win for transparency, and hope that these records help promote informed discussion about the relationship between privacy, due process, and intelligence gathering.”
The irony, of course, is that the NSA is alleged to have lifted Yahoo user data in secret anyway.
The huge fine Yahoo was threatened with would have meant the firm paying out $91.3m per year.
Over the past five years, the firm has had an average quarterly net income of $425m, so the fine would have eaten up around 20% of that.