US Government Threatened Yahoo to Provide User Data: If not Pay a Fine of $250,000 per day

Recently, there was a news regarding Gmail accounts that are being compromised by hackers, but the news now is that the internet giant Yahoo was threatened by the U.S. Government to disclose information of Yahoo users. This comes as a part of the U.S. surveillance power. According to Yahoo if they do not give the necessary information they would have to pay a fine of $250,000 per day.

Yahoo has out rightly condemned this stating that this was unconstitutional and the rules were against the rights of their client's fourth amendment that is concerned with client privacy.

The Federal Judge ordered that the details of the case that were unsuccessful court challenges could be made public.

In 2007, the government headed by President George W Bush had introduced a rule that search engines should supply user information to the government and Yahoo stated that it was challenging this rule in the court.

Ron Bell Yahoo's counsel said that their challenge and an appeal did not succeed. Yahoo stood their ground and did its best in challenging the U.S. Government surveillance efforts. He went on to add that the U.S. Government threatened to slap a fine of $250,000 per day if the company did not cooperate.

Yahoo has challenged the Government regarding the PRISM intelligence programme that gives the government access to online communications.

PRISM is a data mining program that was launched in 2007 by the National Security Agency (NSA). What PRISM does is it collects stored internet communications based on demands made to internet companies like Google. Any data that matches search terms approved by the court has to be handed over to the NSA. It is a protect America Act under the Bush Administration. Information regarding this was leaked by Edward Snowden who said that the data amassed was much more than what the general public knew that he termed as dangerous and criminal activities.

The data was collected without a warrant from the court. Washington Post reported that after the defeat in 2007 Yahoo complied and supplied the information to NSA to avoid huge fines and continued with their appeal. Yahoo also assured its users that it would do everything to protect user information.

Bell said that this could be an important win for transparency and hoped that the records could promote informed discussions about the relationship between privacy and the process of intelligence gathering.

The documents that were released recently indicate that the Bush administration was angered at Yahoo for being allowed into to court to challenge the act. The case was booked in the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court.

Yahoo also stated that they will release the documents of 1,500 pages relating to the case with the NSA that did not stand in court to the public.

According to recently released court documents, the then U.S. Attorney General Michael Mukasey said that the Government had conducted Foreign Intelligence Surveillance for ages without any court warrant and this was upheld by the Fourth Amendment and the Protect America Act adequately protects the privacy of the U.S. citizen.

But Yahoo challenged this stating that the government was acting in an unlawful manner.

The disclosure was a cause for concern said Patrick Toomey of the American Civil Liberties Union. He also said that the court proceedings were held secretly to avoid the public from understanding the surveillance laws. He went on to add that the disclosure by Yahoo makes it more important to bring transparency to the NSA surveillance activities.