Feds Wielded Baseball Bat to Win Yahoo's NSA Cooperation
The Obama administration threatened Yahoo with fines of US$250,000 daily if it wouldn't comply with demands to hand over user information to the United States National Security Agency, Yahoo has disclosed.
Yahoo had filed suit against the demands in 2007, citing the Fourth Amendment.
"They basically said you must do this thing that you don't want to do or we'll put you out of business," Daniel Castro, senior analyst at The Information Technology & Innovation Foundation, told TechNewsWorld.
"But if Yahoo complied, they'd go out of business because people would get angry with them," Castro continued. "That's like giving a prisoner a shovel and making him dig his own grave."
Yahoo plans to release more than 1,500 pages of documents from its court case.
"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," said Yahoo General Counsel Ron Bell.
The U.S. Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court of Review (FISC-R) -- which reviews denials of applications for electronic surveillance warrants under FISA, agreed to unseal the proceedings after years of court battles.
There is no FISC-R public docket, so Yahoo is preparing the documents for release. It will place a link to the documents on its Tumblr page when they are ready.
The documents include the first release of the 2008 FISC opinion that Yahoo challenged on appeal.
They also include an expanded version of the FISC-R opinion in the case, first released in a more redacted form in 2008; both parties' briefs, including some lower court briefings; an ex parte appendix of classified filings; a partially redacted certification filed with FISC; and a partially redacted directive Yahoo received.
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