Yahoo Inc. was threatened with daily fines of $250,000 by the U.S. government in 2008 if they failed to hand over customer user data as part of the National Security Agency's PRISM surveillance program, according to 1,500 pages of court documents unsealed on Thursday.
The documents shed new light on how the government dealt with U.S. Internet companies that were reluctant to comply with orders from the secretive U.S. Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, which rules on government requests to conduct surveillance for national security issues, Reuters reported.
Although Yahoo challenged the FISC's order in 2007, it was forced to give up records, which experts say helped pave the way for the PRISM surveillance program, revealed last summer by former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden, to bolster the government's argument that national security concerns legally justified the collection of user data from tech firms.
Back in 2007, after the government "amended a key law to demand user information from online services ... we refused to comply with what we viewed as unconstitutional and overbroad surveillance and challenged the U.S. government's authority," the company's general counsel Ron Bell said.
"It's always been a little bit behind the curtain as to what Internet companies do when they actually receive these requests. Now we have evidence that Yahoo did in fact fight this battle and look at considerable fines as a consequence of not disclosing the data," said Marc Rotenberg, executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center.
"It tells us how very serious the Bush administration was about trying to get the Internet firms to turn over this data. Until the disclosure, it was mostly hearsay that they were willing to impose these penalties. That's heavy handed," he added, referring to the threat of fines.
On Thursday, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court of Review (FISC-R) ordered that the documents surrounding Yahoo's challenge be unsealed. No documents were available immediately, but Yahoo is in the process of making them all public, Bell said on Yahoo's Tumblr page.
"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," Bell said on Yahoo's Tumblr on Thursday.
Portions of some released documents remain classified and Yahoo is pressing the court to agree to make those public, as well as other documents that are still classified, according to NBC News.
"We treat public safety with the utmost seriousness, but we are also committed to protecting users' data," Bell said. "We will continue to contest requests and laws that we consider unlawful, unclear, or overbroad."
With the help of documents provided by Edward Snowden, The Post and the London-based Guardian revealed last June that the NSA and FBI were involved in siphoning personal data from the main computer servers of nine major U.S. Internet firms including Facebook, Google and Microsoft, USA Today reported.
Privacy advocates said the release of the Yahoo documents, even in their heavily redacted form, provided important information about the controversial surveillance practices, according to USA Today.
"It fills in more gaps than what we knew about the challenge," Mark Rumold, a staff attorney with the Electronic Frontier Foundation.
"The bottom line is these are federal court opinions and they are interpreting federal law in the constitution in really significant and substantial ways and they're being withheld from the public," Rumold said.
Meanwhile, Apple, Facebook, Google and Microsoft did not have immediate comment.
Making an effort to prove their limited involvement in controversial U.S. surveillance efforts, Facebook Inc., Microsoft, Yahoo and Google Inc. began publishing details earlier this year about the number of secret government requests for data they receive.
