U.S. Government Threatened Yahoo With $250,000 per day Fine If It Didn't Release Data

[engine]

Despite Yahoo fighting this, it was probably inevitable the data had to be released.

Of course, we know much more about the NSA than we knew at the time.

Today we are pleased to announce the release of more than 1,500 pages of once-secret papers from Yahoo’s 2007-2008 challenge to the expansion of U.S. surveillance laws.

In 2007, the U.S. 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.

Our challenge, and a later appeal in the case, did not succeed. The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) upheld the predecessor to Section 702 of the FISA Amendments Act. The Court ordered us to give the U.S. Government the user data it sought in the matter.U.S. Threatened Yahoo With $250,000 per day Fine If It Didn't Release Data [yahoopolicy.tumblr.com]

The released documents underscore how we had to fight every step of the way to challenge the U.S. Government’s surveillance efforts. At one point, the U.S. Government threatened the imposition of $250,000 in fines per day if we refused to comply.

[hamlet]

There has to be better communication between parties to avoid this type of nonsense.

[motorhaven]

There is no such thing as "communicating" with a government agency intent on spying on people and trampling civil liberties. Short of revolution we have the courts, and that is what Yahoo choose to do.

[incrediBILL]

The problem is any time people cluster on a single social network you give the government an opportunity to make a run at a mass of information easily collected in one location.

The solution would be a social service built on a
a peer to peer cloud service, similar to how the file sharing sites work, that distributes the data across a decentralized worldwide network.

This is one way to solve this issue once and for all because they wouldn't be able to serve a warrant for a single source or a single country.

There would be tens of thousands or millions of members and data hosts, so the scale would be unprecedented and the only legal option would be completely toss the constitution to even attempt to collect it.

Assuming it only uses 4K-bit digital encryption to communicate, they'd have to be a node in the system to even get a trickle of the data unless they installed a man-in-the-middle attack at a location like Comcast or Level 3.

It would be the ultimate fight of privacy rights over government instrusion.

Anyone ready to start FreedomBook? ;)

[ronin]

The solution would be a social service built on a peer to peer cloud service, similar to how the file sharing sites work, that distributes the data across a decentralized worldwide network. [...] Anyone ready to start FreedomBook? ;)

- Diaspora*
- App.net
- Tent.io

Are all initiatives to ensure that across a network (or across multiple networks) the personal data of individuals is supplied by and under control of each individual person - rather than being stored centrally on network servers, which is the model which prevails at present at Twitter, Facebook etc.