U.S. to Yahoo – $250,000 A Day If You Don’t Comply [VIDEO]

Do you expect your personal information to be kept private by companies that you do business with?  Most people would say “yes”, that confidentiality is one of the things they expect from companies.  But, recent news shows that the company might not always have that choice.  Yesterday, unsealed court documents revealed how federal officials forced American tech companies to participate in the National Security Agency’s controversial PRISM program.

The documents showed that Yahoo tried to resist the federal government’s demands on the basis of unconstitutionality but were ultimately unsuccessful.  After the legal loss Yahoo was forced to grant the NSA extensive access to the records of its users online com­munications and other U.S.-based technology firms or be fined $250,000 a day.

Yahoo, along with many other online companies, has endured heavy criticism for apparent cooperation with the NSA since the Washington Post and Britain’s Guardian newspaper used Snowden’s documents to reveal the existence of PRISM last year.

Yahoo hailed the decision in a Tumblr post Thursday afternoon. “The released documents underscore how we had to fight every step of the way to challenge the U.S. Government’s surveillance efforts,” Ron Bell, the company’s general counsel, wrote in the post.

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