While Edward Snowden’s leak of the NSA’s PRISM program revealed that the US government has been spying on its citizens, safe to say that this has been going on for a while, but thanks to a report from the Washington Post, it seems that things could have kicked off in 2008 with Yahoo.
Back in 2008, it seems that the US government had requested user data from Yahoo and even threatened them with a fine of $250,000 a day, which safe to say will add up to a pretty huge amount if Yahoo were to deny the government access to their users. However Yahoo tried to fight the government’s request and failed.
Apparently the loss in court was said to be a key moment in the creation of the PRISM program where Yahoo ended up being one of the first few companies to hand over information to the government. This was followed by other tech companies such as Google, Apple, AOL, and Facebook, at least according to the Snowden reports.
In a recent post by Yahoo on Tumblr, the company’s general counsel Ron Bell writes, “Users come first at Yahoo. We treat public safety with the utmost seriousness, but we are also committed to protecting users’ data. We will continue to contest requests and laws that we consider unlawful, unclear, or overbroad.”
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