THEY TRIED

Yahoo Fought Prism (and Lost)

Challenged FISA request in secret court.

It looks like Yahoo fought the law, and the law won. According to a report in The New York Times, the Internet company had challenged the legality of a government order that ultimately led to the Prism program, saying the request violated users’ Fourth Amendment rights. The secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court did not agree, and in 2008, citing government assurances that the U.S. does not maintain a database of information on nontargeted Americans (ahem...), ruled Yahoo’s compliance was obligatory, and called its privacy concerns “overblown.” Yahoo! has repeatedly denied involvement in any government sweep of its users’ data, and said it “has not joined any program in which we volunteer to share user data with the U.S. government.” Key word here being “volunteer.”