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11/21/2024 11:45:15 pm

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U.S. Government Threatens Yahoo with Daily $250k Fine Over Private User Data

Internet giant Yahoo announced Thursday that the United States government is slapping it with a $250,000 fine every day it refuses to cough up its user data as a part of the National Security Agency's surveillance programs.

Ron Bell, Yahoo's general counsel, said on the company's Tumblr page that the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court of Review released over 1,500 pages of previously secret documents that are related to the company's dispute with the government in 2007 over the data Yahoo's users have with the company.

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While the documents are currently unavailable, Yahoo is making a conscious effort in making them accessible to the public.

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," Bell said.

However, Yahoo lost at the initial challenge and one appeal. The rulings against the firm strengthened the U.S. administration's gathering of user's private data from technology companies was legally justified by the concerns for national security.

Earlier in June, news broke out that the NSA and Federal Bureau of Investigation were unwarrantedly retrieving private and personal data from the main computer servers of nine prominent Internet firms in the U.S., including Google, Microsoft and Facebook, as reported by the London-based Guardian and The Post, with documents from NSA contractor and whistleblower Edward Snowden.

"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."

Meanwhile, Snowden has also revealed that the U.S. government is attempting to deploy "MonsterMind," a program that also aims to strengthen the cybersecurity of the nation, but may breech the rights of its citizens at the same time.

The program would automatically block any cyber attack from entering the cyberinfrastructure of the United States. It is also set to automatically retaliate against the server where the attack had originated.

The deployment of MonsterMind would violate the United States' Fourth Amendment rights, a part of the Bill of Rights that disallows unreasonable searches without a warrant, as it would access almost all of electronic communication from other nations into the U.S.

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