Feds Threatened to Fine Yahoo $250K Daily for Not Complying with NSA's PRISM

http://www.wired.com/2014/09/feds-yahoo-fine-prism/

by suprgeek • 12 years ago

784 237 12 years ago

wired.com

dmritard96• 12 years ago

might be worth it actually. if it doesn't increase, and if they can market with it. haha

joshavant3• 12 years ago

Weren't these requests, which Yahoo objected to, intended to stay secret, by the wishes of the government?

Consider if Yahoo refused to honor the requests, and began accruing the fines. Presumably, if they didn't pay the huge bill for their fines, what would happen?

Surely, $250k/day would rack up fast... As I see it, eventually Yahoo would rack up such a bill that they couldn't afford it, and any collection of the fee by the government would force Yahoo to close its doors. At that point, surely they'd have to reveal something to the general public about said requests, and the fines, and everything else going on behind the scenes...

melvinmt• 12 years ago

"As I see it, eventually Yahoo would rack up such a bill that they couldn't afford it, and any collection of the fee by the government would force Yahoo to close its doors."

Yahoo is about to get $20bn+ in cash in about 2 weeks, so they can hold out these fines for about 80,000 days.

joshavant3• 12 years ago

Fair enough. But it still stands, couldn't Yahoo ignore it?

What's the worst thing the government could do to Yahoo that would go unnoticed by the public, if Yahoo didn't comply?

tjohns2• 12 years ago

If Yahoo continued to resist, I'm sure the government would just gradually increase the amount until they had no choice but to comply.

These kinds of fines are usually issued for contempt of court. Judges don't take kindly to parties that try to ignore a court order, which would include writing off a court imposed fine as a cost of business.

There's few things more terrifying than an angry judge with full power of contempt. There's no principle of proportionality, which gives judges almost unlimited authority. See Chadwick v Janecka (3rd Cir. 2002) as an example.

benologist• 12 years ago

I was thinking about that because it seemed like a cost they could just afford to ignore ($91m/yr), this was probably not the limit of the penalties they could have faced.

ams61102• 12 years ago

At some point people would have started being thrown in jail and that's when resistance usually ends.

madaxe_again3• 12 years ago

They'd lock up the execs for "embezzlement".

I could tell you a story about this squeaky clean guy I know who's in prison for fraud, because he refused to comply with a secret court order... but I can't, because I don't want to join him.

I could tell you another story about a barrister I know who had his career destroyed and his wife "suicided" for refusing to do certain things around a trial in the UK - but again, I fear repercussions should I say anything.

In fact, this is probably too much.

monsterix2• 12 years ago

I have a question: Can the NSA/the coercing party be reverse fined at $500k/day by Yahoo (i.e by an organization) for some reasons in similar vein?

otakucode4• 12 years ago

Probably... but in order to bring any lawsuit against the US government (presuming they don't pay... which they wouldn't), the US government has to grant you permission to sue them. So chances are that debt would go nowhere.

baddox2• 12 years ago

Presumably, if they didn't pay the huge bill for their fines, what would happen?

It's easy to think of shady secret things the government could do to coerce Yahoo! in to either complying or paying. But at the end of the day, there's always people with guns.

nitrogen• 12 years ago

But at the end of the day, there's always people with guns.

I think the point of the OP is that "people with guns" get to be pretty hard to hide at larger scales.

lern_too_spel4• 12 years ago

Over the course of a year, that's equivalent to employing 300 engineers. For a company the size of Yahoo, that would be pretty easy to hide.

dredmorbius11• 12 years ago

That's an interesting comparison, but it's still a pretty big hit. Profits (net income) over the past four quarters were $311 million, the fines would have eaten nearly a third of that, $91.25 million.

For 2008 the percentage may well have been higher.

xtrasmart2• 12 years ago

they would just withdraw the money appropriate the company sell it off and install their security amongst employees.

i think I have seen it somewhere, hightway interdiction. I am sure that they have a way to do whatever they want.

nevermind bombing contries that refuse to give up controls to energy resources or are controlling flow of those. like um Syria or Ukraine.

Shivetya• 12 years ago

it would not be long before they would find a way to put the executives in jail. I do not doubt for one minute they would use other government agencies to intimidate, the IRS chief amongst them.

Not much will change until the people in Washington are changed and changed regularly. the system is engineered to protect those in office and they are very good at manipulating the public into helping them maintain that dominance; namely bills to supposedly prevent money in politics - except it really only blocks money for views that don't support their views.

xtrasmart2• 12 years ago

NATO should be destroyed with furious anger and righteous punishment.

nathancahill• 12 years ago

Happened in 2008, revealed today.

darkstar999• 12 years ago

Yep, we can read the first sentence of the article too!

AJ007• 12 years ago

Imagine what kind of secret programs are being pushed today that we will hear about in 2020, or longer. I have some guesses but they are so absurd I would be laughed off hn.

crusso2• 12 years ago

Yet we keep electing the same politicians that went along with all this. We deserve the tyranny.

comrade18• 12 years ago

Which was long after 9/11, but right around when the occupy movement and tea party we're coming into being.

jacquesm5• 12 years ago

So that's the price of having principles.

enlightenedfool3• 12 years ago

In general people/entities with principles and morals have a higher price to pay. For them it's worth it.

alsetmusic• 12 years ago

In general people/entities with principles and morals have a higher price to pay. For them it's worth it.

Or the reality of a destroyed life leads them to suicide as the only way out. Prison is pretty terrible.

yarou• 12 years ago

The surest way to remain poor is to be an honest man.

xnull5• 12 years ago

This is nothing compared to what allegedly happened to QWest. When the US Government was forcing telecom by telecom to install taps into their business's core routing hubs Joseph Nacchio, the CEO at the time, dug his heels in demanding legal avenues to avoid turning his back on QWest's customers. The US threatened to pull out large contracts that made up a large part of QWest's business.

Furthermore, having been served a National Security Letter, Nacchio was not able to speak to his company or shareholders about the situation.

Nacchio continued to insist on legal avenues and Uncle Sam did exactly what it threatened. Nacchio warned major stakeholders that all of the major QWest contracts were about to go belly up.

The US government threw Nacchio in prison for insider trading.

Oh and then QWest went bankrupt and was bought by competitor CenturyLink (who presumably had fewer difficulties complying).

Sometimes the market has more than one invisible hand.

Edit: A good point by a fellow commentor - no independent investigation has been performed into the QWest story. I looked but could not find FOIA information online.

yuhong• 12 years ago

I hasn't look it much recently, but I remember that the only sources for this claim was from Nacchio himself. I wonder what Snowden actually thinks of this claim.

xnull5• 12 years ago

Yes, this is a good caveat. This is what Nacchio claims. I do not have much in the way of a third party source.

It's likely that Snowden doesn't know anything about it.

swartkrans• 12 years ago

Was he actually guilty of insider trading?

xnull5• 12 years ago

I'm not a lawyer so nothing I say below means anything.

From what I can tell - yes - he was guilty of insider trading by the letter of the law. Sharing insider information as CEO about the future of the company with shareholders is by definition insider trading. Despite circumstances, warning that contracts were being gutted is still illegal.

agscala• 12 years ago

My understanding is that since he told major stakeholders what was about to happen, he gave them inside information to trade on and went to jail for that instead of making trades himself.

coldtea3• 12 years ago

Well, it's not like the governments cannot either manufacture a case to send an innocent man to jail or cover-up a wrongdoing -- they have been caught doing those things time and again.

Heck, there are people that had the death penalty due to planted evidence and/or witnesses in favor of them ignored, only to be found innocent decades later, through newer findings like DNA.

So who really knows, especially in particularly charged cases with special interest like this.

eli3• 12 years ago

The jury thought so beyond a reasonable doubt.

tptacek15• 12 years ago

Reprising a comment from a long time ago:

Nacchio was convicted of running a pump-and-dump insider trading scam that netted him ~$100MM at the expense of common public shareholders. If there's an award for "most obnoxious implication of NSA's wrongdoing", it should go to the attempted rehabilitation of people like Nacchio.

Here's the indictment. It's quite straightforward.

http://extras.mnginteractive.com/live/media/site36/2007/0307...

Here's the cliff notes:

"No later than December 4, 2000, through and including September 10, 2001, NACCHIO was aware of material, non-public information about Qwest’s business, including, but not limited to" [litany of distressing concerns about Qwest's bottom line which ultimately proved dispositive in valuing Qwest].

Note the date.

Now, look at this table of Nacchio's stock sales:

http://oi60.tinypic.com/2n1tgr6.jpg

Nacchio claims to have believed that secret national security government contracts were going to rescue Qwest from their financial problems (note the implicit concession that Qwest had problems from which its financials needed to be rescued). One tie-in between Nacchio and NSA is the notion that by refusing requests from NSA, Nacchio lost those contracts. Stipulate that this is true; it's a plausible complaint. Nacchio still took the money and ran.

sampsonjs• 12 years ago

I'm just glad PRISM is nothing but an extremely expensive Rube Goldberg contraption for responding to warrants. Golly, why did Yahoo bother going to court to fight the notion that when a court issues a warrant ...

"Yahoo also felt that warrantless requests placed discretion for data collection 'entirely in the hands of the Executive Branch without prior judicial involvement' thereby ceding to the government 'overly broad power that invites abuse” and possible errors that would result in scooping up data of U.S. citizens as well.'

Oh.

higherpurpose• 12 years ago

Sure, but that's how they are going to get anyone in the end, especially with their current mass spying capabilities and fishing expeditions. Remember this?

http://online.wsj.com/articles/SB100014240527487044715045744...

If you don't cooperate with whatever they want you to do they'll get you for something, and then they'll paint you as the scum of the Earth in the media, so nobody pays too much attention to what they did exactly.

lawnchair_larry• 12 years ago

You of all people should know better than to give any credence to indictments. You know what purpose they serve, right?

dredmorbius11• 12 years ago

As has been noted below: an indictment is not a legal finding of fact. It's the worst possible case that the prosecution can make against the defense (in a criminal case). In a civil case, this would be the circumstance of the opening briefs of either side.

An indictment will read very clearly, because that's how it's written.

What it fails to do is take into account any exculpatory evidence or claims.

This isn't proof against Nacchio. You've mistaken a court finding for a lawyer's filing.

spacefight• 12 years ago

And this is exactly why we haven't had any leaks until Snowden.

zo13• 12 years ago

I'm curious why you consider government meddling, blackmail, coercion and manipulation as an "invisible hand"? Purely because it's not known to the populace?

xnull5• 12 years ago

For many reasons, but I'll admit it was mostly a provocative and clever remark more than an informative one.

If you want more meat than that: the US government, and in fact the majority of modern Western-style governments, do not directly control enterprises ("that's fascism/marxism/communism") but there remains a need for governments to interact and leverage infrastructure, information and capabilities of private enterprises - a need that can not be fulfilled by the blunt instrument of eminent domain.

Western style governments instead rely on coercion and leverage and also provide market advantages (and sometimes "Soft Power"; look that up) to achieve policy goals. The idea is then that governments nudge private enterprises to efficiently allocate their resoures for the greater good that individual customers and market pressures can't account for (because the calculus of a consumer doesn't include national strategy and because access to restricted information can't make it into the marketplace).

A fantastic example of that is the global cyberintelligence war, which the US and Five Eyes would very much like to win, and you should a tleask hope that we don't lose. [The vast majority of the Snowden leaks are about international espionage and sabotage (not about 'terrorism', the 2000's boogyman; find more in previous comments by yours truly).] There are other examples such as private enterprises with shared strategic interests having been invited to participate in international treaties like the Trans Pacific Partnership.

This has its own sort of internal self-consistent logic that is somewhat grounded in, although also represents a significant departure from, the ideas of Western 'Enlightenment' thinkers.

A criticism of this sort of leverage is that it has to grow more and more intense as the need, frequency, and scope of demands intensify due to resource exhaustion, accumulating expenses/promises, and competition with large centrally organized states and other Western-style states that are willing to interfere more to compete more (the 'prisoner dilemma' or 'tragedy of the commons' scenario). Every person you ask will give you a different answer on how much of this behavior, if any at all, has been happening.

The current conception of the state is that it must correct the market where it fails to allocate things efficiently (natural monopolies, etc) and that it may also collectivize cost where chance or circumstance have the power ruin individuals (providing emergency services during storms, snowplows during winter, equal access to education even for the poverty stricken) for the same reason people collectivize risk via insurance. But that otherwise it should remain minimal in size. I acknowledge there are debates about the concept of the state that would fill libraries. These are broad strokes.

States have learned that wielding private enterprises for both Soft Power (having the world rely on US company services or Chinese goods, owning water supply [Nestle]) and coercive power (withholding access to treatments and cures of diseases, manipulating social media to stir unrest, exporting favorable financial regulations via the WTO and World Bank [why BRICS made their own]) and by giving domestic corporations favors so that they can compete internationally (traditionally tariffs, huge tax subsidies (sugar), and recently information from the cyberintelligence war) as well as financial manipulations (manipulating currency exchange rates so that they are favored for export) enable them to achieve policy goals. Countries must participate if their competitors are, sort of like a cold war but without the existential threat of annihilation.

So states play a large part in the fluxuations of markets. Some of this is highly public ("Today at 9:00, China bans bitcoins"), but others are surreptitious.

In so many words: because it is 'invisible' and because it is a 'hand'.

hadoukenio• 12 years ago

Here's a serious question - is the fine secret too? If Yahoo didn't comply and were slapped with a fine, could Yahoo object and table the fine in a court?

IvyMike• 12 years ago

That would be an awesome item in the quarterly SEC filing: REDACTED $23M

enlightenedfool3• 12 years ago

"But today’s [document] release only underscores the need for basic structural reforms to bring transparency to the NSA’s surveillance activities" and how would those reforms come when majority of population and hence politicians are okay with such surveillance? that's a dream. makes good hacker news debate and nothing beyond that.

lern_too_spel4• 12 years ago

What sloppy reporting.

"The company disputed the initial order in 2007 because it deemed the bulk demand for email metadata to be unconstitutionally broad."

That is neither what the government demanded nor the reason Yahoo appealed. How did the reporter get this so wrong?

otakucode4• 12 years ago

It would have been very interesting if Yahoo had simply said "do it."

A few months later the government would want to demand Yahoo pay them millions of dollars........ but be entirely incapable of explaining WHY they were owed this money at all. That would have been a very interesting event.

tootie2• 12 years ago

Yahoo would have to take $90M/year charge and either give a reason to the SEC or just declare it classified which would be as good as saying the NSA is taking it.

tjohns2• 12 years ago

It's unlikely this would stop at just $90M/year.

There's no reason to believe the daily fine wouldn't continuously increase, or that executives wouldn't eventually be put in jail for contempt.

And keep in mind you can be held in jail indefinitely for contempt of court, as long as you remain in noncompliance.

duaneb2• 12 years ago

At that point they're in contempt of court. There's really no saying how long it would have stayed $250k/day. A week? A month?

comrade18• 12 years ago

I wish there was a way to post anon here. I create a new id every now and then and post but no one sees the posting because it's new...

I wish more people would be outraged by where the u.s. Is going and just leave. If you're educated, have desirable skills, you can just come to Europe. If you think you can change what's happening in the u.s. I do not agree with you. You will lose to the political class. They have 100% of their time to focus on restraining you while you have to focus on building your business.

The u.s. has become a force for evil in the world. It has been at war for almost the entire time of its existence. In the past Americans were protected from that reality but now the u.s. seems to be even at war with its citizens and businesses.

If you don't like what's happening in the u.s. you can quit your company you're building and become a politician, or you can just take your skills and knowledge to someplace different. But don't forget to continue filing your u.s. taxes.

idlewords14• 12 years ago

Some of us are outraged by where the U.S. is going but stay to try to fix it. Otherwise you get adverse selection effects, like when all the non-crazies left New Hampshire.

Plus have you ever had a European burrito? It's not pretty.

rsync• 12 years ago

Well, at least there is finally passable sushi being made in Zurich. That's a very, very new thing.

All kidding aside - the euro countries are no better than the US in these areas. They have different code-names and the agencies are different, but they're all going the same direction.

comrade18• 12 years ago

What are you doing to change the system?

hugogee• 12 years ago

I make the best MoFro burritos and tacos. I'll come and cook for everyone! I think the tequila is worse than the burritos though. o,0

happyscrappy2• 12 years ago

like when all the non-crazies left New Hampshire

Huh?

zo13• 12 years ago

"Some of us are outraged by where the U.S. is going but stay to try to fix it"

Do you truly believe you'll be able to change anything? Remember, people that reason about these sorts of things are the exception, not the rule. The majority just gobble up whatever "militaristic propaganda" (as one of the siblings called it) is fed to them by the media.

3pt14159• 12 years ago

This is why I haven't taken countless opportunities to move to the US from Toronto.

Willingly working in America is supporting the surveillance and military state. Yes, Canada is part of Five Eyes, but the political will to surveil everything is centred in America and the UK, Canada is just along for the ride because the cost to our defensive interests is too great to go against our NATO / NORAD arrangements.

jqm3• 12 years ago

Europe's management has it's own set of problems.

I might add, Europe has also been at war for most of the time it has been inhabited. Just because parts of Europe have taken a break for the last 60 years doesn't negate this.

comrade18• 12 years ago

I think the u.s. Has been at war for all but 21 years of its existence. I could be wrong - it was a stat from a website with an agenda.

comrade18• 12 years ago

What problems, btw? Surely nothing even close to the scope of the u.s.

goldfeld• 12 years ago

I'm pretty sure a bunch of old realms having long time land disputes and family feuds and ethnic disavowals for over a thousand years is different from an industrial military complex that keeps conjuring up wars for oil and to keep itself well-oiled, and worse yet stirs its fat finger in the world's cup in the name of self-righteous capitalism.

bostik• 12 years ago

I expect that it'd be difficult to find any major region in the entire history of the world with 60 years without war.

Hell, I wouldn't be surprised if that was even built in to humans on a sociological level. The recurring need for sword/spear/arrow/cannon fodder has been a socially acceptable way to prevent accumulation of an excess of (male) population. As soon as there are too many disgruntled people, those in power start to worry. Sending this cumbersome segment of population off to be killed has been, historically, a perfectly valid way to deal with the problem. (It has also provided a very convenient way to direct attention away from domestic problems.)

Nature shows the same tendency. When a local population of a species grows too great, lack of resources forces some of them to migrate outside their "normal" region. The inhabitants of the regions under invasion fight back, and eventually things return to an equilibrium.

jacquesm5• 12 years ago

The age of your account has absolutely nothing to do with who sees your posting.

Making new ids every now and then is strange, there is absolutely no need for that unless you are divulging something that might cost you your job or that you're embarrassed to share.

As for your 'come to Europe' call, America needs critical Americans just as much as Europe needs critical Europeans. The better solution would be to push for change locally, rather than to instigate a brain drain.

Europe has just as many problems as the US does, the only difference is that we do not yet have a European president with sufficient power to wield to cause real trouble. But we're getting there. And then what would you tell any Americans that you've tempted here with greener pastures? If you want to improve the world the best place to do it is right where you're living.

spindritf• 12 years ago

Making new ids every now and then is strange

Cycling through IDs online seems like a great way to prevent stuff from haunting you later. It's hard to predict what will turn out to be embarrassing or can cost you your job later.

In theory, you would need to be very careful to prevent a determined adversary from chaining those IDs together and back to you. In practice, it seems unlikely that anyone would be that determined.

IanDrake3• 12 years ago

The US is still full of good people and so long as those people are allowed to have guns, I'm staying.

Once the government disarms us, I'll probably leave. That will be the final nail in freedom's coffin.

idlewords14• 12 years ago

I can't wait to disarm you, brother. And the country will be better for it. Hand over those guns!

beedogs2• 12 years ago

I left. And the country I moved to has lurched even further into the realm of "authoritarian police state" than the US.

I'm of the opinion that all Western governments are headed down this path, inevitably. It's going to take a lot of violence and bloodshed (read: murdering the rich in their sleep) to "fix" this.

bruceboughton2• 12 years ago

> murdering the rich in their sleep

Well, you're a pleasant fellow.

cryoshon5• 12 years ago

I mostly agree, but remember that evil doesn't stop just because you remove your complicity from it-- it has to be actively contained or else it just continues to spread.

I agree that the US is a force for evil in the world. Getting other Americans to believe this is extremely difficult, as it is directly contrary to decades of militaristic propaganda.

rdtsc• 12 years ago

$250K/day -- someone had to come up with that number.

Was it some high level official? An intern?

I can imagine this dialogue taking place:

----

(Two bureaucrat monkeys. They just got back from lunch from cafeteria at Ft. Meade. Their tummies are bit heavy with greasy hamburgers. Settling in to finish their day before 2pm. One last thing needs to be done -- deciding on this PRISM non-compliance issue)

M0: What if they don't comply?

M1: We'll punish them!

M0: How?

M1: Well...we'll make them pay.

M0: How much?

M1: [Puts pinkie finger to the corner of his mouth] Two hundred and fifty thousand dollars a day!

M0: Great idea, M1

(They wrap up before clock hits 2pm. Get in their cars. One goes to pick up kids from soccer practice. Other drives straight home, to his bachelor-pad apartment in College Park, MD).

----

Wonder what and how the people who generated and viewed this documents feel about them being on the front page of news sites. I can only hope they feel a tiny bit violated and betrayed. Kind of like when someone breaks in and steals your things. Or violates your privacy.

AVTizzle2• 12 years ago

I was already loving your comment, and then you name-dropped College Park, MD my home for 4 years of undergraduate.

But you make a good point. There was a real life human (or humans) on the creating end of that number.

Do you think they believe they're actually fighting for American Freedoms and Security?

ams61102• 12 years ago

Do you think they believe they're actually fighting for American Freedoms and Security

Yes, they probably do think that.

quarterwave• 12 years ago

Tony: Umm... Control?

Control: Yes, Tony?

Tony: If I may ask, how did you determine this sum of a 150,000 pounds a day?

Control: A very good question, Tony. You see, I simply took the figure that our American cousins have calculated using a supercomputer, and converted the currency.

Tony: That's very clever of you, Control.

Control: Thank you, Tony. It proves that what we lack by way of resources we make up for with good old British ingenuity.

Watabou• 12 years ago

Tony and Control. I can't believe someone even remembers this! Now I'm depressed thinking about how Control had to fire Tony :(

notastartup• 12 years ago

This is like being shaken down by the Mafia.

You are not gonna do what we like? It's gonna cost ya. Next we are gonna break Marissa's legs.

idlewords14• 12 years ago

That's how courts enforce court orders. You can get philosophical and say that the state is just like the mafia, man, except legal. But surely you understand the need for some mechanism to force compliance from people who just say "I don't want to do that" to a court ruling.

biafra• 12 years ago

Yeah, but this is a secret court. Now way for the public to review it's decisions. No public accountability. That's IMHO what makes it Mafia like.

andy_ppp• 12 years ago

I actually believe that people should be allowed to do what they like, with the underlying premise that everyone has a right to not be harmed by another's actions. The law seems to have lost it's way to the point where if you are rich you win, poor you loose.

And if you are the government or a business and you can't win, you change the rules so that you can.

pkinsky• 12 years ago

Note that this argument applies equally well to enforcing the edicts of England's Star Chamber.

cryoshon5• 12 years ago

It's a secret court, with secret penalties, none of which you're allowed to talk about if you're being attacked by it.

Democracy does not coexist with expansive secret court systems...

legutierr• 12 years ago

Hmm...if they hadn't complied, in three months more than $20 million would have accrued.

Would that have been material enough to require disclosure in Yahoo's public filings? If so, how would it have been described? It seems as if by complying with SEC regulations, Yahoo would have been forced to violate secrecy rules with regards to the origin of the fine.

That would have been an interesting conundrum.

adventured3• 12 years ago

It certainly would have been material within a short amount of time. One could debate exactly how many quarters that line is hit at, but at $45m to $90m it starts to become very stupid to hide from shareholders from a legal standpoint.

Not reporting the exact details of a $90m acquisition is not a huge deal (for Yahoo). Not reporting on-going government fines that have amounted to $90m in a year, would be a huge deal. One is in theory the acquisition of value and enhances the business, the other is just a black hole of cash destruction.

Further, beyond the money, intentionally doing something against the US Government such that you're getting fined per day, is a big issue for shareholders to know about. Especially given the power the government wields these days.

idlewords14• 12 years ago

A smarter company would have treated the $250K as a marketing expense. It's peanuts compared to what Yahoo earns, and imagine the reaction when people figured out that Yahoo had gone to the mat for its users.

alaaibrahim• 12 years ago

you understand that in order for this to be marketing it needs to be public information.

idlewords14• 12 years ago

That's what the multi-million dollar charge marked REDACTED on your quarterly earnings report is for.

duaneb2• 12 years ago

A smarter company would have treated the $250K as a marketing expense.

That's called 'contempt of court' and would cause the fines to go up the second the judge realized how they took it.

psykovsky• 12 years ago

They fought it, but they're complying...

sharkweek• 12 years ago

Let's just say hypothetically Yahoo said "No" and refused to pay the fines.

What happens next? Do the feds forcibly shut down the company?

korzun• 12 years ago

Ironically, half of HN is circle jerking DuckDuckGo as some sort of privacy king pin every other week.

They are either in bed with NSA or will be very soon. I laugh how gullible some people are.

"But they owner told me that they will stand up to US government with 3M seed round guys!"

quackerhacker• 12 years ago

Just seeing the dates that the companies complied (or were forced to comply) is disappointing. A full year after Steve Jobs passes and stepped down as CEO, then Apple is added to that list.

Way to go Yahoo for sticking it our then.

bengrunfeld2• 12 years ago

Anyone who believes that America champions freedom of speech and expression only has to go as far as the closest newspaper to discover that it's a bull-faced lie.

dredmorbius11• 12 years ago

NB: usually given as "bald-faced lie".

bengrunfeld2• 12 years ago

Since I am bald and respect my own hairlessness, I prefer the term "bull-faced lie", since I have much less respect for bulls. ;)

_pmf_• 12 years ago

Feds Threatened to Fine Yahoo $250K Daily for Not Complying with NSA's PRISM

Luckily, they realized that nothing of worth is on Yahoo.

kriro• 12 years ago

I applaud them for fighting this in some way but at the end of the day they'll probably comply somehow.

The curious mind in me would like to see a parallel universe in which a major company responds to these threads by leaving the US entirely (or threatening to do so) and then running an anti agency here campaign for years to spite them. Or maybe a big enough company that takes them heads on and crushes them...well I guess I've been reading too much dystopia fiction recently and am curious how the megacorps > governments scenario would actually be kickstarted.

[the situation is too sad for me to think about it in realistic terms, sorry for the minor derail]

allegory• 12 years ago

The company I worked for a few years ago (I'm not going to disclose who as I'll get shot) were an EU based insurance org and had a US subsidiary that they used for selling overseas. They had a 5 man legal team to keep the US govt off their backs. In the end they said "fuck it" and closed US operations down one afternoon with no noticed, cancelled everyone's policies and fired everyone (gave them 4 months pay at the same time).

Everyone was told why including the investors.

Not a major company (<$50M capital) but it stirred the pot big time in a particular sector of the insurance industry and pissed off a number of large investors in the US.

DominikR2• 12 years ago

A militarized police state, the state subjugating private businesses according to its needs, state intrusions into the most private spheres of its citizens, executions of US citizens without trial, kidnappings - it all looks like we are moving straight into fascism.

And I'm seeing the same pattern in the EU where I live since it basically copies whatever the US does.

"Fascist governments encouraged the pursuit of private profit and offered many benefits to large businesses, but they demanded in return that all economic activity should serve the national interest."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economics_of_fascism

jdimov3• 12 years ago

The US and Israel now have what the Nazis could only dream about.

DominikR2• 12 years ago

I do not like how Israel is always portrayed as some thug that is pulling the strings. Israel is a small satellite state of the US in a very important region, therefore Israel is very important to the US in realizing its goals to dominate this region.

Also, the comparison with Nazi Germany is wrong. The US does not have any racial ideology, it wants to dominate economically and militarily, not destroy if it doesn't have to.

A government that is fascist doesn't mean automatically that it has any policies towards certain races. It just means that it gradually removes freedoms of its citizens in every sphere to excert greater control over its population.

The only reason that muslims are victimized on this scale is that mostly muslims live in that region. If the region was mostly habitated by a buddhist or jewish population that isn't compliant with US demands, then buddhists or jews would be the victims.

idlewords14• 12 years ago

Decent jet engines!

Seriously, you typed this statement and thought what? "Now we'll finally have a fruitful discussion on the hacker site"?

cryoshon5• 12 years ago

Yeah, we've been there for about a decade now, and the mask is slipping off.

The biggest question is what to do, and how to do it. Clearly, we have to fix things, but how do we fix a fascism problem that is deeply ingrained in the roots of power and spans multiple countries economic, social, military, and political structures?

happyscrappy2• 12 years ago

If the US and EU are fascist is there a country that isn't?

chris_wot• 12 years ago

Yeah? I'd just refuse to pay, what are they going to do - publicize it?

TeMPOraL• 12 years ago

Dig up that tax report 5 years ago you accidentally did wrong. Unofficially point the MAFIAA towards the fact that your kid pirated few songs and a movie last month. Or find something else entirely. You'll end up in jail or with no money for reasons (on the surface) completely unrelated to the case.

jbverschoor• 12 years ago

Dear Yahoo, move to europe

icantthinkofone• 12 years ago

When the terrorists stop using the internet, the government will stop searching for them with PRISM. Sound fair?

known• 12 years ago

Never do anything against conscience even if the state demands it.

Feds Threatened to Fine Yahoo $250K Daily for Not Complying with NSA's PRISM

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