The U.S. government threatened to fine Yahoo $250,000 a day in 2008 if it failed to comply with a broad demand for user data that the company believed was unconstitutional, according to court documents unsealed Thursday. (Justin Sullivan/Getty Images) 
 
 The U.S. government threatened to fine Yahoo $250,000 a day in 2008 if it failed to comply with a broad demand to hand over user communications — a request the company believed was unconstitutional — according to court documents unsealed Thursday that illuminate how federal officials forced American tech companies to participate in the National Security Agency’s controversial PRISM program. 
 
 The documents, roughly 1,500 pages worth, outline a secret and ultimately unsuccessful legal battle by Yahoo to resist the government’s demands. The company’s loss required Yahoo to become one of the first to begin providing information to PRISM, a program that gave the NSA extensive access to records of online com­munications by users of Yahoo and other U.S.-based technology firms. 
 
 The ruling by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court of Review became a key moment in the development of PRISM, helping government officials to convince other Silicon Valley companies that unprecedented data demands had been tested in the courts and found constitutionally sound. Eventually, most major U.S. tech companies, including Google, Facebook, Apple and AOL, complied. Microsoft had joined earlier, before the ruling, NSA documents have shown. 
 
 A version of the court ruling had been released in 2009 but was so heavily redacted that observers were unable to discern which company was involved, what the stakes were and how the court had wrestled with many of the issues involved. 
 
 “We already knew that this was a very, very important decision by the FISA Court of Review, but we could only guess at why,” said Stephen Vladeck, a law professor at American University. 
 
 The U.S. government threatened to fine Yahoo $250,000 a day in 2008 if it failed to comply with a broad demand for user data that the company believed was unconstitutional, according to court documents unsealed Thursday. (Reuters) 
 
 PRISM was first revealed by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden last year, prompting intense backlash and a wrenching national debate over allegations of overreach in government surveillance. 
 
 Documents made it clear that the program allowed the NSA to order U.S.-based tech companies to turn over e-mails and other communications to or from foreign targets without search warrants for each of those targets. Other NSA programs gave even more wide-ranging access to ­personal information of people worldwide, by collecting data directly from fiber-optic connections. 
 
 In the aftermath of the revelations, the companies have struggled to defend themselves against accusations that they were willing participants in government surveillance programs — an allegation that has been particularly damaging to the reputations of these companies overseas, including in lucrative markets in Europe. 
 
 Yahoo, which endured heavy criticism after The Washington Post and Britain’s Guardian newspaper used Snowden’s documents to reveal the existence of PRISM last year, was legally bound from revealing its efforts in attempting to resist government pressure. The New York Times first reported Yahoo’s role in the case in June 2013, a week after the initial PRISM revelations. 
 
 Both the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court and the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court of Review, an appellate court, ordered declassification of the case last year, amid a broad effort to make public the legal reasoning behind NSA programs that had stirred national and international anger. Judge William C. Bryson, presiding judge of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court of Review, ordered the documents from the legal battle unsealed Thursday. Documents from the case in the lower court have not been released. 
 
 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. 
 
 The Justice Department and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence published their own Tumblr post Thursday evening offering a detailed description of the court proceedings and posting several related documents. It noted that both the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court and the appeals court sided with the government on the main questions at issue, and added that a subsequent law added more protections, making it “even more protective of the Fourth Amendment rights of U.S. persons than the statute upheld by the [appeals court] as constitutional.” 
 
 At issue in the original court case was a recently passed law, the Protect America Act of 2007, that allowed the government to collect data for significant foreign intelligence purposes on targets “reasonably believed” to be outside of the United States. Individual search warrants were not required for each target. That law has lapsed but became the foundation for the FISA Amendments Act of 2008, which created the legal authority for some of the NSA programs later revealed by Snowden. 
 
 The order requiring data from Yahoo came in 2007, soon after the Protect America Act passed. It set off alarms at the company because it sidestepped the traditional requirement that each target be subject to court review before surveillance could begin. The order also went beyond “metadata” — records of communications but not their actual content — to include the full e-mails. 
 
 A government filing from February 2008 described the order to Yahoo as including “certain types of communications while those communications are in transmission.” It also made clear that while this was intended to target people outside the United States, there inevitably would be “incidental collection” of the communications of Americans. The government promised “stringent minimization procedures to protect the privacy interests of United States persons.” 
 
 Rather than immediately comply with the sweeping order, Yahoo sued. 
 
 Central to the case was whether the Protect America Act overstepped constitutional bounds, particularly the Fourth Amendment prohibition on unreasonable searches and seizures without a warrant. An early Yahoo filing said the case was “of tremendous national importance. The issues at stake in this litigation are the most serious issues that this Nation faces today — to what extent must the privacy rights guaranteed by the United States Constitution yield to protect our national security.” 
 
 The appeals court, however, ruled that the government had put in place adequate safeguards to avoid constitutional violations. 
 
 “We caution that our decision does not constitute an endorsement of broad-based, indiscriminate executive power,” the court wrote on Aug. 22, 2008. “Rather, our decision recognizes that where the government has instituted several layers of serviceable safeguards to protect individuals against unwarranted harms and to minimize incidental intrusions, its efforts to protect national security should not be frustrated by the courts. This is such a case.” 
 
 The government threatened Yahoo with the $250,000-a-day fine after the company had lost an initial round before the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court but was still pursuing an appeal. Faced with the fine, Yahoo began complying with the legal order as it continued with the appeal, which it lost several months later. 
 
 Stewart Baker, a former NSA general counsel and Bush administration Department of Homeland Security official, said it’s not unusual for courts to order compliance with rulings while appeals continue before higher courts. 
 
 “I’m always astonished how people are willing to abstract these decisions from the actual stakes,” Baker said. “We’re talking about trying to gather information about people who are trying to kill us and who will succeed if we don’t have robust information about their activities.” 
 
 The American Civil Liberties Union applauded Thursday’s move to release the documents but said it was long overdue. 
 
 “The public can’t understand what a law means if it doesn’t know how the courts are interpreting that law,” said Patrick Toomey, a staff attorney with the ACLU’s National Security Project. 
 
 Carol D. Leonnig and Julie Tate contributed to this report. ||||| Two different versions of the PRISM scandal were emerging on Thursday with Silicon Valley executives denying all knowledge of the top secret program that gives the National Security Agency direct access to the internet giants' servers. 
 
 The eavesdropping program is detailed in the form of PowerPoint slides in a leaked NSA document, seen and authenticated by the Guardian, which states that it is based on "legally-compelled collection" but operates with the "assistance of communications providers in the US." 
 
 Each of the 41 slides in the document displays prominently the corporate logos of the tech companies claimed to be taking part in PRISM. 
 
 However, senior executives from the internet companies expressed surprise and shock and insisted that no direct access to servers had been offered to any government agency. 
 
 The top-secret NSA briefing presentation set out details of the PRISM program, which it said granted access to records such as emails, chat conversations, voice calls, documents and more. The presentation the listed dates when document collection began for each company, and said PRISM enabled "direct access from the servers of these US service providers: Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, Facebook, Paltalk, AOL, Skype, YouTube, Apple". 
 
 Senior officials with knowledge of the situation within the tech giants admitted to being confused by the NSA revelations, and said if such data collection was taking place, it was without companies' knowledge. 
 
 An Apple spokesman said: "We have never heard of PRISM. We do not provide any government agency with direct access to our servers and any agency requesting customer data must get a court order," he said. 
 
 Joe Sullivan, Facebook's chief security officer, said it did not provide government organisation with direct access to Facebook servers. "When Facebook is asked for data or information about specific individuals, we carefully scrutinise any such request for compliance with all applicable laws, and provide information only to the extent required by law." 
 
 A Google spokesman also said it did not provide officials with access to its servers. "Google cares deeply about the security of our users' data. We disclose user data to government in accordance with the law, and we review all such requests carefully. From time to time, people allege that we have created a government 'backdoor' into our systems, but Google does not have a 'back door' for the government to access private user data." 
 
 Microsoft said it only turned over data when served with a court order: "We provide customer data only when we receive a legally binding order or subpoena to do so, and never on a voluntary basis. In addition we only ever comply with orders for requests about specific accounts or identifiers. If the government has a broader voluntary national security program to gather customer data we don't participate in it." 
 
 A Yahoo spokesman said: "Yahoo! takes users' privacy very seriously. We do not provide the government with direct access to our servers, systems, or network. 
 
 Within the tech companies, and talking on off the record, executives said they had never even heard of PRISM until contacted by the Guardian. Executives said that they were regularly contacted by law officials and responded to all subpoenas but they denied ever having heard of a scheme like PRISM, an information programme internal the documents state has been running since 2007. 
 
 Executives said they were "confused" by the claims in the NSA document. "We operate under what we are required to do by law," said one. "We receive requests for information all the time. Say about a potential terrorist threat or after the Boston bombing. But we have systems in place for that." The executive claimed, as did others, that the most senior figures in their organisation had never heard of PRISM or any scheme like it. 
 
 The chief executive of transparency NGO Index on Censorship, Kirsty Hughes, remarked on Twitter that the contradiction seemed to leave two options: "Back door or front?" she posted.
– Just how badly did the federal government want data about Yahoo users for its now-notorious PRISM surveillance program? It threatened to fine the company $250,000 a day in 2008 if it didn't comply, reports the Washington Post. The revelation comes from newly declassified court documents detailing the company's fight with the National Security Agency to keep the "metadata" out of the government's hands. Yahoo eventually lost its case in the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, and the NSA soon got other tech giants such as Facebook, Apple, and Google to comply as well. “The released documents underscore how we had to fight every step of the way to challenge the U.S. Government’s surveillance efforts,” says Yahoo General Counsel Ron Bell in a Tumblr blog post. The company viewed the government's request as unconstitutional, but the super-secret intelligence court disagreed. PRISM, first revealed by Edward Snowden, was reportedly discontinued in 2011.