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. The New York Times first reported Yahoo’s role in the case in June 2013, a week after the initial PRISM revelations. Key takeaways from these documents include: 
 
 An expanded version of the FISC-R opinion in the case, originally released in 2008 in a more redacted form.  By Ron Bell, General Counsel 
 
 Today we are pleased to announce the release of more than 1,500 pages of once-secret papers from Yahoo’s 2007-2008 challenge to the expansion of U.S. surveillance laws. 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.
– 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.