Yahoo is the latest company to reveal its dealings with the US authorities, following revelations about the Prism surveillance programme. It said it had received between 12,000 and 13,000 US government requests for user data in the past year and a half. Most of them had "concerned fraud, homicides, kidnappings, and other criminal investigations", it said. Yahoo voiced frustration that it was unable to reveal the number of requests that had concerned national security. It urged the government to "reconsider its stance on this issue". "Like all companies, Yahoo cannot lawfully break out Fisa [Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act] request numbers at this time because those numbers are classified," it said in a blog post by chief executive Marissa Mayer and general counsel Ron Bell. FISA is widely seen as the legislation under which Prism operated. Earlier in the week Twitter also said it was important to be able to publish numbers of national security requests. And Google said lumping police requests with national security requests was "a step back for users". Tech firms have been under pressure to disclose information about data passed to the National Security Agency (NSA) since the Guardian and Washington Post revealed the existence of Prism - a programme giving the NSA access to user data held on the servers of tech firms including Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, Facebook, PalTalk, AOL, and Apple.
Posted on: Tue, 18 Jun 2013 14:38:07 +0000
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