Company says court papers would show the public it fought strenuously against intelligence agencies accessing its data.
Yahoo has said that it is legal to argue against the intelligence agencies who have access to its data that should be made public.
Yahoo has called up Fisa, the secretive surveillance court in US, for publishing its argument against a case that gave the government “powerful leverage” in persuading tech companies to co-operate with a controversial data-gathering program.
In the first court filing of San Jose Mercury News, the company will argue the release which will demonstrate that Yahoo “objected strenuously” in a key 2008 case after the National Security Agency (NSA) demanded Yahoo customers’ information.
It was identified by NSA in June that Yahoo, along with Apple, Google, Facebook, Microsoft and other companies were participating in a secret surveillance scheme, known as Prism. It was declared by the former NSA contractor Edward Snowden that the documents disclosed by the Guardian and Washington Post, as”direct access” to the servers of top tech firms. This has been the source of strenuous dispute by the companies.
Yahoo said to Fisa, “Release of this court’s decision and the parties’ briefing is necessary to inform the growing public debate about how this court considers and examines the government’s use of directives. Courts have long recognised the public has a right to access court records.”
Under federal law the ruling and Yahoo’s arguments against it have been treated as classified information.
Yahoo said in the filing, “The directives at issue in this debate are at the centre of a robust national debate represented by countless news articles, a statement from the director of national intelligence and congressional hearings, inform this debate and prevent misunderstandings.
Yahoo also commented, “Disclosure of the directives and the briefs in this case would also allow Yahoo to demonstrate that it objected strenuously to the directives that are now the subject of debate, and objected at every stage of the proceedings, but that theses objections were overruled and its request for stay was denied.
The company’s move has made the government to provide more public clarity on their surveillance of people’s online lives. The Google and Microsoft are seeking for permission to reveal more information about the numbers and types of requests for information they receive under national security programs.