US government “threatened” Yahoo with daily $250,000 fines over user data

In the post-Snowden era many web firms came in for criticism over their apparent willingness to bend over for the NSA as the agency went on a massive data grab. Now, however, Yahoo has revealed how much it would have cost the company to disregard government data requests – a cool quarter of a million dollars per day.

NSA catches only 10% of data legally, but is it a fair trade off?

That leaves large-scale privacy invasion on 90% of 160,000 analysed messages swept up illegally by the NSA. But credit where credit is due: the legal 10% of intercepts have significant intelligence value, including data about a secret overseas nuclear project and double-dealing by an ostensible ally.