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US Internet Company Refused To Participate In NSA Surveillance, Documents Reveal (zdnet.com)
Zack Whittaker reports via ZDNet: A U.S. company refused to comply with a top-secret order that compelled it to facilitate government surveillance, according to newly declassified documents. According to the document, the unnamed company's refusal to participate in the surveillance program was tied to an apparent expansion of the foreign surveillance law, details of which were redacted by the government prior to its release, as it likely remains classified. It's thought to be only the second instance of an American company refusing to comply with a government surveillance order. The first was Yahoo in 2008. It was threatened with hefty daily fines if it didn't hand over customer data to the National Security Agency. The law is widely known in national security circles as forming the legal basis authorizing the so-called PRISM surveillance program, which reportedly taps data from nine tech titans including Apple, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, and others. It also permits "upstream" collection from the internet fiber backbones of the internet. Any guesses as to which company it may be? The company was not named in the 2014-dated document, but it's thought to be an internet provider or a tech company.
Lavabit, assuming the calendar years fit the redacted docs.
It isn't Qwest. These documents are from 2014. Qwest was bought out and rebranded in 2011. The NSA stuff they're known for was from the early 2000s.
When I got a notice from Cox for my "business-level connection" they specifically wrote that as this was a business service I was allowed per my contract to share out my signal via unauthenticated wifi and they therefor assumed that was how the infringement happened. At that point, I tweaked utorrent to only share back up to 120% and then stop seeding, and never got another notification. So yes, they do really put their customer first in this.