PR Boost for Yahoo!; Crowdfunding for a Good Cause
QUEST: It was a quarter of a million dollar fine every day until you give the U.S. government what it wants. And by the way, you can't tell anybody about it. It was the threat that Uncle Sam made to Yahoo! for not handing over user data in 2008. Yahoo! ended up revealing the data and has now won the release of documents showing the battle that it waged trying to avoid it, whose general counsel, Ron Bell, said in a statement. "We consider this an important win for transparency and we hope these records help promote informed discussions about the relationship between privacy, due process and intelligence gathering." PRISM was the code name for the U.S. National Security Agency's secret data collection program. It was based on requests to Internet companies to provide information launched in 2007 as part of President Bush's Protect America Act. The design -- and it was revealed by the -- to the public by Edward Snowden in 2013. Last year at "The Washington Post," quote a source saying 98 percent of PRISM requests made to three companies, Yahoo!, Google and Microsoft, not surprisingly, they carry most of the Internet email and traffic. Patrick Toomey is the staff attorney for the American Civil Liberties Union, the National Security Project. He joins me now from New York. The Yahoo! fought the decision and they lost the initial and they lost the appeal. And faced this very severe fine. But they were finally allowed to reveal the case, weren't they. Why?</s>PATRICK TOOMEY, ATTORNEY, ACLU: That's right. Yahoo! should be applauded for fighting back against the government's sweeping requests for its customers' information. It was permitted to release these documents after an order from the secret FISA court earlier this week. And those documents revealed both arguments that Yahoo! made on behalf of its customers' privacy and that the government made in its effort to defend its requests for information on Yahoo! customers without a warrant and without probable cause.</s>QUEST: So let's put this into today's architecture. You have the United States now about to prosecute a campaign or a war, if you like, against ISIS, ISIL. You have a coalition forming and you have the possibility that once again that sort of information is going to be required. How does a government get that information when we're all using the Internet that for you passed constitutional muster?</s>TOOMEY: The government's efforts to obtain information about individuals should be targeted. It should be based on reasonable suspicion and it should not engage in the type of bulk collection that had been revealed in the aftermath of the Snowden disclosures. That type of bulk collection is not an effective tool, is not a constitutional tool for seizing the information of Americans from companies like Yahoo!, Microsoft, Google and others.</s>QUEST: Do you think -- I mean, Yahoo! put up a fight and it -- and even after handing over the information, which I assume you accept they had no choice, rule of law, you've got to hand it over. That's the way the law seems to demand it. But they continue to fight and that, from your point of view, is to be applauded.</s>TOOMEY: It's -- Yahoo! is -- should be applauded for putting up the fight that it did. Of course that fight was conducted entirely in secret without the knowledge or participation of the public, the ability of individual users of its services or other organizations like the ACLU and other advocacy and privacy oriented organizations to participate in those core proceedings. And in fact, some of the -- some portions of those secret core proceedings were secret even from Yahoo! itself. What this whole process shows is that there are many layers of secrecy and many road blocks that prevent the public from participating in this conversation.</s>QUEST: Sir, thank you for joining us, bringing us the perspective. I appreciate it. Jenny Harrison's now with us from the World Weather Center. Now we know obviously this weekend is crucial, what's happening in Pakistan and in India, with -- as the crest of the rivers come down. But it's a very busy week elsewhere.</s>JENNY HARRISON, CNN METEOROLOGIST: It is, as you say. This weekend, the</s>QUEST: Yes, yes. I wouldn't like to tell you how many times I have stood outside, middle of the night in some freezing part of the Northern Hemisphere trying to find the borealis, or whatever it is. Finally managed to see it.</s>HARRISON: Well, good. I'm glad. Have a nice weekend, warm, sunny Spain.</s>DIANA MAGNAY, CNN CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): The 2008 global financial crisis saw the banks turning off the taps on loans. Overnight the investment landscape changed. Budding entrepreneurs with no track record had to find new ways to raise capital to fund growth. Along came crowdfunding, leveraging the power of people to finance projects and the return on your investment, well, it could be some kind of equity stake or a reward or maybe even just the warm feeling inside you get from financing something that you believe in. Hamburg-based startup Protonet turned to the crowd for cash to develop its secure personal service.</s>ALI JELVEH, FOUNDER, PROTONET: These parts come in directly from our 3D printer like we have here and it helps us keep production and development cycles short.</s>MAGNAY: How many companies have this in their offices now?</s>JELVEH: About a little over 250. So this is -- we're sending out three or four boxes more of this today. We said, OK. This is what we're going to do. We're going to take our story and our vision of what we believe the future should look like and tell it to the crowd and see what happens.</s>MAGNAY (voice-over): What happened was that in less than an hour and a half, Protonet had raised $1 million.</s>JELVEH: It's a profit sharing agreement. So if we get as big and have huge successes, which we'll hopefully have, you will be a part of that. Plus we also get one of our latest products. The percentage of crowd funding that we have is about 60-65 percent. And I believe in the future we will see companies at 100 percent crowd funded.</s>MAGNAY (voice-over): Crowd funding taps into an online community, generating small contributions from lots of people.</s>BEN YEARSLEY, CHARLES STANLEY DIRECT: I think that's the dilemma for the crowd funding industry to sort out, the level of risk involved and who they're actually marketing to and who they want to invest in their platforms. So the future is interesting. There's a need for funding. But you've got this issue of risk and levels of investment that have to be sold, I think.</s>MAGNAY (voice-over): It's an industry that's finding its way but Oliver Gajda believes the crowdfunding approach will have a place in how businesses are funded in the future.</s>OLIVER GAJDA, EUROPEAN CROWDFUNDING NETWORK: If you look at how a startup</s>MAGNAY (voice-over): Protonet celebrates another sale. This small German startup thinks the crowd could become a powerful force in finance.</s>JELVEH: I think it's going to be an earthquake. And I believe that it's going to fundamentally change the way things are funded.</s>MAGNAY (voice-over): As social media communities grow, the power of the online crowd could play an increasingly important role in democratizing the investment world and in backing the businesses of the future.</s>QUEST: The referendum in Scotland is next week. One of the questions that will be raised, should the yes vote win, what happens to the Union Jack for the rump U.K.? Does it have to be rewritten? Start again.