Yahoo Webcam Images From Millions of Users Intercepted by GCHQ

Spencer Ackerman and James Ball, reporting for The Guardian:

GCHQ files dating between 2008 and 2010 explicitly state that a surveillance program codenamed Optic Nerve collected still images of Yahoo webcam chats in bulk and saved them to agency databases, regardless of whether individual users were an intelligence target or not.

In one six-month period in 2008 alone, the agency collected webcam imagery — including substantial quantities of sexually explicit communications — from more than 1.8 million Yahoo user accounts globally.

There’s no other way to describe this than Orwellian. Government agencies spying on and collecting images of innocent citizens. Outrageous.

★ Thursday, 27 February 2014