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from the and-this-one-goes-into-my-private-collection dept.
lhsi writes:
"The Guardian has revealed that GCHQ has been collecting the images of millions of Yahoo! webcam chat users, whether or not they were intelligence targets.
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.
Yahoo reacted furiously to the webcam interception when approached by the Guardian. The company denied any prior knowledge of the program, accusing the agencies of 'a whole new level of violation of our users' privacy'.
According to the documents provided by Edward Snowden, the system, called Optic Nerve, saved one image every five minutes from Yahoo! users' feeds. These users, the documents reveals, were 'unselected', i.e. indiscriminately targeted. GCHQ doesn't have the technical means to make sure no images of UK or US citizens are collected and stored by the system."
(Score: 5, Interesting) by thomasdotnet on Sunday March 02 2014, @06:13AM
1 image every 5 minutes from millions of users? I'm really curious how they will spin that as anti-terrorism. Honestly, I'm curious how they will spin it as anything other than "well, we learned that we COULD, so we DID." To quote a movie, "Uhhh, what is the practical application of this sir?"
I'm sure they could dig up lots of blackmail material, but even that... it's not targeted. I could really understand their desire to do this in a targeted manor, but this is more like a proof of concept run amok.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 02 2014, @06:54AM
kiddy porn
(Score: 4, Interesting) by frojack on Sunday March 02 2014, @09:10AM
Agreed, this is just totally whack!
They have no way to know (allegedly) where the feeds are coming from or who is in them, but they are saving snaps every 5 minutes! To what end?
Doing facial recognition hoping to find some terrorist they might recognize? (Cuz we all know terrorists love the yahoo).
And failing any hits why do they still have all this data?
They can do this, only because they are above the law.
Black stickers on all my front facing cams. I never use them anyway, but I have no way of telling if someone else uses them.
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by mojo chan on Sunday March 02 2014, @11:11AM
Targeting comes later. Need to blackmail someone? You have five years of Yahoo webcam images to mine for embarrassing pictures. Naturally they had to build in facial recognition to make searching easier, and create a massive database of innocent people's faces. I bet it's just like CSI where all the faces flash up needlessly as it searches, just to show how cool it.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)