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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 Popeidol on Sunday March 02 2014, @07:24AM
They estimate 3% to 11% of the images they've collected contain 'undesirable nudity', the vagueness because they just ran all the pictures through algorithms that track the amount of visible flesh tones. The algorithms are most commonly used to assist police with investigating child porn: You confiscate a computer, run every single image on in through the script, and it'll present you with a shortlist of those that are most likely to be have nudity.
This is an interesting link because, as it turns out, This revelation probably makes GCHQ the largest producer and collector of child pornography in the world. The sheer amount of data they're collecting makes this inevitable. Once the data has been stored (and apparently accessible to more than a few people), the chance those images could be made public in some way is real.
There is no getting away from that fact: UK residents have been unknowingly funding government efforts to capture and store images of naked minors that would otherwise have been gone forever. I honestly can't think of much that would make this story any worse.
(Score: 5, Funny) by AnonTechie on Sunday March 02 2014, @08:07AM
They estimate 3% to 11% of the images they've collected contain 'undesirable nudity'
What would be considered as DESIRABLE NUDITY ??
Albert Einstein - "Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former."
(Score: 5, Funny) by Luke on Sunday March 02 2014, @08:26AM
Obviously the remaining 89% to 97% of nude photos...
(Score: 1) by isostatic on Sunday March 02 2014, @12:19PM
Natalie Portman, naked and petrified
(Score: 2) by Khyber on Sunday March 02 2014, @08:54AM
Sounds like you were listening to me in the IRC chat. ;)
And the NSA would be somewhat complicit in this, as well, which makes them equally guilty.
Destroying Semiconductors With Style Since 2008, and scaring you ill-educated fools since 2013.
(Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Sunday March 02 2014, @09:40AM
Then you clearly lack imagination. What would make this story any worse would be if those images have actually been used. I can imagine that such images could come in handy for certain other activities. [soylentnews.org]
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 1) by Boxzy on Sunday March 02 2014, @08:22PM
There's only one reason to steal private pictures like this, and that's to use them. I'm willing to bet the GCHQ's online Misinformation dept HAS used them or why do it?
Go green, Go Soylent.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by mojo chan on Sunday March 02 2014, @11:17AM
I'm actually hoping that the images are made public. We need a wistleblower or hacker to get them out. I'm convinced that we need some kind of privacy apocalypse to make the general public take notice and demand action. The government losing million's of people's tax records or confidential NHS data doesn't seem to be enough. To be honest I'm not sure even this would be, people would just say "only losers use Yahoo video chat anyway" or some such nonsense. Like the people who dismiss Facebook users' expectation of basic privacy - we can feel smugly superior but that doesn't change the principals involved.
I noticed that this was only a minor story on most news sites and programmes. A day later it was pushed aside by the convenient release of some pro-MI5 propaganda about how they had German spies working for them during WW2.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)