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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, 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.
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