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GCHQ Collected Images of Yahoo! Webcam Chat Users

posted by girlwhowaspluggedout on Sunday March 02 2014, @06:00AM   Printer-friendly
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."

 
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  • (Score: 5, Insightful) by ticho on Sunday March 02 2014, @01:42PM

    by ticho (89) on Sunday March 02 2014, @01:42PM (#9591) Homepage Journal

    What are the chances that if they're doing this to yahoo, they're doing it to skype as well? I'd say somewhere upwards of 100%.

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  • (Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Sunday March 02 2014, @02:23PM

    by maxwell demon (1608) on Sunday March 02 2014, @02:23PM (#9606) Journal

    What about the camera built into your newest smart TV?
    Can you even be sure that it doesn't record if your TV is "off"?

    --
    The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.

    • (Score: 1) by sce7mjm on Sunday March 02 2014, @02:35PM

      by sce7mjm (809) on Sunday March 02 2014, @02:35PM (#9610)

      Insulating tape over the top.

      Don't help with the microphone, but I recon expanding (polyeurethene iirc) glue might help a little...

  • (Score: 1) by jt on Sunday March 02 2014, @02:34PM

    by jt (2890) on Sunday March 02 2014, @02:34PM (#9609)

    100% would be my guess. And every other communication service too. Still, nice to know that at least one part of the government is listening to us.

    • (Score: 2) by ticho on Sunday March 02 2014, @05:06PM

      by ticho (89) on Sunday March 02 2014, @05:06PM (#9656) Homepage Journal

      Indeed - this is why I'm waiting/hoping for Tox [tox.im] to become more widely used.