America's National Security Agency has already acknowledged that some analysts have been caught trawling databases for inappropriate material on partners or love interests. The collection of nude photographs also raises questions about potential for blackmail.
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"At least Big Brother had the decency to install his own cameras," British media lawyer David Banksy said in a message posted to Twitter after the revelations broke. But the stockpiling of sexually explicit images of ordinary people had uncomfortable echoes of George Orwell's "Nineteen Eighty-Four," where the authorities - operating under the aegis of "Big Brother" - fit homes with cameras to monitor the intimate details of people's personal lives.
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The Guardian said that OPTIC NERVE was intended at least in part to identify targets using automatic facial recognition software as they stared into their computer's webcams. It went on to say that an informal study had found that between 3 and 11 percent of all the images carried "undesirable nudity." "It would appear that a surprising number of people use webcam conversations to show intimate parts of their body to the other person," another snippet of an intelligence document published said.
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One snippet of a leaked document published to the Guardian's website appears to show that GCHQ hoped to eventually "collect images at a faster rate," or perhaps even download all the webcam videos in their entirety.Įven at one screenshot every five minutes, material published to the Guardian's website appeared to show UK analysts being deluged with X-rated footage. However, unlike the phone database, OPTIC NERVE also automatically downloaded the content of video communications - taking a screenshot from the video feed every five minutes, the Guardian said. Like the NSA's collection of millions of innocent people's phone, email, and credit card data, the webcam surveillance program was carried out in bulk, creating a massive database where the communications of hundreds of thousands of people could later be scanned by analysts for clues or patterns. The Sunnyvale, California-based company said it was unaware of such snooping and would never condone it, calling on governments across the world to reform their surveillance practices. If confirmed, the newspaper's report would represent "a whole new level of violation of our users' privacy," Yahoo said in a written statement. The Guardian said the documents were provided by former US intelligence worker Edward Snowden, who remains in Russia after having sought temporary asylum there. Yahoo Messenger had 75 million users worldwide in late 2011, according to an estimate by digital analytics company comScore, although numbers have fallen steadily since then. If the program expanded, millions more could have had their video communications intercepted. The Guardian said that in one six-month period in 2008, GCHQ intercepted the video communications of 1.8 million users, but it's possible that the program, which the Guardian says was still active in 2012, has either grown or shrunk in scope since then. It's not clear how many Yahoo users were spied on in this way. The newspaper said GCHQ has been scooping up the sensitive images by intercepting video chats such as the kind offered by Yahoo Messenger, an effort codenamed OPTIC NERVE. London: Britain's signals intelligence division is stealing screenshots from hundreds of thousands of innocent Yahoo users' webcam videos, according to the Guardian newspaper, which also reported that the years-long operation has swept up a huge haul of intimate photographs.
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