In the latest revelation from the Snowden docs, Ackerman and James Ball report that Britain’s GCHQ, with help from the NSA, snooped on millions of Yahoo webcam chats between 2008 and 2010 under a program called Optic Nerve:
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“.
GCHQ does not have the technical means to make sure no images of UK or US citizens are collected and stored by the system, and there are no restrictions under UK law to prevent Americans’ images being accessed by British analysts without an individual warrant.
Here is the, er, money quote:
Sexually explicit webcam material proved to be a particular problem for GCHQ, as one document delicately put it: “Unfortunately … it would appear that a surprising number of people use webcam conversations to show intimate parts of their body to the other person. Also, the fact that the Yahoo software allows more than one person to view a webcam stream without necessarily sending a reciprocal stream means that it appears sometimes to be used for broadcasting pornography.”
Imagine that. John Aravosis wonders how, exactly, this program was supposed to help catch terrorists:
Of course, there are a few problems here. First of which, one could also search this system for anyone and everyone they wanted to blackmail or destroy. Got a political opponent who’s being difficult? See if you can find a Web chat between him and his mistress.
There’s also the question of how well facial recognition is going to work on sexually-oriented Web chat. The spy document notes that, “the best images are ones where the person is facing the camera with their face upright.” Faces are not always available in such chats.
Especially when other body parts are the primary focus. And Mano Singham notes, “We already knew that NSA operatives were using their snooping powers to spy on their lovers, an operation known as LOVEINT.” But Willard Foxton feels too much is being made of this and other Snowden leaks:
The volume of data collection is what’s scary – but if you read the whole Guardian article, GCHQ come across as an agency terrified of legal consequences. For example “the program saved one image every five minutes from the users’ feeds, partly to comply with human rights legislation.” While the story is disturbing, the agency hardly seems to be the surveillance juggernaut of Glenn Greenwald’s fantasies.
This goes to the heart of the problem with all the Snowden leaks – what we are getting is often a technological perspective of what could be possible, not an operational perspective on what is legally allowed. When Snowden said that if he had wanted to he could have tapped Barack Obama’s phone, he was right; but he failed to mention that if he had done so, he’d have been sent to jail.
Charlie Stross chimes in:
I am still trying to get my head around the implications that the British government’s equivalent of the NSA probably holds the world’s largest collection of pornographic videos, that the stash is probably contaminated with seriously illegal material, and their own personnel can in principle be charged and convicted of a strict liability offence if they try to do their job. It does, however, suggest to me that the savvy Al Qaida conspirators of the next decade will hold their covert meetings in the nude, on Yahoo! video chat, while furiously masturbating.
The Dish 