The whole Edward Snowden thing seemed to have died down a bit, until we heard this latest revelation from the least charismatic spy in the world is that our spy agency (GCHQ) has been harvested webcam images of innocent UK civilians. Including our dirty webcam chats.
Seriously. According to the documents leaked, in the programme, known as 'Optic Nerve', which was designed to help the agency out with their facial recognition software, GCHQ (which stands for Government Communication Headquarters, fact fans) spies would harvest stills from webcams of random Yahoo users at five minute intervals. They took millions of stills, however, they weren't always capturing faces, because 3-11% of the images collected were the type of stuff that so much of the internet is full of: genitals.
Not only was it an invasion of the intimate privacy of whoever broadcast themselves doing the dirty via webcam, it also got in the way of GCHQ's work.
'Unfortunately, it would appear that a surprising number of people use webcam conversations to show intimate parts of their body to the other person,' Snowden says in one document leaked to The Guardian: '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.'
A Yahoo spokesperson says they had no knowledge of this intrusion: 'We were not aware of, nor would we condone, this reported activity. This report, if true, represents a whole new level of violation of our users’ privacy that is completely unacceptable.'
Our hearts go out to whoever was in a long-distance relationship from 2008-2010...
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**Picture: Ada Hamza **
This article originally appeared on The Debrief.