Posted on 02/27/2014 5:20:40 PM PST by Red in Blue PA
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SAN FRANCISCO — A British intelligence agency collected video webcam images — many of them sexually explicit — from millions of Yahoo users, regardless of whether they were suspected of illegal activity, according to accounts of documents leaked by Edward J. Snowden.
The surveillance effort operated by Britain’s Government Communications Headquarters, or GCHQ, was code-named Optic Nerve. Images from Yahoo webcam chats were captured in bulk through the agency’s fiber-optic cable taps and saved to a GCHQ database.
It is unclear how much of the data was shared with American officials at the National Security Agency, though the British ran queries of the data using a search tool provided by the N.S.A. called XKeyscore, according to a report on Thursday by The Guardian.
The report did not indicate whether the agency also collected webcam images from similar services, such as Google Hangouts or Microsoft’s Skype. The Guardian did say the British intelligence agency was studying the possibilities of using the cameras in Microsoft’s Kinect devices, which are used with its Xbox game consoles, to spy on users.
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
Why would one think that any thing you put on the web isn’t collect by some government agency.
Just like one should assume that any gun is always loaded, one should also assume this: anything you put out on the web can be seen by anyone, anywhere, anytime... and can never be erased.
Thru must have videos of that Chicago gay bath house we hear so much about?
I can’t understand why ANYONE is surprised by all of this. As soon as I heard about the internet I knew it would not be private. The same with cell phones.
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