Edward Snowden’s leaked documents are the gift that keeps on giving. The latest revelation in the ongoing saga has revealed that spooks in United Kingdom’s GCHQ domestic spying agency were taking millions of pictures every year. The agency photographed both of US and UK citizens without consent and without knowledge of those being photographed, during their private webchats over Yahoo.

Britain’s surveillance agency GCHQ, with aid from the US National Security Agency, intercepted and stored the webcam images of millions of internet users not suspected of wrongdoing, secret documents reveal. GCHQ files dating between 2008 and 2010 explicitly state that a surveillance program codenamed Optic Nerve collected still images of Yahoo webcam chats in bulk and saved them to agency databases, regardless of whether individual users were an intelligence target or not. 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.

The report states that between 3%-11% of the collected images are of pornographic nature – nude shots that were obviously not meant for the prying eyes of government spies. I would err towards it being 11% rather than 3%. The reason for so many of these images being collected was that the program was designed (according to the documents) to search for known suspects via mugshots or known images that could work with facial recognition technology. However, seeing as one person’s face can look quite a bit like ten, twenty or more other people when you are looking at millions of webcam targets, the program collected exponentially more images than whatever “X” number they started with.

Naturally, the NSA was complicit in this activity, and the quote from NSA spokesperson Vanee Vines is cringe-inducing in its transparency.

The NSA declined to respond to specific queries about its access to the Optic Nerve system, the presence of US citizens’ data in such systems, or whether the NSA has similar bulk-collection programs. However, NSA spokeswoman Vanee Vines said the agency did not ask foreign partners such as GCHQ to collect intelligence the agency could not legally collect itself.

Oh, of course they wouldn’t explicitly ask such a thing. But if such a thing were to happen, and the US just happened to have a sharing program in place with the UK (Which does not have laws protecting , then no harm no foul, right, Vanee?)

“As we’ve said before, the National Security Agency does not ask its foreign partners to undertake any intelligence activity that the US government would be legally prohibited from undertaking itself,” she said. “The NSA works with a number of partners in meeting its foreign intelligence mission goals, and those operations comply with US law and with the applicable laws under which those partners operate. “A key part of the protections that apply to both US persons and citizens of other countries is the mandate that information be in support of a valid foreign intelligence requirement, and comply with US Attorney General-approved procedures to protect privacy rights. Those procedures govern the acquisition, use, and retention of information about US persons.”

Of course, these protections were already brutally violated – and such protections don’t exist in the UK. So we’re to believe that the US government went back in and added protections in when they got the data during information sharing? Please.

Programs like Optic Nerve, which collect information in bulk from largely anonymous user IDs, are unable to filter out information from UK or US citizens. Unlike the NSA, GCHQ is not required by UK law to “minimize”, or remove, domestic citizens’ information from its databases.

Assurances of privacy and protections promised by State entities that have repeatedly committed illegal acts against their own citizens carry little weight. Even worse these State agencies only acknowledge these acts after the treachery comes to light.

The news that webcams have been compromised by the State’s spies isn’t breaking news. Even schools were doing it. It’s just news that it took so long for them to get caught.

Source: Guardian.

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