It ’s been a while since we ’ve had a disgraceful NSA disclosure , so you probably think all the madness was over . Welp , you were wrong . Very , very unseasonable .
News just emerged that GCHQ , the British counterpart to our NSA , ran a program codenamed “ Optic heart ” from 2008 to 2010 that involved capturing webcam images from net users . Documents leaked by Edward Snowden divulge that the surveillance bureau captured images from over 1.8 million Yahoo users during one six - calendar month period in 2008.According toThe Guardian , that cache included “ substantial quantities of sexually explicit communication theory . ” Oh , and the NSA helped .
Apparently , the object of the program was to cumulate intel on terrorism suspects who used remain anonymous online and used multiple assumed name . The big problem with that missionary station , however , is that the GCHQ ’s facial recognition software had no way of severalize who was even a UK citizen . That mean that a lot U.S. citizens were probably spied on . If it makes you palpate any better , the British undercover agent did n’t capture entire webcam sessions . They save one figure of speech every five minutes “ partly to abide by with human rights legislation , and also to void overloading GCHQ ’s servers,”saysThe Guardian .
And what did they do with those bare photos ? Well , GCHQ did n’t really hump what to do with all the sexually explicit fabric which , one document show , amounted to as much as 11 percent of the Yahoo webcam imagery . The agency did restrict its analysts power to sort through the paradigm by curtail lookup to metadata only . Either way of life , Yahoo really is n’t felicitous about this profound breach of its users ’ privacy . A spokesperson told The Guardian , “ We were not cognizant of , nor would we condone , this reported activity . ”
Well , as we ’ve learned the toilsome room , it does n’t really matter what the cyberspace companies condone . It does n’t really seem to even matterwhat the U.S. governing condones . At the end of the day , the net do it no borders . And the spies lie with no limits . [ Guardian ]
Image via Shutterstock
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