NSA enjoying quite a show thanks to your webcams

So you're up late at night, web-chatting on Yahoo with someone in another part of town, or another part of the country - or world. Now you two - being the naughty types - start taking things in a risque direction. Hey. It's just the Internet, right? Who's going to see?

Well. Turns out the National Security Agency doesn't need HBO to get itself one heck of an eyeful. Not with you providing it, and thanks to something called Optic Nerve, that's exactly what you're doing. The Irish Times, of all things, reports:

They show the surveillance programme – codenamed Optic Nerve – saved one image every five minutes from randomly selected Yahoo webcam chats and stored them on agency databases. This was partly to comply with human rights legislation, and also to avoid overloading GCHQ’s servers. The documents show that in one six-month period in 2008, the agency collected webcam imagery – substantial quantities of which were sexually explicit – from more than 1.8 million Yahoo user accounts globally. A spokeswoman for Yahoo said the actions of the surveillance agencies represented “a whole new level of violation of our users’ privacy”.

“We were not aware of nor would we condone this reported activity,” she said. “This report, if true, represents a whole new level of violation of our users’ privacy that is completely unacceptable and we strongly call on the world’s governments to reform surveillance law consistent with the principles we outlined in December. We are committed to preserving our users’ trust and security and continue our efforts to expand encryption across all of our services.” So every five seconds of your cybersex extravaganza produces a still shot that serves as the evening's entertainment for some NSA agent charged ostensibly with making sure terrorists don't hit us. Just thought you'd like to know, in case you want to take it as inspiration to lose a little weight or something. For the most part, I think I part company with a lot of the audience here in that I believe strongly enough in the federal government's national security role that I'm willing to accede a degree of secrecy in surveillance so they can get the information they need without the bad guys being aware of it. That's my big problem with Edward Snowden, who was (of course) the source for this information. But that's what I support in principle. It gets harder and harder to defend what they're actually doing when a) they constantly lie about it; and b) you hear about stuff like this, which is pretty difficult to connect to anything that bolsters national defense in a real sense. Anyway, I'd think twice about what you do on Yahoo video chats, unless you get a thrill out of exhibitionism. In that case, maybe it excites you all the more to think of the level of importance of some of the people who might get a glimpse of you. Too bad for you this technology wasn't as widespread 20 years ago. Just think of the audience you might have had then.

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