The GCHQ program saved one image every five minutes from the users' feeds. (Photograph: Chris Jackson/Getty Images)
The latest documents leaked to journalists by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden and
published Thursday in the
Guardian
newspaper reveal that the British GCHQ spy agency—with possible
assistance from its U.S. counterpart—built and maintained a program that
allowed it to tap the live webcam chats of millions of internet users
with no connection to criminal or national security investigations.
With
a program codenamed "Optic Nerve," the documents reveal how the agency
hacked into the camera feeds of those using Yahoo! webchats, capturing
both snapshots of conversations and metadata associated with the
communication. As its name indicates, at least part of the program was
aimed at improving the government's ability to use digital
eye-recognition technology to detect and catalog online users that may
or may be not be part of a criminal investigation.
"The best images are ones where the person is facing the camera with their face upright." —from GCHQ document
"Truly shocking," were the words used by Alex Abdo, staff attorney
with the ACLU's National Security Project, to describe the latest
details about the dragnet surveillance programs of the GCHQ and the NSA,
which seemed to have some knowledge of the program and may have had an
active role in executing certain aspects of it.
“In a world in which there is no technological barrier to pervasive
surveillance, the scope of the government’s surveillance activities must
be decided by the public, not secretive spy agencies interpreting
secret legal authorities," said Abdo in a
statement.
"This report also raises troubling questions about the NSA’s complicity
in what is a massive and unprecedented violation of privacy. We need to
know more about what the NSA knew, and what role it played.”
If the reporting is true, said Yahoo in a statement, the secret
program "represents a whole new level of violation of our users' privacy
that is completely unacceptable." A spokesperson for the company was
clear in saying the Yahoo! had no knowledge of and would never approve
such a blatant violation of its users right to privacy.
As the
Guardian reports:
Rather than collecting webcam chats in their entirety, the program
saved one image every five minutes from the users' feeds, partly to
comply with human rights legislation, and also to avoid overloading
GCHQ's servers. The documents describe these users as "unselected" –
intelligence agency parlance for bulk rather than targeted collection.
One document even likened the program's "bulk access to Yahoo webcam
images/events" to a massive digital police mugbook of previously
arrested individuals.
"Face detection has the potential to aid selection of useful images
for 'mugshots' or even for face recognition by assessing the angle of
the face," it reads. "The best images are ones where the person is
facing the camera with their face upright."
Spencer Ackerman, one of the
Guardian journalists who wrote
today's story, tried to get comment from Gen. Keith Alexander, outgoing
director of the NSA, about what the agency's level of involvement may
have been. Alexander was on Capitol Hill to offer testimony to a
congressional panel on Thursday, but did not appear interested in
responding to Ackerman's questions:
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