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Thread: Yahoo webcam images from millions of users intercepted by British spying agency

  1. #1
    Member tinybug's Avatar
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    Search Yahoo webcam images from millions of users intercepted by British spying agency

    I am sure this is not limited to Yahoo:

    • Optic Nerve program collected Yahoo webcam images in bulk
    • 1.8m users targeted by UK agency in six-month period alone
    • Yahoo: 'A whole new level of violation of our users' privacy'
    Material included large quantity of sexually explicit images

    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 privacy risks of mass collection from video sources have long been known to the NSA and GCHQ, as a research document from the mid-2000s noted: "One of the greatest hindrances to exploiting video data is the fact that the vast majority of videos received have no intelligence value whatsoever, such as pornography, commercials, movie clips and family home movies."
    Sexually explicit webcam material proved to be a particular problem for GCHQ, as one document delicately put it: "Unfortunately … it would appear that a surprising number of people use webcam conversations to show intimate parts of their body to the other person. Also, the fact that the Yahoo software allows more than one person to view a webcam stream without necessarily sending a reciprocal stream means that it appears sometimes to be used for broadcasting pornography."

    The document estimates that between 3% and 11% of the Yahoo webcam imagery harvested by GCHQ contains "undesirable nudity". Discussing efforts to make the interface "safer to use", it noted that current "naïve" pornography detectors assessed the amount of flesh in any given shot, and so attracted lots of false positives by incorrectly tagging shots of people's faces as pornography.

    GCHQ did not make any specific attempts to prevent the collection or storage of explicit images, the documents suggest, but did eventually compromise by excluding images in which software had not detected any faces from search results – a bid to prevent many of the lewd shots being seen by analysts.
    The system was not perfect at stopping those images reaching the eyes of GCHQ staff, though. An internal guide cautioned prospective Optic Nerve users that "there is no perfect ability to censor material which may be offensive. Users who may feel uncomfortable about such material are advised not to open them".
    It further notes that "under GCHQ's offensive material policy, the dissemination of offensive material is a disciplinary offence".
    Once collected, the metadata associated with the videos can be as valuable to the intelligence agencies as the images themselves.

    ...

    http://www.theguardian.com/world/201...internet-yahoo

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    Default Re: Yahoo webcam images from millions of users intercepted by British spying agency

    I don't know why people enter this industry ever wanting to keep it a secret lol

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    Default Re: Yahoo webcam images from millions of users intercepted by British spying agency

    These are people using Yahoo, I haven't seen camgirls talking about giving shows that way, I think they're seeing girls/guys using it purely for fun http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-26367781
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    Banned Melonie's Avatar
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    Default Re: Yahoo webcam images from millions of users intercepted by British spying agency

    I don't know why people enter this industry ever wanting to keep it a secret lol
    Indeed ! This 'addition' to the UK story may fall into the 'tin foil hat' category ... from ... or then again it may not !

    (snip)" In the latest news report based on documents revealed by Edward Snowden, we’ve learned that the NSA creates profiles of porn viewing, online sexual activity and more from its vast database of Internet content and transactional data as part of a plan to harm the reputations of those whom the agency believes are radicalizing others through speeches promoting disfavored—but not necessarily violent—political views. The report—by Glenn Greenwald, Ryan Gallagher and Ryan Grim in the Huffington Post—shows how the NSA proposes to use personal information gleaned from electronic surveillance to blackmail, silence and otherwise marginalize people for advocating “radical” beliefs.

    I will assume for the sake of argument that there may be rare occasions where such a tactic is a good idea—where, in the words of former intelligence lawyer Stewart Baker, it’s better to “drop[] the truth” on someone than to drop a bomb. But history and the current Huffington Post documents show that intelligence agencies, including the NSA, are utterly incapable of knowing when that is, or of deploying such a dangerous technique safely."(snip)

    Thus it's not beyond the realm of possibility that the NSA has already assembled a 'secret' database of adult webcam vidcaps ... for the supposed purpose of being used as gov't 'leverage' against certain webcam customers. Basically, as the article states, this is not very different from the extensive files that former FBI director J Edgar Hoover used to collect. It's just that today's technology makes it so much easier for the gov't to 'log' webcam customer X paying for a private show with camgirl Y versus having to dispatch a clandestine photographer to poke his lens into a hotel room !

    However, as previously pointed out, the 'bottom line' is that NOTHING posted to the internet is secret !!!
    Last edited by Melonie; 02-28-2014 at 04:10 AM.

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    Default UK spies snooped on Yahoo users’ sexy webcam chats

    http://www.digitaltrends.com/web/uk-...ebcams/#!zRgn0

    Found this article today by accident while researching about how the NSA has been using Facebook to record people's conversations and snap pictures of them from their computers.

    Figured some of you might find it interesting.

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    Default Re: UK spies snooped on Yahoo users’ sexy webcam chats

    LOL. There are things that are way worse as I used to live a stone's throw away from the NSA and my soon to be ex husband used to work there. I wonder if they spied on yahoo cam chats. If so, I feel sorry for them because it's pretty shyte quality and no one really uses yahoo chat's cam function lol.




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    Default Re: Yahoo webcam images from millions of users intercepted by British spying agency

    Opps! Sorry about posting something that had already posted at an early date lovelies! *blushes*

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