The ripple of controversy brought about by the intelligence loot of former National Security Agency (NSA) contractor Edward Snowden continues to spread. This time, details about alleged nude images collected by the Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) of Britain have surfaced and have created another tidal wave of privacy concerns.
Between 2008 and 2012, the NSA aided GCHQ in a program called Optic Nerve. The surveillance program snooped at Yahoo webcam chats using a shotgun approach and stored them in the databases of the agency. With storage concerns and an attempt to comply with existing laws, the agency opted to record an image per five minutes of a webcam feed instead of capturing whole video chats.
The surveillance was conducted to test facial recognition technology and for intelligence gathering purposes. However, GCHQ does not have a way to filter the collected data, whether they are feeds from British or Americans so the latter population was not exempted. The webcam snooping was also not limited to users who are on the list of intelligence targets. There are no provisions in existing UK laws that inhibit British intelligence agents to access images of Americans captured by the program.
"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," reported The Guardian. The documents turned over by Snowden to the publication revealed that Optic Nerve was in its infancy in 2008 and that it was still active in 2012.
Based on the leaked NSA documents, about three to 11 percent of the captured images fall into what can be classified as "undesirable nudity." The implementation of Optic Nerve did not have any attempt on the exclusion of explicit images except that it did not store images without faces. However, there was also no guarantee that these messages cannot be accessed by GCHQ staff, which was warned about the kind of images analysts may see. It is also not clear what kind of access NSA has to the library of nude images.
The Guardian reported that the agency had to struggle in keeping sexually explicit images from the eyes of its employees. One safety measure was to limit the bulk access search of its staff to metadata but with Yahoo users only using their online IDs and not their real names, it was highly like that a good number of Yahoo IDs similar to the name of a target will come up every time a search was done.
"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 report cited the leaked classified documents.
With no discussion or details about possible age, gender, or nationality of the monitored Yahoo webcam chats, it is only clear that the snooping done by GCHQ is the worst possible nightmare of those who engaged in sexually, provocative chats.
"We were not aware of, nor would we condone, this reported activity. 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," a Yahoo spokesperson said.
The document, as reviewed by the British publication, indicated that legalities of the program were also considered especially upon the development and proven accuracy of its algorithm.
A portion of the document purportedly discusses the potential of the Kinect camera of the Xbox, which can be part of an even wider target.
"It is a longstanding policy that we do not comment on intelligence matters. "Furthermore, all of GCHQ's work is carried out in accordance with a strict legal and policy framework which ensures that our activities are authorised, necessary and proportionate, and that there is rigorous oversight, including from the secretary of state, the interception and intelligence services commissioners and the Parliamentary Intelligence and Security Committee. All our operational processes rigorously support this position," the GCHQ said in a statement.
The NSA has not commented about the specifics of Optic Nerve.
"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," said Vanee Vines, NSA spokesperson. "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."
The new revelation comes even as a security expert at the RSA Conference in San Francisco has called for people to be "truly outraged" to protect one's freedom and privacy.
