The NSA is not the only spy agency collecting personal information of users around the world. A new report has shown that its British counterpart spied on millions of Yahoo users through their webcams, something that is sure to cause some serious backlash against the British government.
The new report is part of the Edward Snowden leaks, released by the Guardian.
According to the report, the British spy agency, GCHQ, uses a hacking program called Optical Nerve to spy on British citizens in their homes while they were having private moments via Yahoo's webcam chat service. Apparently, several of the victims illegally spied on were in the nude, which should be seen as a shocking revelation of how far governments are willing to go in order to catch their man.
The Guardian reports that over 1.8 million Yahoo users were targeted in a six month period and that the Optical Nerve hacking program collected images and chat logs in bulk, even from users who are not on the GCHQ radar. A large quantity of the captured images includes sexually explicit content, says the Guardian.
"Unfortunately ... it would appear that a surprising number of people use webcam conversations to show intimate parts of their body to the other person," according to a GCHQ document. "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."
Obviously, Yahoo was not pleased with this revelation, as it could mean the end of one of its core business if users feel the need to use another service due to security and privacy risks.
"We were not aware of nor would we condone this reported activity," Yahoo 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."
Interestingly enough, the GCHQ and the NSA were making plans to use the video capabilities of video game console camera for video surveillance. The document specially named the Kinect camera for the Xbox 360 as a potential tool, but it is not certain if those plans ever materialized.
Clearly from this leaked documentation, webcam users should consider the consequences before taking part in a nude sexual adventure. Yes, you are in the privacy of your own home, but from what we have seen, the NSA and the GCHQ do not care about your privacy.
