More than 1.8 million Yahoo! users' webcams were intercepted, revealing the fact that video calls were heavily used to show sexual parts to others

ByStéfan

More than 1.8 million Yahoo! users' webcam images are captured by British intelligence agenciesGCHQWhat was intercepted by,The GuardianIt became clear by coverage of.

Yahoo webcam images from millions of users interceded by GCHQ | World news | theguardian.com
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/feb/27/gchq-nsa-webcam-images-internet-yahoo


According to a secret document provided by Edward Snowden, under the auspices of the American NSA, the British intelligence agency GCHQ intercepted the images of millions of Internet users' webcams and kept their images It turned out that I was doing.


According to the secret document obtained by The Guardian, the Web camera interception by GCHQ was dated from 2008 to 2010, and the code name of this project was "Optic Nerve (optic nerve)". GCHQ collects a large amount of images from the images when users use web cameras via Yahoo! services, stores them in a database, and even intercepted webcams not only suspects of crime, It is said that ordinary citizen's things were also intercepted.

When six months of spying acts were done in 2008, more than 1.8 million users were intercepted the webcam images, they were intercepted as showing sexual partners in them We also found out that there were a large number of users. Moreover, these spy acts were executed until 2012.

ByJessie Romaneix Gosselin

Although this spy act called Optic Nerve could help to identify the user ID used by terror suspects and criminals, the user gathers all the conversations while using the webcam, It was said that the video of the webcam was captured every 5 minutes.


It seems that face detection technology was also used in this large-scale spy act, and "The best image is written when a person is facing the front of the web camera". However, due to consideration of users intercepted the video, GCHQ analyzers of these large amounts of web camera images, although the images themselves can be seen, thoseMetadataIt seems that access restriction was set so that it can not search.

In addition, I know that there was also a test of face recognition technology that gathers images of people similar to the face of terror suspects and criminals who are the targets of GCHQ.

ByHerman Yung

Some secret documents also say that "unfortunately, it turned out that an amazing number of users are using video calls to show their sexual part to others," and furthermore According to this secret document, 3 to 11% of the images collected by GCHQ were those containing "undesirable naked appearance".

In response to this spy act, Yahoo! strongly criticizes GCHQ as "completely new level of interference to our users" as not knowing at all that these acts were done.