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GCHQ Intercepted Webcam Images of Millions of Yahoo Users
An anonymous reader writes with more chilling news from the Snowden files. Quoting the Guardian: "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. ... The system, eerily reminiscent of the telescreens evoked in George Orwell's 1984, was used for experiments in automated facial recognition, to monitor GCHQ's existing targets, and to discover new targets of interest. Such searches could be used to try to find terror suspects or criminals making use of multiple, anonymous user IDs."
Remember, friends don't video conference with friends unless they're using SIP and TLS.
How many fingers am I holding up now?
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
Unfortunately, now they have a very nice pool of information/images to blackmail the persons(s) displayed. What a treasure that must be for the agencies. How better control the populous than dirty tricks.
Maybe we should start collecting the like info on the agencies?
I wonder what the sticky side of electrical tape looks like?
They first tried this experiment with Chatroulette only to find that the facial recognition software didn't work with cam pointed below the waist.
1984? Sure. And Snowden is Emmanuel Goldstein.
Fact: They have a large collection of kiddie porn.
How is it that the home country of the author of 1984 just doesn't get it? How is it they are letting this kind of thing go on? It's truly amazing and sad!
It all starts at 0
That is so fucked up.
I find it hard to believe anything the big tech companies say after years of favors from the government.
If so, did any Americans assist a foreign state in spying on Americans? Are there two witnesses to this?
Espionage is an act of war.
"Forget the $16 billion romance between Facebook and WhatsApp. There's a new messaging tool worth watching.
Tor, the team behind the world's leading online anonymity service, is developing a new anonymous instant messenger client, according to documents produced at the Tor 2014 Winter Developers Meeting in Reykjavik, Iceland."
It does not get any more creepy and perverted than that...
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
And people always look at me funny when I explain why I have a piece of black electrical tape over my laptops built in webcam. If only I could figure a way of disabling the built in mics now.
That's why I have my webcams taped over when not in use. Who's crazy now??1!?
Tic-Tac-Toe, Global Thermonuclear War, and relationships all have the same winning move.
KINECT is "eerily reminiscent" of the telescreen. This is something else.
It is stated that about 11% of the pictures contain sexually explicit material.
Surely there will be naked pictures of minors among them.
So I think there will be no way for GHCQ to justify this and save their neck, even if (!) the interception of computer camera by the GHCQ is not prosecutable ifself (what I cannot believe).
English speaking countries only care about good PR on TV owned by 2-3 families.
The rest is accelerating towards North Korea mentality. Give it couple more years and we have it.
I vaguely remember a highschool principal who used web cams on laptops he gave out to students. Whatever happened to him anyway?
God spoke to me
WebRTC seems to be the best way now to communicate and avoid all the spying. It is supported by Firefox, Chrome, and Opera browsers. It does audio, video, text and file transfers. The media streams are all encrypted and once connected the media streams from browser to browser with no middle man/web site.
Slashdot has a long and dishonourable history of promoting the propaganda of the state, especially the intelligence operations. The moderation system here was specifically designed to allow blanket promotion or 'removal' of types of post, depending on whether the post was 'on message' or an attempt to reveal the truth. Prior to Snowden, a post of the form "that person is a tin foil hat wearing conspiracy nutcase" was guaranteed to be moderated '5' thanks to Slashdot providing meta-moderation facilities to certain groups.
The owners of Slashdot, being low level peons far from being in the real loop, have no idea why Snowden is being allowed to reveal so many devastating truths, that contradict every lie organs like Slashdot have been pushing for years. So, caught in a cleft stick, Slashdot has no choice but to cover these revelations, and hope you sheeple soon forget and go back to sleep.
Bill Gates, in direct partnership with the NSA, spent billions of Microsoft money buying up every available 'depth' camera research company. The intention was to replace the god-awful joke technology of Kinect (the original one) with a military grade 'time-of-flight' sensor chip that actually measured the depth of each pixel 'ray' using measurements actually accurate enough to record the travel time of individual beams of photons. This military grade sensor, present in EVERY Xbox One, costs more than twice any other part in the console, including the APU chip that holds the GPU and CPU clusters.
The Yahoo story details how dumb data collection is its own worst enemy. The NSA and GCHQ, faced with an absolute access to all webcam traffic, then found themselves actively wanting to arbitrarily sample the data, simply to reduce storage requirements. GCHQ, in the leaked documents, detail this as a semantic disaster- in other words, they new their were nuggets of gold in the data, but had little means of simply finding such nuggets. But that was then.
The Xbox One fixes the problem of NSA domestic spying vs the old dumb webcam capture to a degree that might allow comparison of a crude stone club with an ICBM.
1) EVERY Xbox One can run every spying function of the Kinect 2 sensor block at maximum capacity even when the owner is AAA gaming. 25% of the Xbox One hardware is dedicated purely to running and processing the Kinect system. When the Xbox One is 'off' but still connected to the mains, the Kinect system is 100% operational and functioning.
2) EVERY Xbox One with ANY time spent with a plugged in Kinect 2 sensor system, and ANY time spent connected online is constantly monitoring the people who enter and leave the room, taking detailed facial photographs (even in low light or dark), and uploading these headshots, with time data, to NSA servers in the cloud. The NSA then uses facial recognition software, in combination with data drawn from the known location of the console, to attempt to put names to faces. Unknown faces are still given unique identification numbers, so they can be tracked as specific individuals, even when they are captured by other consoles in other locations.
3) EVERY Xbox One reports to NSA servers in the cloud the moment the console is connected to the Internet with a functioning Kinect 2. The NSA owns a copy of every Xbox One cryptological key. They can instruct ANY online Xbox One to begin (within 100ms) to begin capturing, encoding, encrypting and streaming video and audio streams to a given NSA server. The NSA is given complete control over the quality and nature of the stream. It can even be redirected to the internal HDD for later uploading, if the NSA agent determines the Internet traffic from the console would look less suspicious this way.
4) EVERY Xbox One (online with Kinect active) can be sent 'trigger' conditions for remote activation of recording. This solves the 'Yahoo' problem in the best possible way. So, for instance, the NSA agent can tell a specific console (or range of consoles) to begin video recording if a specific person A and person B begin enga
to bomb the shit out of some organizations for much less.
However, they did see a significant improvement in gender recognition performance.
We need someone to capture the web cam chats that the NSA and GCHQ have with each other. Then post them to youtube, vimeo, and all of the other streaming sites.
Okay people, start listing your favourite video chat applications that support SIP and TLS, and why you use them.
Go!
"Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife
else to be an clear she couldn't Ma7 be hurting 7he counterpart,
No, their software kept getting confused from Batman.
(I promise, SFW, not a rickroll, etc. Just a guy with a Batman costume blowing some minds on CR.)
Please help metamoderate.
Omegle does the exact same thing but solely for moderation purposes (they claim). They take a screenshot every few minutes of every user and then anyone caught being a perv is forced to moderate like 500 of these random screenshots to get their IP address unbanned. Those people catch maybe 5 more people who are all forced to moderate 500 more and tada, free 100% moderation without paying staff.
And nobody has complained about it yet.
As someone who has worked for one of the 5 eyes (my name isn't Snowden btw), I can tell you that if you put it out there and your name is on it, they collect it. Its free information. Total Information Awareness (TIA) is the name of the game. They have 1 data centre for Facebook. 1 for Yahoo. 1 for (name your favourite service here). And a dozen other data centres besides. They have hardware to process, automate, sort, scrutinize and identify key bits (ignore the pun) for all of it. Current hardware not effective? Build new bespoke hardware (including/custom processors, circuits, entire computers, etc.). There is also a gob of software to back it all up. Don't like the government collecting all your data including where you pee and what you eat? Then don't give it to them! You put it up for your friend Fred or Jane, or your mom, but a 3 letter agency got it too, and unlike your page, there is no undo. They collect and glean over time too. This means that if you only give 'just a bit' then they only have 'just a bit'. But later if you give 'just a bit' of something else, they get the new stuff, and add it to the old stuff. Add bills, reciepts, subscriptions, cell phone calls, email, cable tv subscriptions, speeding tickets, traffic tickets, employer information, store purchases via credit card, etc. They know you better than you know yourself.
Sincerely,
Anonymous Coward
GCHQ Here: Tits or GTFO.
Call me naive, but isn't it the job of the US Federal Government to protect the US citizens and property against incursion and spying by foreign powers? We cannot know what they will do with their intercepts.
PRISM and similar "you spy on mine and I'll spy on yourn" programs smell like conspiracy to violate the US Consititution, if not out-and-out treason. That those programs continue can only be attributed to institutionalized endemic corruption.
So you need a dataset for your "automated facial recognition" experiments. Do you:
A) Go to YouTube and collect videos from the millions of talking heads freely available for the taking.
or B) Illegally hack into the private communications of others for the sake of your "experiment".
I smell more than a little BS coming from Minitrue here.
I am becoming gerund, destroyer of verbs.
With every new NSA/GCHQ revelation, I am finding it increasingly difficult to tell the difference between these agencies, and an outright criminal internet hacker trolling group.
Devices and sites are being broken into en-masse, security systems at companies foreign and domestic are being compromised, social engineering is being used to torpedo national standards and progress, internet forums are being saturated with disruptive trolls, people are being targeted/retaliated/gaslighted in their jobs and homes, and now, yes here it is, people's webcams are being hacked into en-masse to take pictures of women in their bedrooms -- sorry I mean for national security whatevers.
My mental image of the NSA/GCHQ at this point is a building saturated with passive-aggressive computer geeks with a grudge against the world and a multi-billion dollar budget with which to indulge it. Ethics, maturity and responsibility are to be checked at the door.
I cannot tell where the NSA ends and anonymous/lulsec begins. And at this point I am waiting for the press release which reveals that 90+% of the chans are in fact hosted at Maryland, and that GCHQ is the principal distributor of 95% of all fetish pornography in the United Kingdom.
And I'm willing to take odds right now, that the mother and father of all illegal TV/Film torrent servers are situated in the T1 connected basements of Maryland and Cheltenam respectively.
May the Maths Be with you!
I'll bet. "Oh God!!! My eyes!!!" was overheard more than once in that division.
Have gnu, will travel.
The British absolutely despise freedom and the concept of freedom. They really, really do.
The even sadder thing is, the general Daily Mail reading populace either don't care, adopt the mentality of "If you've done nothing wrong, you've got nothing to hide," want more censorship and control or adopt the mentality of "It's not my problem."
I took the liberty of compiling a list a while back of freedom hating shit they've pulled, or plan to pull. (Mainly illustrated by the first point on it, being a big fan of anime, hentai, and other aspects of otaku culture.)
The list is here: http://pastebin.com/raw.php?i=9UDUnvSQ [pastebin.com]
I'm not from there but I supposed something had to inspire him to write it.....
And nothing of interest was found.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
and guess what they found out:
http://www.heise.de/newsticker...
according to TheH they had "problems with too much nudity" (Article in German)
bickerdyke
Yahoo has millions of users?
Who would have thought.
And if you sue them for collecting Porn (child or otherwise), they'll say they need to hold onto it forever for courts. Despicable. Zero out their budget
Is it a common abbreviation?
I can't wait for a Republican to get elected President so someone will go to jail when they break the law!
They see your naked bodies through the walls all the time, because your clothes only shield your eyes from seeing each other in the buff. Modern satellites and radar systems and camera systems can see through clothes and walls, and they can watch you even when you're fucking in your bedrooms with no electronics present in the room.
Signals Intelligence is everywhere. We have 32 + satellites. Phased array antenna systems that let us image through the earth and around mountains, through the ionosphere. We have radar systems and many types of electron imaging techniques at our disposal. The local law enforcement and police use these same technologies, ... We watch and track every person every second of the day.
http://www.oregonstatehospital...
Time to start thinking outside of the light spectrum and into terahertz and radio. And look up TAMI and Remote Neural Monitoring, too, because images seen by the eye or stored in the brain are easily accessed ..
Yeah we tap your phones and webcams even when your electronics are off, too. And we're using your cellphone as a roving bug that records everything for us.. Oh yeah, and then we got atomic grade laser microphones that hear you even without that, anywhere you are, even in remote space and isolation. We also decode your audio cortex and impulses in your ears remotely, using you like a microphone and digital recorder. Neurons = evoked potentials = radio for remote imaging. Lmfao. :D ....
Evidence, anyone? http://oregonstatehospital.net...
My suggestion: http://www.phibetaiota.net/201... ..."
"The greatest threat facing the USA is the irony inherent in our current defense posture, like for example planning to use nuclear energy embodied in missiles to fight over oil fields that nuclear energy could replace. This irony arises in part because the USA's current security logic is still based on essentially 19th century and earlier (second millennium) thinking that becomes inappropriate applied to 21st century (third millennium) technological threats and opportunities. That situation represents a systematic intelligence failure of the highest magnitude. There remains time to correct this failure, but time grows short as various exponential trends continue.
To address that pervasive threat from unrecognized irony, it would help to re-envision the CIA as a non-ironic post-scarcity institution. Then the CIA could help others (including in the White House) make more informed decisions to move past this irony as well.
A first step towards that could be for IARPA to support better free software tools for "crowdsourced" public intelligence work involving using a social semantic desktop for sensemaking about open source data and building related open public action plans from that data to make local communities healthier, happier, more intrinsically secure, and also more mutually secure. Secure, healthy, prosperous, and happy local (and virtual) communities then can form together a secure, healthy, prosperous, and happy nation and planet in a non-ironic way. Details on that idea are publicly posted by me here in the form of a Proposal Abstract to the IARPA Incisive Analysis solicitation: "Social Semantic Desktop for Sensemaking on Threats and Opportunities"
http://slashdot.org/comments.p...
And, as will be mentioned below, the greatest threat facing specific CIA staff is heart disease and cancer. These two threats, global and personal, are actually connected in an odd sort of way, both reflecting past adaptive behavior which is no longer very adaptive under new conditions resulting from technological change. The current economic crisis the USA is facing also results from unrecognized underlying exponential trends.
I supply this document as mainly food for thought as people at IARPA contemplate the future of US defense intelligence and "incisive analysis".
But this document is a sort of "meta" incisiveness, because it is about the CIA itself and related institutions and their difficulties dealing with this phase change in our society (as the late James P. Hogan mentioned in his 1982 novel "Voyage From Yesteryear").
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
This even made the TV news. .... or maybe not....
One might think the news outlets are getting aware....
Truth is stranger than fiction, but it is because Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities; Truth isn't. Mark Twain.