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.

Comments

Hey, GCHQ and NSA ...

[gstoddart]

How many fingers am I holding up now?

Re:Hey, GCHQ and NSA ...

[SpankiMonki]

How many fingers am I holding up now?

Don't know about you, but I'm holding up one.

Re:Hey, GCHQ and NSA ...

[Thud457]

GHQ collected child porn

Blackmail pool

[BSAtHome]

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?

Re:Blackmail pool

[noh8rz10]

Doesn't matter. I bet gchq and NSA are super stoked about google glass.

Re:Blackmail pool

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

There will be one potential issue: Did they score some sweet, sweet, incriminating footage of Inconvenient Politician confessing his love of grits wrasslin' and anal twincest? Yeah, probably. However, it doesn't take a PhD in teenagerology to suspect that Her Majesty's Wiretapping Crew are now sitting on one of the largest collections of illegal kiddie porn on the planet. And the kiddies are, on the whole, the unsuspecting children of the taxpayers of the UK. If the British tabloid press is anything to go by, they like (non clerical) pedos even less than we do on this side of the pond.

As much fun as it will be to...encourage...an MP or two to take a more understanding position (just like somebody other than his wife did, and we have pictures, hint hint), I wouldn't really want to be on the receiving end of the entire population of the UK suspecting that I'm hoarding kiddie porn based on their children. If the black-bag crew are really unlucky, whatever 'license to do whatever the fuck you want, because terroristsOMG!!!' law(s) and set of interpretations may not even have considered an idea this audacious. As much as Clapper is a lying fuckwad, his 'Oh, mere metadata' driven sounds convincing, if you don't know what metadata are, or how useful they are. "Yup, hot, definitely not yet legal, naked pictures of your innocent children", by contrast, isn't even good PR, no matter how you spin it.

Re:Blackmail pool

[oodaloop]

They almost certainly did think of that, and they almost certainly have a waiver that allows them to retain that data. I am not familiar with this program, but I am familiar with others. (IAA Intelligence Analyst)

Chatroulette Failed

[number17]

They first tried this experiment with Chatroulette only to find that the facial recognition software didn't work with cam pointed below the waist.

Re:Chatroulette Failed

[gstoddart]

They first tried this experiment with Chatroulette only to find that the facial recognition software didn't work with cam pointed below the waist.

It did, however, create the new discipline of schmeckle recognition, which shows long-term promise in some areas.

Re:Chatroulette Failed

[Anonymous Coward]

The truth is even funnier.

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.

The porn filter filtered out the faces, which was exactly what they wanted to capture. Brilliant!

Re:Chatroulette Failed

[jolyonr]

The document estimates that between 3% and 11% of the Yahoo webcam imagery harvested by GCHQ contains "undesirable nudity".

But what percentage was desirable nudity?

The home of 1984? Really?

[zerosomething]

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!

Re:The home of 1984? Really?

[gstoddart]

How is it that the home country of the author of 1984 just doesn't get it?

They've been treating it as a manual, instead of as a warning.

Re:The home of 1984? Really?

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

How is it that the home country of the author of 1984 just doesn't get it?

Plenty of us get it. Please remember that at no point did the general population of the UK ask for, support or condone this kind of behaviour, nor most of the other dubious things we've been hearing about lately that have supposedly been done in our name or for our protection.

Also, the previous administration went from being elected on a technicality with a heavy majority of the population not supporting them to having a leader who everyone was promised at the election wouldn't take over if they voted for the party in question. And obviously nobody directly elected the current coalition administration, which doesn't even seem to be able to honour what it said it would do in the coalition agreement upon which it was founded consistently, never mind what was in the manifestos of the two constituent parties that people actually voted for.

The last time we actually had anything resembling a government with a mandate in this country was nearly a decade ago, and they were the guys who then went to war, despite literally millions of people marching in the street to protest the decision, based on little more than trumped up rhetoric that proved to be every bit as made up as most of us always assumed it was.

How is it they are letting this kind of thing go on?

We demonstrably don't live in an effectively functioning democracy, by any credible definition of the term. Unfortunately, the political class have got very good at playing the game by the rules that currently exist and go to great lengths to avoid allowing those rules to change. Short of actually bringing down the government and replacing the system, hopefully in a non-violent way, this seems unlikely to change any time soon.

As long as we have that limited system, a handful of big issues will inevitably dominate the one vote we get every five years or so, and there are way too many people who are (reasonably enough) more concerned with things like not having their homes flooded or whether they can get their kids into a good school or whether the grandparents will get proper treatment if they have to go into hospital for those of us who also consider points of principle when voting to have a significant impact.

Re:The home of 1984? Really?

[gstoddart]

And, in fairness, you can ask how the home country of The Declaration of Independence and the US Constitution could also be going down the same road.

This isn't limited to the Brits.

Re:I hope they got mine!

[AmiMoJo]

I wonder how well facial recognition works on wank face.

Cue the false outrage from Yahoo

[the_scoots]

I find it hard to believe anything the big tech companies say after years of favors from the government.

Re:Cue the false outrage from Yahoo

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

I find it hard to believe anything the big tech companies say after years of favors from the government.

"We are, um, shocked and outraged by these revelations, and wish to assure our customers that, honestly, we are a bunch of incompetent second-stringers, so we probably can't do too much our current level of security. Also, even if we could, we have a long and ignoble track record of being a bootlicking toadies who give our best customer service with the PRC is hunting down dissidents for Labor Camp Adventure Time, we're actually pretty good at that. So, yeah, try to think of us as 'Google': By AOL, it's give us a nostalgic tinge.

Thank you.

Re:Cue the false outrage from Yahoo

[AmiMoJo]

I'm willing to believe that Yahoo had no idea about this. GCHQ hack anything they want access to, they don't ask. Yahoo would never have allowed it unless coerced in a way that there is no basis for in UK law (we don't have National Security Letters). I imagine the number of people using their video chat service has massively decreased since this story came to light, and they would have realised there was a risk of that happening.

Tor is building an anonymous instant messenger

[Anonymous Coward]

"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."

Re:Were any of them American?

[noh8rz10]

NSA brought gchq in on. This because the y couldn't do it themselves (5th amendment etc.). So they have gchq do the dirty work and then gchq shares the intelligence. Welcome to the new USA.

Re:Wow

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

That is so fucked up.

So is the footage from your laptop (in the garage?) at 3 AM last Tuesday, citizen. That raccoon, seriously?

Aaaaaand

[oodaloop]

That's why I have my webcams taped over when not in use. Who's crazy now??1!?

Re:Aaaaaand

[freeze128]

... but they would monitor your video connection when the camera *IS* in use.

Re:Aaaaaand

[oodaloop]

Shit.

Re:Aaaaaand

[Charliemopps]

This is why I never remove the tape from my webcam unless I'm masturbating.

Re:Were any of them American?

[HornWumpus]

Look up Echelon.

The USA, the UK and Australia were all legally prevented from domestic spying.

So they agreed to spy on each others citizens and share the results, in 1948. It has never stopped.

The original AT&T supplied call metadata to the government back when 'who knows who' was the worlds largest database.

Re:Didn't a highschool pricipal do this once?

[Anonymous Coward]

Robbins v. Lower Merion School District

The FBI investigated, there was a U.S. Senate Judiciary Subcommittee hearing, but in the end the school district spent some money.

In October 2010, the school district agreed to pay $610,000 to settle the Robbins and Hasan lawsuits against it. The settlement must be approved by Judge DuBois, who could also make his injunction barring the district from secretly tracking students permanent. The settlement also includes $175,000 that will be placed in a trust for Robbins and $10,000 for Hasan. The attorneys for Robbins and Hasan get $425,000.

Re:Were any of them American?

[MrL0G1C]

NSA brought gchq in on. This because the y couldn't do it themselves (5th amendment etc.). So they have gchq do the dirty work and then gchq shares the intelligence. Welcome to the new USA.

That would be ECHELON you are referring to. Except you obviously missed that news that's been coming out for the last year about NSA spying on Amercicans regardless. What do you think NSA are storing in their $1,500,000,000 data centre, how many Terabytes does $1.5 billion buy?

WebRTC Solution

[PineHall]

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.

Re:WebRTC Solution

[richtopia]

Not to steal the OP's thunder, but I use Jitsi for multi-platform video chat. jitsi.org

Where to start?

[Trogre]

Okay people, start listing your favourite video chat applications that support SIP and TLS, and why you use them.

Go!

no no, Batman was causing problems

[SuperBanana]

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.)

Where is the US govt protecting its citizens ?

[redelm]

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.

Re:Sue them for owning child pornography

[cbhacking]

CP isn't something you sue over (lawsuits are civil issues, at least this side of the water...). It's something you file charges over. Unfortunately, doing that usually requires an identifiable victim. Who knows exactly whose (childrens') pictures are in that collection? Also, I'm not exactly sure how you file charges against a government agency.

Now, you could sue to shut down the program, and cite the collection ("manufacture" in legal terms) of CP as one of the reasons, but that just, at most, gets the program de-funded. Although I suppose doing so probably makes it easier to get discovery needed for actual criminal cases...?

Re:this isn't the only one

[AdamThor]

so the punishment for being a perv is that you get to be a voyeur as well?

WOW!!!

[nospam007]

Yahoo has millions of users?

Who would have thought.

Re:I hope they got mine!

[lagomorpha2]

I hope they got mine! I wonder what the sticky side of electrical tape looks like?

Your aim is impressive sir.

oh.

You meant the back.