Slashdot Mirror
NSA Collecting Millions of Faces From Web Images
Advocatus Diaboli (1627651) writes "The National Security Agency is harvesting huge numbers of images of people from communications that it intercepts through its global surveillance operations for use in sophisticated facial recognition programs, according to top-secret documents. The spy agency's reliance on facial recognition technology has grown significantly over the last four years as the agency has turned to new software to exploit the flood of images included in emails, text messages, social media, videoconferences and other communications, the N.S.A. documents reveal. Agency officials believe that technological advances could revolutionize the way that the N.S.A. finds intelligence targets around the world, the documents show. The agency's ambitions for this highly sensitive ability and the scale of its effort have not previously been disclosed."
It's funny how little difference there is between what Facebook's servers are doing and the NSA's. I wonder who has more info on you.
Pretty good is actually pretty bad.
GCHQ, NSA, and their equivalent agencies in Australia, Canada and NZ are all members of the "five eyes" spying group also known as ECHELON. Any time a law might restrict one from spying on citizens of their own country, they just have another member spy for them and hand over the info.