Webcam stills of global Yahoo users collected by US, UK spies: news report

LONDON-

Files leaked by former US National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden revealed that British and US spy agencies had intercepted and stored images from webcams used by millions of Yahoo users, The Guardian reported on Thursday.

The secret documents disclosed that the British surveillance agency GCHQ, along with the US National Security Agency, stored the images of users who were not suspected of wrongdoing.

The GCHQ files, dating between 2008 to 2010, stated that a spy program codenamed Optic Nerve collected still images of webcam chats, including sexually explicit ones, in bulk and saved them to agency databases, regardless of whether individual users were an intelligence target or not.

In one period of six months during 2008 alone, the privacy of 1.8 million global Yahoo users was breached by the agencies, the British paper said.

The Guardian also reported that the information collected later also suggested the programme was still active in 2012.

The data was used for experiments in automated facial recognition, and to monitor existing GCHQ targets and discover new ones.

One image was saved every five minutes from the users’ webcam feed by the program.

GCHQ analysts were able to search the metadata, such as location and length of webcam chat, and they could view the actual images where the username was similar to a surveillance target.

In a statement to the Guardian, GCHQ said all of its work was “carried out in accordance with a strict legal and policy framework which ensures that our activities are authorized, necessary and proportionate”.

The US senators have reacted to the new disclosure terming the US and British agencies program as a “breathtaking lack of respect” for privacy.

“We are extremely troubled by today’s press report that a very large number of individuals -– including law-abiding Americans –- may have had private videos of themselves and their families intercepted and stored without any suspicion of wrongdoing,” Democratic US Senators Ron Wyden, Mark Udall and Martin Heinrich said in a joint statement.

The senators pledged to investigate the activity as part of an ongoing wide-ranging review of surveillance programs, with close inspection to any role US agencies may have played.

Yahoo expressed outrage at the reported surveillance.

“We were not aware of nor would we condone this reported activity,” a spokeswoman for the US technology firm told a foreign news agency in an email statement.