UK agency’s effort to gather facial images via Yahoo chat sessions brings in too many other body parts.

The Five Eyes, a term used to explain the transnational intelligence-gathering alliance between Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the united kingdom, and the united states, will be more aptly named the Million Eyes, to mirror more accurately the agencies’ ability to access webcam communications.

The UK’s GCHQ intelligence service, with the aid of the NSA, reportedly grabbed snapshots from millions of Yahoo users’ webcam chat sessions in recent times, about 7% of which contained “undesirable nudity.”

On Thursday, in line with documents provided by whistleblower Edward Snowden, The Guardian published information about an intelligence-gathering program called Optic Nerve, which began in 2008 and continued a minimum of through 2012, designed to check facial recognition technology and to spot persons of interest.

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Optic Nerve is claimed to gather information from GCHQ’s Internet cable taps and to route that data to the NSA’s XKeyscore search program. Instead of collecting the whole video stream, this system reportedly collects still images every five minutes.

According to the report, GCHQ collected 1.8 million images from Yahoo users’ webcam chat sessions in a six-month period during 2008. A lot of these images are said to be sexually explicit — 7.1%, with a three.7% margin of error.

“Unfortunately, there are issues with undesirable images throughout the data,” one of the vital excepted documents posted by The Guardian reads. “It might appear that a stunning variety of people use webcam conversations to teach intimate parts in their body to the opposite person. Also, the truth that Yahoo software allows a couple of person to view a webcam stream without necessarily sending a reciprocal stream signifies that apparently sometimes for use for broadcasting pornography.”

Rather than taking steps to bypass capturing such images, GCHQ is related to have made an effort to exclude images from its searches when its software doesn’t find any facial expression. However, in accordance with The Guardian, the agency’s explicit imagery detection system generates too many false positives by identifying people’s faces as pornographic.

What’s more, such policies might be unsustainable now that the agency’s aversion to nudity has become public knowledge. Continued refusal to think about explicit imagery would create a secure, though immodest, channel for covert communication — pornography could shield steganography.

GCHQ declined to comment to The Guardian beyond insisting that its activities were legal.

In an emailed statement, a Yahoo spokesperson said the corporate was not previously privy to this GCHQ’s program and disapproves of it, if it exists as claimed. “This report, if true, represents an entire new level of violation of our users’ privacy that’s completely unacceptable and we strongly call at the world’s governments to reform surveillance law in line with the rules we outlined in December,” Yahoo’s spokesperson said, noting that the corporate intends to expand encryption across all of its services.

“That’s just more evidence that the NSA’s surveillance programs are broken and short of serious and immediate reform,” said Mark Rumold, a staff attorney on the Electronic Frontier Foundation, in a phone interview.

Rumold said this is not particularly surprising because the bulk number of online information practiced by the NSA and GCHQ may be assumed to incorporate video communications. “But this has a bit of more emotional pull to it, a chunk more of a visceral feel, because many people communicate with video chats over the web.”

Computer & Communications Industry Association president Ed Black also condemned this system. “This secret capturing and storage of imagery taken from millions of video chats indicates government privacy violations have reached an alarming new level of intrusiveness,” he said in a press release. “The dimensions and audacity of this online spying is outrageous and shows how government surveillance officials will go so far as they could to collect data with minimal regard for privacy expectations, ethics, or laws.”

Earlier this year, in accordance with months of stories concerning the scope of NSA surveillance, President Obama outlines five changes in US surveillance policy, to the dissatisfaction of privacy advocates. The foremost substantive change was a commitment to switch the agency’s bulk selection of phone metadata with something less omnivorous. It is still seen exactly how this program may be reconstituted.

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Thomas Claburn have been writing about business and technology since 1996, for publications together with New Architect, PC Computing, InformationWeek, Salon, Wired, and Ziff Davis Smart Business. Before that, he worked in film and tv, having earned a not particularly useful … View Full Bio

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