British Agents Have Seen Your Penis

If you’ve used webcam chats via
Yahoo, there’s a chance that Great Britain’s surveillance agency,
Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ), has collected still
images of you in bulk, including images of your junk you might have
flashed at some lucky person on the other end.

The latest documents leaked by Edward Snowden are about a
program called Optic Nerve, which bulk-collected screenshots of
Yahoo chats and stored them in databases, one image every five
minutes. The images were used in for experiments with automated
facial recognition to try to monitor terrorism suspects. The
Guardian
reports:

The agency did make efforts to limit analysts’ ability to see
webcam images, restricting bulk searches to metadata only.

However, analysts were shown the faces of people with similar
usernames to surveillance targets, potentially dragging in large
numbers of innocent people. One document tells agency staff they
were allowed to display “webcam images associated with similar
Yahoo identifiers to your known target”.

Optic Nerve was based on collecting information from GCHQ’s huge
network of internet cable taps, which was then processed and fed
into systems provided by the NSA. Webcam information was fed into
NSA’s XKeyscore search tool, and NSA research was used to build the
tool which identified Yahoo’s webcam traffic.

One of the big problems on GCHQ’s end was that the images were
full of wangs and butts and boobs:

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.

GCHQ did not make any specific attempts to prevent the
collection or storage of explicit images, the documents suggest,
but did eventually compromise by excluding images in which software
had not detected any faces from search results – a bid to prevent
many of the lewd shots being seen by analysts.

The system was not perfect at stopping those images reaching the
eyes of GCHQ staff, though. An internal guide cautioned prospective
Optic Nerve users that “there is no perfect ability to censor
material which may be offensive. Users who may feel uncomfortable
about such material are advised not to open them”.

Yahoo condemned the program and claim they didn’t know it was
going on:

“We were not aware of, nor would we condone, this reported
activity,” said a spokeswoman. “This report, if true, represents a
whole new level of violation of our users’ privacy that is
completely unacceptable, and we strongly call on the world’s
governments to reform surveillance law consistent with the
principles we outlined in December.

Read the full story
here.