GCHQ spied on millions of Yahoo video chats, harvested sexual images of chatters, compared itself to "Tom Cruise in Minority Report"

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The programme, called OPTIC NERVE, focused on people whose usernames were similar to those of suspects,

Really chafes my Buttle.

3% and 11% of the Yahoo webcam imagery harvested by GCHQ contains “undesirable nudity”

100% of the rapiscan machines also contain undesirable nudity.

Why is the security state such a perv?

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My 13 year-old son doesn’t want the newest X-box, 'cause he doesn’t trust the always-on camera and the NSA. Seemed a bit paranoid to me, but obviously I’m not paranoid enough.

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This is horrible. The global Big Brother apparatus needs to be dismantled!

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Also, the fact that the Yahoo software allows more than one person to view a webcam stream without necessarily sending a reciprocal stream means that it appears sometimes to be used for broadcasting pornography.

Wait a minute–the Internet is used for pornography? Why am I just hearing about this now?

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I am confident all of those users spied upon were over age 18.

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Small, grandiosity problems, infatuated with the illusion of a perfectly secure society at any cost…

Or did they, um, have something else in mind?

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So THAT’S why all those Russian girls want to talk to me…

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Depending on sampling frequency, it’s entirely possible that the United Kingdom now has the world’s largest collection of totally illegal amateur hebephilic pornography. They’d better hope that whoever wrote up their immunity included a catch-all clause… That’s the sort of thing you could easily overlook while crafting your Enabling Act.

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There’s been a lot of lag lately, from all the pr0n

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Apparently the “undesirable nudity” OPTICNERVE guys don’t talk to the JTRIG “discrediting psyops” guys.

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I’ve seen my share of nudity on the internet, and I think it’s fair to say a lot more than 7% of it is undesirable.

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Really chafes my Buttle.

I see what you did, there. Whatever clever comment I was going to make now Palin’s in comparison.

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Surely the intelligence services conduct this research for one reason only;
so they can provide us innocent citizens with the best advice on protecting our privacy.

Thank them for keeping us safe so proficiently! We should be grateful forever. To each of them.

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I don’t know if the UK has the same neo-liberal “privatize everything” push as the US, but I sense a market opportunity here!:

$ whois gchqporn.com

Whois Server Version 2.0

Domain names in the .com and .net domains can now be registered
with many different competing registrars. Go to http://www.internic.net
for detailed information.

No match for “GCHQPORN.COM”.
Last update of whois database: Thu, 27 Feb 2014 17:03:13 UTC <<<

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Word on the street is Verizon is getting into a spat with Yahoo, bitching that Yahoo is sending too much porn to the internet and should pay for the privilege.

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Had to go and look up that term, and I’m not sure whether I should thank you or go and bleach my eyeballs. The Guardian article noted that there was:

"Furthermore, all of GCHQ's work is carried out in accordance with a strict legal and policy framework which ensures that our activities are authorised, necessary and proportionate, and that there is rigorous oversight, including from the secretary of state, the interception and intelligence services commissioners and the Parliamentary Intelligence and Security Committee.
Orly? Exactly who authorized the keeping of such images and why is that necessary or proportionate? Also, the use of this word, "rigorous"? I do not think that word means what you think it means.

Also, this fun little tidbit:

Rather than collecting webcam chats in their entirety, the program saved one image every five minutes from the users' feeds, partly to comply with human rights legislation, and also to avoid overloading GCHQ's servers.
Well, gosh, that's mighty white of you, GCHQ/NSA/FiveEyes. Gonna guess the it's less the former, much, much more the latter.
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That’s pretty much the exact concern that prevented me from ever buying the Kinect and the reason I’ll never buy the new Xbox One. Why would anyone let a camera (3D at that) and a mic in your home?

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You’ve got a smart kid.

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Thank you for expressing your opinion. It has been noted and filed in your permanent record. ~NSA

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