From Britain’s GCHQ, lamenting the images they got when they tapped into Yahoo webcam chats:
It would appear that a surprising number of people use webcam conversations to show intimate parts of their body to the other person.
Imagine that. On a more serious note, GCHQ was tapping into Yahoo webcam chats:
Britain’s surveillance agency GCHQ, with aid from the US National Security Agency, intercepted and stored the webcam images of millions of internet users not suspected of wrongdoing, secret documents reveal.
GCHQ files dating between 2008 and 2010 explicitly state that a surveillance program codenamed Optic Nerve collected still images of Yahoo webcam chats in bulk and saved them to agency databases, regardless of whether individual users were an intelligence target or not.
In one six-month period in 2008 alone, the agency collected webcam imagery — including substantial quantities of sexually explicit communications — from more than 1.8 million Yahoo user accounts globally.
Unsurprisingly, Yahoo was not amused when it learned about this.