Yahoo Webcam Images From Millions of Users Intercepted by GCHQ ⇥ theguardian.com

Spencer Ackerman and James Ball, of the Guardian:

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.

Just when you thought intelligence agencies had reached Peak Creepy with their interception of web browsing, text messages, Angry Birds, and so forth, they go for the full David Bailey. Along the way, a human being actually approved of this program, thinking it was a great idea. Does anyone in the intelligence community live in the real world where stuff like this is repulsive?