I guess we’ve known for a while that your webcam could be hacked by those who know how (safe to assume NSA has a few people who do) but I this is the first time I’ve heard of this “Operation Optic Nerve” which the NSA and the UK’s GCHQ used to grab image and video streams en masse and save them for later perusal. Here’s the most alarming bit from the Democracy Now piece:
The program was reportedly used for experiments in “automated facial recognition” as well as to monitor terrorism suspects. A more accurate name for the “Optic Nerve” program may have been “Peeping Tom,” because it ended up collecting a large number of sexually explicit images. According to the documents, between 3 and 11 percent of the Yahoo webcam images contained what the GCHQ called “undesirable nudity.”
In other words, they’re just grabbing everything and watching enough of it to know that they’ve gone too far. Surely, we, as Americans–no–as human beings have the right to not have our clotheless bodies seen by people without our permission.
Go check out the rest of Democracy Now’s coverage–it’s a real eye-opener.
via thepete.com* http://thepete.com/bigbrother-is-in-the-house-well-your-house-and-mine-via-our-webcams-notcool-via-democracynow-org/
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