UK spy agency collected millions of personal webcam images

Britain's spy agency GCHQ intercepted millions of people's webcam chats and stored still images of them, including sexually explicit ones, the Guardian newspaper reported on Thursday.

The files, leaked by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden, reportedly revealed how the surveillance program Optic Nerve collected one still image of webcam chats every five minutes from random Yahoo webcam chats regardless of whether individual users were suspects or not.

Optic Nerve, which began as a prototype in 2008 and was still active in 2012, was intended to test automated facial recognition, monitor GCHQ's targets and uncover new ones, the Guardian said.

Under British law, there are no restrictions preventing images of U.S. citizens being accessed by British intelligence, it added. GCHQ collected images from the webcam chats of over 1.8 million users globally in a six-month period in 2008 alone.

"It is a long-standing policy that we do not comment on intelligence matters," a GCHQ spokesperson said on Thursday.

The webcam information was fed into the National Security Agency’s search tool and all of the policy documents were available to NSA analysts, according to the paper. However, it was not clear whether the NSA had access to the actual database of Yahoo webcam images, it added. Such widespread information-sharing between U.S. and U.K. spy agencies has riled public and politicians on both sides of the Atlantic.

Yahoo, which was apparently chosen because its webcam system was known to be used by GCHQ targets, expressed outrage at the reported surveillance.

"We were not aware of nor would we condone this reported activity," a spokeswoman told Agence France Press news agency.

"This report, if true, represents a whole new level of violation of our users' privacy that is completely unacceptable,” she added. "We are committed to preserving our users' trust and security and continue our efforts to expand encryption across all of our services."

Snowden, now in Russia after fleeing the United States, made world headlines last summer when he provided details of NSA surveillance programs to the Guardian and the Washington Post.

For decades, the NSA and GCHQ have worked as close partners, sharing intelligence under an arrangement known as the UKUSA agreement. They also collaborate with eavesdropping agencies in Canada, Australia and New Zealand under an arrangement known as the "Five Eyes" alliance.

Under Optic Nerve, GCHQ tried to limit its staff's ability to see the webcam images, but they could still see the images of people with similar usernames to intelligence targets, the Guardian reported.

The data collected, which was available to NSA analysts through routine information sharing, contained a significant amount of sexual content, the newspaper added. It cited one document as saying: "It would appear that a surprising number of people use webcam conversations to show intimate parts of their body to the other person."

GCHQ also implemented restrictions on the collection of sexually explicit images, but its software was not always able to distinguish between these and other images.

"Discussing efforts to make the interface ‘safer to use,’ it (GCHQ) 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," the newspaper said.

The spy agency eventually excluded images in which the software had not detected any faces from search results to prevent staff from accessing explicit images, it added.

Wire services