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 code-named Optic Nerve collected still images of Yahoo webcam chats in bulk and saved them to agency databases.
The agency collected webcam imagery – including substantial quantities of sexually explicit communications – from millions of Yahoo user accounts globally.
Yahoo reacted furiously to the webcam interception and the company denied any prior knowledge of the program, accusing the agencies of “a whole new level of violation of users’ privacy
