U.K. Agency Spied on Millions of Webcam Chats

A recent report from The Guardian newspaper revealed that Britain's surveillance agency GCHQ, with aid from the US National Security Agency, intercepted and stored the webcam images of millions of internet users. Dubbed Optic Nerve, the operation, which began as a prototype in 2008 and was still active in 2012, saved images to agency databases, regardless of whether individual users were suspected of wrongdoing, the newspaper claims.

In one six-month period during 2008 and 2010, GCHQ collected webcam imagery - including substantial quantities of sexually explicit communications - from more than 1.8 million Yahoo user accounts around the world.

"The latest report about webcam spying indicates government privacy violations have reached an alarming new level of intrusiveness," Ed Black, president of the Computer and Communications Industry Association, said in a statement. Black's group includes Yahoo, Microsoft, Google, Sprint and T-Mobile.

"The size and audacity of this online spying is outrageous and shows how government surveillance officials will go as far as they can to gather data with minimal regard for privacy expectations, ethics or laws," Black said.

Read more -here-