A document from Edward Snowden to The Guardian revealed Optic Nerve, a secret program to collect still images for GCHQ and NSA.
In a six-month period in 2008, the program collected images from 1.8 million Yahoo! users' webcam.
The privacy risks of mass collection from video sources have long been known to the NSA and GCHQ, as a research document from the mid-2000s noted: "One of the greatest hindrances to exploiting video data is the fact that the vast majority of videos received have no intelligence value whatsoever, such as explicit materials, commercials, movie clips and family home movies."
Yahoo! "reacted furiously" to the reported interceptions when approached by the newspaper, The Guardian said. It said the company denied any prior knowledge of the program and accused the surveillance agencies of "a whole new level of violation of our users' privacy."
