The Five Eyes, a term used to describe the transnational intelligence-gathering alliance between Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the UK, and the US, would be more aptly named the Million Eyes, to reflect more accurately the agencies' ability to access webcam communications.
The UK's GCHQ intelligence service, with the help of the NSA, reportedly grabbed snapshots from millions of Yahoo users' webcam chat sessions in recent years, about 7% of which contained "undesirable nudity."
On Thursday, based on documents provided by whistleblower Edward Snowden, The Guardian published details about an intelligence-gathering program called Optic Nerve, which began in 2008 and continued at least through 2012, designed to test facial recognition technology and to identify persons of interest.
Optic Nerve is said to collect information from GCHQ's Internet cable taps and to route that data to the NSA's XKeyscore search program. Rather than collecting the full video stream, the program reportedly collects still images every five minutes.
According to the report, GCHQ collected 1.8 million images from Yahoo users' webcam chat sessions in a six-month period during 2008. Many of these images are said to be sexually explicit -- 7.1%, with a 3.7% margin of error.
"Unfortunately, there are issues with undesirable images within the data," one of the excepted documents posted by The Guardian reads. "It would appear that a surprising number of people use webcam conversations to show intimate parts of their body to the other person. Also, the fact that Yahoo software allows more than one person to view a webcam stream without necessarily sending a reciprocal stream means that it appears sometimes to be used for broadcasting pornography."
Rather than taking steps to avoid capturing such images, GCHQ is said to have made an effort to exclude images from its searches when its software does not find any facial features. However, according to The Guardian, the agency's explicit imagery detection system generates too many false positives by identifying people's faces as pornographic.
What's more, such policies may be unsustainable now that the agency's aversion to nudity has become public knowledge. Continued refusal to consider explicit imagery would create a safe, though immodest, channel for covert communication -- pornography could shield steganography.
GCHQ declined to comment to The Guardian beyond insisting that its activities were legal.
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