14 DAY TRIAL // The number of troubles piling on NSA’s doorstep is growing constantly and the latest one has a direct connection to the GCHQ’s spying on Yahoo users via their webcams.
Three senators are planning to launch an investigation into the American agency’s involvement in the GCHQ operations. Martin Heinrich, Mark Udall and Ron Wyden are already well-known adversaries of the NSA’s mass surveillance programs and have been working to make sure the NSA starts respecting people’s privacy rights.
They stated that they are extremely troubled by the “breathtaking lack of respect for privacy and civil liberties” of the British agency. They said that any involvement of the US agencies in the events reported by The Guardian and based on files from Edward Snowden will need to be closely scrutinized.
The other day, it was revealed that the GCHQ intercepted communications of Yahoo users conducted via webcam. The program was meant to help the agency conduct face recognition on subjects, and it snapped a picture every few minutes, since collecting all the chat logs would have required too much space.
Millions of users were affected by this. As you’d expected, nude pictures were also snapped by the GCHQ, who, despite trying to weed them out before sending the images out to analysts, didn’t really succeed.
The case has a great impact on the privacy of countless people and is a grave violation of trust. While “Optic Nerve” sought to collect data on terrorists, the data collection was not targeted, but rather completely random.
“A very large number of individuals – including law-abiding Americans – may have had private videos of themselves and their families intercepted and stored without any suspicion of wrongdoing,” reads the statement coming from Heinrich, Udall and Wyden.
The three senators urged for American authorities to make sure that foreign intelligence collection does not intrude unnecessarily on the rights of innocent people.
The Internet Association, an industry group representing companies such as Amazon, AOL , eBay, Google, Netflix and Twitter, also denounced the latest revelations that have a big impact on how much trust users can put in tools offered by tech companies.
“Today’s revelations, about British intelligence practices, are alarming and reaffirm the need for greater transparency and reform of government surveillance,” reads a statement signed by Michael Beckerman, CEO and President of the Association.
The organization supports the Reform Government Surveillance principles and encourages legislation to limit the government’s authority to collect users’ information, as well as an increase in transparency about government demands.