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DON’T PUT YOUR YAHOO ON YAHOO

Via The Guardian

Optic Nerve: millions of Yahoo webcam images intercepted by GCHQ

• 1.8m users targeted by UK agency in six-month period alone
• Optic Nerve program collected Yahoo webcam images in bulk
• Yahoo: ‘A whole new level of violation of our users’ privacy’
• Material included large quantity of sexually explicit images

The GCHQ program saved one image every five minutes from the users’ feeds. Photograph: Chris Jackson/Getty Images

Spencer Ackerman and James Ball

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 codenamed Optic Nerve collected still images of Yahoo webcam chats in bulk and saved them to agency databases, regardless of whether individual users were an intelligence target or not.

In one six-month period in 2008 alone, the agency collected webcam imagery – including substantial quantities of sexually explicit communications – from more than 1.8 million Yahoo user accounts globally.

Yahoo reacted furiously to the webcam interception when approached by the Guardian. The company denied any prior knowledge of the program, accusing the agencies of “a whole new level of violation of our users’ privacy”.

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GCHQ does not have the technical means to make sure no images of UK or US citizens are collected and stored by the system, and there are no restrictions under UK law to prevent Americans’ images being accessed by British analysts without an individual warrant.

The documents also chronicle GCHQ’s sustained struggle to keep the large store of sexually explicit imagery collected by Optic Nerve away from the eyes of its staff, though there is little discussion about the privacy implications of storing this material in the first place.

Optic Nerve, the documents provided by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden show, began as a prototype in 2008 and was still active in 2012, according to an internal GCHQ wiki page accessed that year.
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The system, eerily reminiscent of the telescreens evoked in George Orwell’s 1984, was used for experiments in automated facial recognition, to monitor GCHQ’s existing targets, and to discover new targets of interest. Such searches could be used to try to find terror suspects or criminals making use of multiple, anonymous user IDs.

Rather than collecting webcam chats in their entirety, the program saved one image every five minutes from the users’ feeds, partly to comply with human rights legislation, and also to avoid overloading GCHQ’s servers. The documents describe these users as “unselected” – intelligence agency parlance for bulk rather than targeted collection.

One document even likened the program’s “bulk access to Yahoo webcam images/events” to a massive digital police mugbook of previously arrested individuals.

Continue reading “DON’T PUT YOUR YAHOO ON YAHOO”

British and American Security Services Pass Around Our Nude Photos … While Protecting Pedophiles

George Washington's picture

Submitted by George Washington on 11/24/2014 11:54 -0500

The British spy agency GCHQ and the NSA collected millions of webcam images … many of them nude.

NSA employees routinely pass around nude photos and videos of everyday normal citizens gathered through mass surveillance.

They say: “Trust us, we won’t misuse any nude images.” They say: “We’re the good guys … just trying to stop bad guys.”

But the British security services allegedly helped to cover up widespread pedophelia in Britain. Indeed, a whistleblower alleges that the British security services supported and funded pedophile rings as a way to blackmail establishment figures.

Something similar may have happened in the U.S. Yahoo News reported in 2010:

A 2006 Immigration and Customs Enforcement investigation into the purchase of child pornography online turned up more than 250 civilian and military employees of the Defense Department — including some with the highest available security clearance — who used credit cards or PayPal to purchase images of children in sexual situations. But the Pentagon investigated only a handful of the cases, Defense Department records show.

***

But the DCIS opened investigations into only 20 percent of the individuals identified, and succeeded in prosecuting just a handful.

What about the other 80 percent? Were they blackmailed?

Yahoo continues:

Without greater public disclosure of how these cases wound down, it’s impossible to know how or whether any of the names listed in the … papers came in for additional scrutiny.

***

According to the records, DCIS prioritized the investigations by focusing on people who had security clearances — since those who have a taste for child pornography can be vulnerable to blackmail and espionage.

***

At least some of the people on the … list with security clearances were never pursued and could possibly remain on the job ….

The NSA also tracks people’s porn-viewing habits in order to discredit activists. The NSA also keeps nude and suggestive photos of people in order to blackmail them.

Bill Binney – the high-level NSA executive who created the agency’s mass surveillance program for digital information, a 32-year NSA veteran widely regarded as a “legend” within the agency, the senior technical director within the agency and managed thousands of NSA employees, an expert on spying by the Soviets – told Washington’s Blog:

This is just one of the ways to make controlling people possible. Standard KGB/Stasi tactics.

Should we really trust these people? Are they the good guys?

iNARCISSISTS & iMORONS DESERVE WHAT THEY GET

Poor AWD. He died one month too soon. Evidently, according to the radio station I was listening to on the way to work this morning, the 50 or so nude pictures of Kate Upton taken from her iCloud account and released on the internet leave nothing to the imagination. Even the women on the radio show seemed to be impressed by her hooters. AWD would have had field day on this thread.

I do not feel sorry in the least for Kate or Jennifer. Who takes nude pictures of themselves in this day and age and doesn’t think they will somehow become public? Haven’t these idiots been paying attention? I guess Kate and Jennifer were too busy with their fantastic careers to pay attention to the Edward Snowden revelations. Everything you do, say, text, or record digitally is being accessed by someone. It’s that simple. Don’t be an iIdiot. Either that, or these narcissistic starlets actually want these pictures in the public realm because it generates more publicity for their “important careers” pretending to be someone relevant in this superficial society.

The extreme narcissism of the morons in this country is breathtaking to behold. Facebook, instagram, twitter and selfies are a reflection of a degraded society of ignorant, egotistical, moronic, shallow, narcissistic, self involved tools. I don’t care where you are checking in from. I don’t care what you are eating. I don’t care what your dinner looks like. I don’t care what you think about Kim Kardashian learning pole dancing. I don’t care that you are going to buy a new car with a 7 year loan and are worried about the car payments. I don’t care about your new tattoo. I don’t fucking care about you. #Idontcare.

I have a suspicion Stucky is going to have some more problems with sticky computer keys.

Via Washington Post

4chan: The ‘shock post’ site that hosted the private Jennifer Lawrence photos

By Terrence McCoy

For all its cultural relevance, it’s possible you’ve never heard of 4chan. It’s not much to look at. Just a few pixels blinking on a page like something out of “Duck Hunt.”

The outdated design, however, belies its influence. Called one the “darkest corners of the Web” by a New York Times writer and the “ninth circle of Hell,” 4chan twins the irreverent with the abhorrent, birthing wildly popular memes such as Lolcats while simultaneously hosting some of the most prurient content on the Internet.

Its army of anonymous users anointed founder Christopher Poole Time Magazine’s Most Influential Person of 2009 by manipulating the poll. It gamed Google Trends, forcing a racial slur to its No. 1 spot. And one of its users, which number more than 7 million, was once investigated for spilling the contents of Sarah Palin’s e-mail.

But this weekend 4chan shot into headlines like never before. On Sunday evening, one or many 4chan users dumped what appeared to be a trove of private, nude photographs of numerous celebrities including Jennifer Lawrence and Kate Upton. The exact provenance of the images remains murky, like almost everything involving 4chan, which deploys fleets of anonymous users who vie for site supremacy by one-upping each other with outrageous material.

The trove of celebrity pictures was about as outrageous as it gets, perhaps the most intrusive, intimate pictures ever circulated publicly of celebrities. They quickly spilled to Reddit, where thousands purveyed it under the handle of “the Fappening” — “fap” means to masturbate — before the news reached Buzzfeed and the rest of the viral media gang.

Now, following 24 hours of hot coverage, the feds are involved. “This is a flagrant violation of privacy,” a Lawrence spokesman said in a statement reported by Reuters. “The authorities have been contacted and will prosecute anyone who posts the stolen photos of Jennifer Lawrence.”

The FBI said it is “addressing the matter,” calling the leak an “unlawful release of material involving high profile individuals.”

But exactly what makes 4chan unique may complicate the investigation into what party or parties were behind the leak. 4chan users operate with complete anonymity, which Poole said contributes to creativity. It also means, however, that users are free to post the profane, the hurtful, the evil. “They get rowdy — it’s like a bar without alcohol,” Willard Ling, one longtime user told the Wall Street Journal in 2008. “It’s like that psychological concept of deindividualization — when groups of people become less aware of their own responsibility.”

Nowhere among 4chan’s vast collection of message boards is this more apparent than in a section known as “/b/,” called the “darkest corner of the searchable Web.” It’s where the Jennifer Lawrence photographs first materialized, which were apparently hawked for bitcoin. And it’s also where more users are reportedly trying to ignite a viral hashtag #leakforJLaw, which encourages people to post nude selfies of themselves to support the celebrity.

/b/ is a realm pervaded by something called “shock posts” — graphic scenes of violence or sex. A realm where “completely anonymous — no login, no username — people try to shock, entertain and coax free porn from one another,” wrote Gawker’s Nick Douglas. He said it’s otherwise known as the “a–hole of the internet.”According to an MIT paper published by the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence, /b/ operates under a very different set of mores than most of society. Its “lack of identity makes traditional reputation systems unworkable,” the paper stated. “Second, instead of archiving conversations, /b/ deletes them when newer content arrives — often within minutes — which leads to a chaotic, fast-paced experience.” It makes “complete anonymity and content deletion the norm.”

It’s bound by few rules. According to Wired, the few include: “Do not talk about /b/,” Do NOT talk about /b/,” and “there is always more f—– up s— than what you just saw.”

The message board was the first created under the banner of 4chan, and Poole says it’s self-perpetuating and self-governing. “Ultimately, the power lies in the community to dictate its own standards,” he told the New York Times in 2008. “All we do is provide a general framework.”

THE NSA THINKS YOU’RE HOT

Snowden: NSA Employees Routinely Pass Around Nude Photos Obtained Via Mass Surveillance

George Washington's picture

Submitted by George Washington on 07/17/2014 15:41 -0400

Edward Snowden just told the Guardian:

Snowden …. Made a startling claim that a culture exists within the NSA in which, during surveillance, nude photographs picked up of people in “sexually compromising” situations are routinely passed around.

NSA employees have also been caught using their mass surveillance powers to spy on love interests, such as girlfriends, obsessions or former wives … and to eavesdrop on American soldiers’ intimate conversations with their wives back home.

By way of background, US and UK intelligence services have gathered millions of webcam images … many nude. The NSA collects and permanently retains many suggestive photographic images gathered in other ways. And top experts say the NSA is collecting the CONTENT of all of our phone calls and emails.

So NSA employees have access to a lot of nude or suggestive videos, photos, phone calls and emails.

It’s not just NSA … many government agencies have become corrupted.

For example, an employee of the Transportation Security Administration admitted that TSA agents share – and laugh at – nude scans of passengers.

And as we’ve previously documented:

Senior SEC employees spent up to 8 hours a day surfing porn sites instead of cracking down on financial crimes

Nuclear Regulatory Commission workers watch porn instead of cracking down on unsafe conditions at nuclear plants

Investigators from the Treasury’s Office of the Inspector General found that some of the regulator’s employees surfed erotic websites, hired prostitutes and accepted gifts from bank executives … instead of actually working to help the economy

The Minerals Management Service – the regulator charged with overseeing BP and other oil companies to ensure that oil spills don’t occur – was riddled with “a culture of substance abuse and promiscuity”, which included “sex with industry contacts”