That's the name Britain’s Government Communications Headquarters, or GCHQ, gave to its program of capturing video webcam images from Yahoo users, no matter who they were. GCHQ is still collecting images. It has collected a lot of images; in six months of 2008 it collected webcam images from more than 1.8 million Yahoo user accounts around the world. Naturally, the agency did not tell Yahoo what it was doing.
GCHQ did not want to overload its servers so it collected one image every five minutes from users’ feeds. Supposedly it restricted its image searches to metadata. But it allowed its spies to view the contents of webcam chats between users whose usernames matched those of surveillance targets. And some of those chats were interesting in that they had sexual images.
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