Webcam spy program grabbed secret stills of millions of Yahoo users

A clandestine security program run by the UK's surveillance agency GCHQ with the aid of the NSA captured and stored still images of millions of global webcam users, a new document leak suggests, part of a sweeping monitoring program that required no suspicion of guilt around those impacted. Optic Nerve - which in one six month period alone is said to have captured and stored more than 1.8m Yahoo accounts around the world - ran between 2008 and 2012 at least, grabbing a still every five minutes to create a privacy-intruding digital "mugshot" book security services could later use.

Other documentation indicated the Kinect camera for Xbox 360 was also being assessed as a potential data collection tool.

Read the whole thing here: http://www.slashgear.com/webcam-spy-program-grabbed-secret-stills-of-millions-of-yahoo-user-27318732/

Lets all get Kinects and have a ton of sex in front of it! Yeah I know they were just doing "assesment" on the possibilities but who's to say it's not already happening right at this moment?

I wouldn't be surprised. Governments try to use almost every way they can to spy on us, so cameras like the Kinect and Playstation Move might be part of them.

Yeah I wouldn't be surprised if they look through the PS Eye too lol.

Kinect 2.0 has a white light shown when the camera is being used, same as a good PC webcam. Any other time it uses infrared to track certain gestures. 

What you don't realize is that there are codes that can turn the lights off

How easy would that be with the Kinect 2.0? From this article it shows that they haven't even cracked the 1st Kinect. 

Or just buy a ps4 :D

Um, what the hell? This is legal?

Just to clarify: Am I correct supposing that these people were indeed using their webcams for something like video chat when these captures were being taken? Because I find it very improbable that they (actively) invade the computers of 1.6m people. These people were probably online video chatting, so the NSA-/GCHQ-assholes were "only" eavesdropping on data being sent by the users themselves.

Anything else wouldn't make sense in my opinion. Many webcams show a light when in use, one that cannot simply be software-deactivated. It wouldn't take long until someone realized there was something strange going on.

So there's a good and a bad side to this: Owning a webcam/Kinect alone probably isn't a problem. If, however, you're using any kind of online video chat like Skype - then you're in big trouble, as they've probably taken periodic snapshots of you, too.

I don't mind, I hope NSA and Microsoft get off on watching me jerk off and have sex.