This will be hard to write without it becoming an opinion piece because I have strong feelings regarding all players involved, and you might be surprised to find out who I support and who I don't. That being said, it was revealed that the British intelligence agency known as GCHQ collected and stored millions of webcam images from Yahoo chat sessions.
This does seem excessive. I don't know their justifications or rationale, but I question how valuable these images have turned out to be. There should at least be some mechanism in place for determining if the images have value and, if not, deleting them immediately.
And, as you could probably figure out, many of them are of an....intimate nature, and those were apparently being viewed by many people at the agency who didn't need to view them. For things such as that between consenting adults, no one needs to view them other than the sender and recipient; I can't imagine any of them are related to national security.
I'll wait to hear their explanation as to the probative value of these captured images, but I suspect it is going to be difficult to explain away.
I find this to be a huge invasion of privacy. If the GCHQ had a reason to capture and store images, due to a potential threat, or if they had information that the sender or recipient was up to no good that would be one thing, but to randomly capture images from Yahoo chat? I find a huge problem with that. I too look forward to their reasoning behind such privacy breaches, I am sure that they will not be fully justified.
ReplyDeleteI want to understand the purpose of this espionage. Why would they need such information? The only purpose I can think is for marketing but even so they can't sell our information. Right?
ReplyDeleteThis violates a person's right to privacy; especially if they are sending pictures using their personal e-mail account. I do not think British Intelligence will be able to provide a logical reason on why they have these private and personal images stored. You would think that in a chat session you have privacy; no one can view or save the information that is being exchanged within the chat. I guess I thought wrong, makes me wonder if it is going on in Britian the US can not be too far behind Britian with violating a person's privacy.
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