Brussels and Washington – The latest revelations about surveillance by Britain’s intelligence officials at GCHQ disclose details on a multi-year program that involved capturing images from millions of peoples’ video chats. News reports say the images taken from Yahoo webcam chats were secretly gathered and stored for facial recognition purposes. Yahoo has issued a strongly worded statement denouncing this violation of privacy
The Computer & Communications Industry Association, whose members include a wide range of Internet service, telecommunications and IT companies, has testified multiple times before the U.S. Senate and has issued numerous written statements around the world over the past decade objecting to overly broad surveillance. The following can be attributed to CCIA President & CEO Ed Black:
“This secret capturing and storage of images taken from millions of video chats indicates government privacy violations have reached an alarming new level of intrusiveness. The size and audacity of this online spying is outrageous and shows how government surveillance officials will go as far as they can to gather data with minimal regard for privacy expectations, ethics or laws. These revelations also add to the evidence that citizens and policymakers around the world need much more information on surveillance programs as those devising and implementing surveillance programs cannot be trusted to make reforms without oversight.”