Guardian: British spy agency collected images of Yahoo webcam chats

INVASION OF PRIVACY: Satellite dishes seen at GCHQ's outpost at Bude, Cornwall. According to the Guardian, GCHQ's surveillance program saved one image every five minutes from randomly selected Yahoo webcam chats and stored them on agency databases. - Reuters

LONDON: Britain's spy agency GCHQ intercepted millions of people's webcam chats and stored still images of them, including sexually explicit ones, the Guardian newspaper reported on Thursday.

GCHQ files dating between 2008 and 2010 provided to the newspaper by the former US National Security Agency (NSA) contractor Edward Snowden, revealed that the surveillance programme, codenamed Optic Nerve, saved one image every five minutes from randomly selected Yahoo Inc webcam chats and stored them on agency databases.