A story published by the Guardian, citing documents obtained from whistle-blower Edward Snowden, said the National Security Agency helped the British surveillance agency GCHQ intercept millions of webcam images in a program code-named Optical Nerve, starting in 2008.
At one point that year alone, Optical Nerve accessed more than 1.8 million Yahoo user accounts around the world, many containing sexually explicit images.
In a statement to The Chronicle, the Sunnyvale company blasted the project and said it had no prior knowledge of Optical Nerve.
"We were not aware of nor would we condone this reported activity," Yahoo said. "This report, if true, represents a whole new level of violation of our users' privacy that is completely unacceptable and we strongly call on the world's governments to reform surveillance law consistent with the principles we outlined in December. We are committed to preserving our users' trust and security and continue our efforts to expand encryption across all of our services."
Optical Nerve was designed to help the spy agency identify targets of its investigations using biometric facial recognition techniques. But the project also intercepted webcam images of "large numbers of innocent people" with "similar Yahoo identifiers to known targets," the Guardian report said.
About 3 to 11 percent of the webcam images contained "undesirable nudity," the report said.
"Unfortunately ... it would appear that a surprising number of people use webcam conversations to show intimate parts of their body to the other person," a GCHQ document said. "Also, the fact that the Yahoo software allows more than one person to view a webcam stream without necessarily sending a reciprocal stream means that it appears sometimes to be used for broadcasting pornography."
The GCHQ tried to program pornography detection into its webcam harvesting software, but those triggered "lots of false positives by incorrectly tagging shots of people's faces as pornography," the newspaper said.
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