They call it intelligence, but...

It really should come as no surprise after the revelations by Edward Snowden that the security agencies of various nations are snooping on anyone with an Internet connection, but apparently the latest hoo-ha is that Britain’s equivalent of the NSA, GCHQ, have been revealed as intercepting webcam images of Yahoo users. This as reported by the Guardian.

Yahoo of course has its knickers in a twist and denies all knowledge of this. Because, like Captain Renault in Casablanca, after more than seven months of Snowden-related disclosures, they are shocked—shocked, I say—to discover that GCHQ has been trawling through their users’ activities (with help from the NSA).

The intelligence agency, naturally, is saying they’ve done nothing whatsoever illegal.

But what’s kind of an extra layer of creep-out is that many, many of the images from billions of Yahoo users around the world are, ah, sexually explicit. That’s because (in the words of one GCHQ document), “Unfortunately…it would appear that a surprising number of people use webcam conversations to show intimate parts of their body to the other person.”

Oh, quelle horreur!

I wonder about the poor analysts who have to look at this stuff. I mean, think about it: after the first 30,000 of those kinds of videos, it’s got to get to you.

Sadly, I don’t know which should be less surprising—the fact that amateurs are using tech to expand on the sexting idea, or that security services are scooping that stuff and a whole lot more into their “intelligence gathering” databases. Or that platform providers like Yahoo want us to believe they’re clueless. Frankly, all three ideas creep me out more than a little.

Well, it could be worse. At least so far we’ve not heard of any Anthony Weiner webcam skivvy-shots going viral. But I kind of wonder if he’s in a warehouse somewhere. So to speak.