Big Brother’s Clever Roll Out?

February 28, 2014 in Montana

by lizard

Is the normalizing of the surveillance state complimented by First Look Media?

It used to be anyone who thought “they” can watch you through webcams were considered unhinged. Well…

Britain’s surveillance agency GCHQ, with aid from the US National Security Agency, intercepted and stored the webcam images of millions of internet users not suspected of wrongdoing, secret documents reveal.

GCHQ files dating between 2008 and 2010 explicitly state that a surveillance program codenamed Optic Nerve collected still images of Yahoo webcam chats in bulk and saved them to agency databases, regardless of whether individual users were an intelligence target or not.

In one six-month period in 2008 alone, the agency collected webcam imagery – including substantial quantities of sexually explicit communications – from more than 1.8 million Yahoo user accounts globally.

Glenn Greenwald also has a very important article (drip) at The//Intercept about How Covert Agents Infiltrate the Internet to Manipulate, Deceive, and Destroy Reputations. I haven’t really dug in yet, but just from skimming the documents the depth of strategic deception appears astonishing.

While I appreciate the information, I remain suspicious of the source and the ultimate intention of these disclosures because it smacks of boiling frogs.

Not a popular position, I know, but watching the lackluster reaction I can’t help but wonder.