Your Worst Moments, Archived for National Security

Somewhere in a GCHQ server farm, there is a screenshot of some guy’s dick. Probably thousands of them. Because between 2008 and 2012, British intelligence was capturing still images from Yahoo webcam chats without any specific suspicion of wrongdoing, ostensibly to fight terrorism. The Guardian broke the story, citing new documents from Edward Snowden, and it’s exactly as invasive and absurd as it sounds.

The operation had GCHQ—with NSA support—collecting webcam imagery from millions of Yahoo users and running it through facial recognition to flag potential terror suspects. They captured over 1.8 million users’ images in 2008 alone. The scale is staggering. The stated purpose is almost insulting in its flimsiness.

What makes it worse—or funnier, depending on your mood—is that even GCHQ staff found the whole thing a bit awkward. An internal note, quoted in the reporting, observed with something like a sigh that unfortunately… it would appear that a surprising number of people use webcam conversations to show intimate parts of their body to the other person. Which: yes. Of course they do. The internet has always been primarily a delivery mechanism for pornography and human loneliness, and Yahoo chat in 2008 was no exception.

Yahoo’s response was essentially a shrug dressed as outrage. They couldn’t do much except publicly complain that the operation technically fell within British law—which is its own kind of damning. The surveillance state wasn’t breaking rules. It just had rules that permitted this.

What sticks is the bureaucratic mundanity of it all. Some analyst, somewhere, tasked with preventing terrorism, scrolling past an endless parade of amateur exhibitionism in search of a recognizable face. The state, peering at its citizens through a keyhole, finding mostly boredom and horniness on the other side—which is, in the end, most of human life.