Operation Optic Nerve

Ophthalmic technician Jennifer Hoffman administers a glaucoma screening test with a Tonometer to Sandra Rohrer, a civilian who works at NSA, during ... “Glaucoma is basically a disease of the optic nerve, that for the most part is caused by a pressure inside of the eye that is too high for that particular optic ...

In a flash, he recalls an earlier event in which NSA contractors hacked laptop cameras to secretly spy on surveillance subjects in real time. Edward ... The use of millions of hacked webcams as monitoring devices was a program known as “Optic Nerve,” which was part of the Snowden revelations. Another ...

By what legal authority do the National Security Agency and the FBI ask Yahoo to search its users' emails? Neither the government nor the tech company would say, after Reuters first reported on Tuesday that Yahoo “secretly built a custom software program” it used on behalf of the NSA and CIA to scan ...

First Look/Trevor Paglen • Britain's GCHQ, using a program called Optic Nerve, intercepted and stored webcam images from millions of Yahoo users, then passed them on to the NSA's XKeyscore database. — February 28, 2014. • The NSA shared intelligence that helped the Dutch navy capture a ship ...

Of all the major NSA revelations, this has to be one of the most frivolous. Certainly, Snowden has a point that international aggression should not be automated, whether physical or cyber in nature. Still, there is a discreet change in function between revealing an illegal spying programs like Optic Nerve and ...

Between 2008 and 2012, GCHQ, Britain's NSA, ran a program called Optic Nerve that scanned live webcam chats on Yahoo (and probably other chat services). Many of the images obtained were very personal ones and could be used to either embarrass or blackmail users. Reports in the UK say that NSA ...

News that government intelligence agency GCHQ has been intercepting and storing webcam images from 1.8 million users of Yahoo's chat service under the codename Optic Nerve is a reminder of how close we are to living in a surveillance state. Webcams, embedded in laptops and sitting on top of ...

Optic Nerve was based on collecting information from GCHQ's huge network of internet cable taps, which was then processed and fed into systems provided by the NSA. Webcam information was fed into NSA's XKeyscore search tool, and NSA research was used to build the tool which identified Yahoo's ...

According to documents provided to the Guardian by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden, the GCHQ program codenamed Optic Nerve fed screengrabs of webcam chats and associated metadata into NSA tools such as Xkeyscore. NSA research, the documents indicate, also contributed to the creation of ...