Britain’s high-tech spy agency intercepted and stored the webcam images of millions while eavesdropping on people all around the world who were using Yahoo webcam chat.  That’s according to the latest revelation from documents smuggled out of the US by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden.

Yahoo issued a statement saying that if the report is confirmed, it would represent “a whole new level of violation of our users’ privacy”, and didn’t know it was happening.

Citing the Snowden Documents, the UK Guardian newspaper says the British Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) used a program called “Optic Nerve”, which was designed to test the agency’s facial recognition software.  The spies snooped on “unselected” Yahoo users, meaning that human targets were selected at random, regardless of whether or not they were suspected of any wrongdoing, without the ability to filter out British or American citizens were included in the bulk collection.

It also couldn’t filter out people who, for whatever reason (and those reasons are their own and no one else’s danged business), were naked.  “Optic Nerve” snapped up images every five seconds, and as many as eleven percent were of people displaying what the spies called “undesirable nudity”. 

In one six-month period in 2008, the GCHQ intercepted the video communications of 1.8 million users.  But the Guardian says “Optic Nerve” was still active as late as 2012 – and it could have either grown or shrunk in scope since then.

It’s not clear how much of the buck-naked metadata was shared with the US National Security Agency (NSA) or the other members of the “Five Eyes” Anglophone allied spy agencies.