Not to mention that awful Yahoo! webcam spying thing, OPTIC NERVE - a particularly distasteful one, that. Petabytes of JPGs of private (unencrypted) webcam stre

Not to mention that awful Yahoo! webcam spying thing, OPTIC NERVE - a particularly distasteful one, that. Petabytes of JPGs of private (unencrypted) webcam streams, simply hoovered up en masse and untargeted - a not-insignificant number of them extremely intimate and personal, many between people of absolutely no intelligence relevance or value whatsoever - and used as a dataset for face-recognition experiments, amongst other things. They've got an extension you can call for counselling if an analyst happens to be selecting/browsing through it and sees 'something that may disturb them' (underage sexual acts, for example). I seriously doubt any of it has ever been deleted, either, even since. When GCHQ spout their boilerplate, what they're pointedly not disclosing is that GCHQ have a general interception policy for all communications they believe might be useful for intelligence purposes in the future (I've never quite been clear myself whether that's under some sort of actual general warrant, or they just do it under An Understanding - quite possibly the latter, because spying on MPs could be rather legally thorny!). And they try doing just that, limited only by the practicalities of storage space and processor power - hence the 72-hour ring buffers on full-take feeds on major links like Level3 and GlobalCrossing, progressively filtered down by highly-specialised lexers and parsers. Data point: There were apparently mentions of WhatsApp at the conference, but not on transcript. It uses the TextSecure protocol now, which is remarkably good and has forward-secure ratcheting. (It's closed-source, so I'd never recommend it over TextSecure/Signal itself, but it does not appear to me to have been compromised, and the huge number of people using that app getting this sort of pretty strong encryption for free is great news overall.) So yes, it seems he does (at the moment, before any potential U-turns! - I mean, "clarifications") want backdoored encryption, and to ban any end-to-end encryption that isn't backdoored. He plans to raise it after the election, if he wins, and he wants to do this specifically because GCHQ and The Security Service ("MI5") asked him to. It's almost like they don't realise they're doing anything wrong, and they're doubling-down on their tactics - because, save for a few very brave whistleblowers, they actually, really, don't think they are. Road to hell's paved with good intentions and all that, even if you're still buying the good intentions. Their reaction to the rise of stronger encryption since Snowden has so far been to get their friends/ex-bosses to make vague threats that this would mean they'd have to hack more (like making them need to work to do targeted interception in specific, more justified cases instead of bulk collection is a bad thing?!). Ugh.