British spies found themselves in a bizarre porn dilemma as they secretly monitored millions of Yahoo webchats, according to the Associated Press.
Spies at the British surveillance agency GCHQ were startled to discover quite a lot of people were using the webchats for pornographic purposes, the AP reported.
"Unfortunately ... it would appear that a surprising number of people use webcam conversations to show intimate parts of their body to the other person," says an internal document from GCHQ seen by Britain's Guardian newspaper, the AP reported
"Also, the fact that the Yahoo software allows more than one person to view a webcam stream without necessarily sending a reciprocal stream means that it appears sometimes to be used for broadcasting pornography," the document read, according to the AP.
The paper said officials estimated that between 3% and 11% of the images the agency was taking from the Yahoo webchats under a program called Optic Nerve were pornographic, the AP reported.
Efforts were made to make the system "safer to use" involving "pornography detectors" that assessed the amount of flesh in any given shot, according to the AP. The Guardian reported that this attracted lots of false positives since sometimes faces of people were sometimes incorrectly tagged as porn.
GCHQ installed face recognition software that excluded shots in which faces had not been detected, but warned staff that this might still enable pornography to seep through, the AP reported.
The document obtained by the Guardian said, "We use face detection to try to censor material which may be offensive but this does not work perfectly so you should read the following before using OPTIC NERVE: It is possible to handle and display undesirable images. There is no perfect ability to censor materials which may be offensive. Users who feel uncomfortable about such material are advised not to open them," according to the AP.
The document then went on to warn staff that those who do view porn and distribute it afterwards could face action, the AP reported.
"You are reminded that under GCHQ's offensive material policy, the dissemination of offensive material is a disciplinary offence," the document read, according to the AP.
The Guardian, reporting on documents provided by fugitive intelligence leaker Edward Snowden, said that under the Optic Nerve program GCHQ collected and saved millions of still images from Yahoo users globally between 2008 and 2010, the AP reported. The program was still running in 2012.
