British intelligence collected Yahoo users' webcam images

A British intelligence agency collected webcam images — many of them sexually explicit — from millions of Yahoo users, regardless of whether they were suspected of illegal activity, according to accounts of documents leaked by Edward J. Snowden.

The surveillance, by Britain’s Government Communications Headquarters, was code-named Optic Nerve. Images from Yahoo webcam chats were captured in bulk through fiber-optic cable taps and saved to a GCHQ database, where they could be queried by a search tool called XKeyscore, provided by the National Security Agency, according to a report Thursday by The Guardian.

The report did not indicate whether the agency collected images from similar services, such as Google Hangouts or Microsoft’s Skype. The Guardian did say the British agency was studying the possibility of using cameras in Microsoft’s Kinect devices, which are used with its Xbox game consoles, to spy on users. Microsoft had no immediate comment on the report.