Governments are getting caught peeping on innocent people's private video chats — how creepy is that?
By
Medical
science has long known that the optic nerve runs from the retina of our
eyeballs to the visual cortex of our brains, letting us see what’s going on
around us.
Don’t
look now, but another “optic nerve” has evolved. Rather than running to our
brains, however, this one goes outward, allowing others to see us and also hear
us having what we assume to be private — even intimate — conversations.
Those
“others” are the out-of-control security agencies in England and the United
States that are secretly vacuuming up everyone’s communications, even if we’re
not suspected of any illegalities.
Millions
of us have these services in our homes and offices, enabling us to have private
video talks with someone or some group across town, or even around the world.
Now we
learn, though, that we’re not alone – the spooks have hacked into the fiber
optic networks of Yahoo (and probably others) to grab, view, listen to, and
store millions of these personal communications.
Creepy?
Yes, Orwellian-level creepy. As Yahoo put it: “[This] represents a whole new
level of violation of our users’ privacy that is completely unacceptable.”
Lest you
think the spies are only gathering info about terrorist plots, the British
agency concedes that up to 11 percent of the Yahoo webcam images it has
purloined contains sexually-explicit content.
One
agent said of the mass window peeping, “a surprising number of people use
webcam conversations to show intimate parts of their body to the other person.”
How
shocking! Not that people would do that, but that our government would be
sneaking peeks at them.
OtherWords columnist Jim Hightower is a radio commentator,
writer, and public speaker. He’s also editor of the populist newsletter, The
Hightower Lowdown. OtherWords.org