We’re a little surprised it took this long to come up, but somebody finally asked Edward Snowden what the NSA did with what has to be the largest repository of nude photos on Earth. The answer is… well, pretty much absolutely unsurprising.
The Guardian, as part of a far-reaching interview out tomorrow, states that Snowden “…made a startling claim that a culture exists within the NSA in which, during surveillance, nude photographs picked up of people in ‘sexually compromising’ situations are routinely passed around.”
Wait, you mean the surveillance authority with some of the most surveillance capability on Earth and absolutely no oversight whatsoever, operating under absurdly lax laws that allow them to gather pretty much anything they want whenever they want it, abused that authority? Especially with the rise of sexting? Isn’t this pretty much exactly what we expect people abusing their authority to do?
Snowden notes that this is actually against the law and even the NSA’s ridiculously thin policies on information abuse, for obvious reasons. But it happens anyway because, well, there’s no auditing. He points out that, after all, he walked out the front door with a treasure trove of records, so we’re not talking about people who stay on top of things.
So, yes, if you have sent somebody a nude photo, the NSA has probably seen it, and it’s probably been passed around the office. Which is yet another reason to not send naked pictures of yourself across the Internet, in case you needed any more of those.