While I'm sure there are other projects at NSA and GCHQ that actually break into targets and records without user knowledge, the Optic Nerve project was meant to simply grab unencrypted video stream data from Yahoo Messenger from people willfully recording themselves while "tapping" parts of the Internet.

Yahoo only decided to provide the option to enable encryption sometime in 2014 after they found about it and it's pretty shameful on their part.

There's mention of MS too with Kinect but I'm not sure if it was sending out encrypted video or simply using weak encryption.