The GCHQ runs a program it calls “KARMA POLICE” that aims to collect the browsing habits of “every visible internet user”. The GCHQ hoped to build the “biggest government surveillance system anywhere in the world”. Listeners to streams that included Islamic religious content were targeted for more data collection in an effort to identify their Skype and social media accounts.
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And GCHQ’s KARMA POLICE program also gathers the IP addresses of people, which it then pairs with other data so that it becomes “a rich source of personal information”. I imagine Thom Yorke & co. will hate this even more: A new report by The Intercept claims that Britain’s Government Communications Headquarters has been operating an extensive surveillance program under the code name “Karma Police”.
The programme started off by tracking those who visited online radio stations and has since expanded to include other aspects of the web.
According to the report, GCHQ has captured over 1.1 trillion “events” – web browsing sessions – in its database, titled “Black Hole”.
The Karma Police system and its Black Hole database log the IP addresses of individuals visiting Internet sites, as well as the cookies associated with their Web traffic.
GCHQ is allowed to search through the internet usage of users outside the United Kingdom without explicit permission.
According to The Intercept, the data is stored for up to six months and retrospectively trawled through using a separate system called Mutant Broth to collate huge amounts of information on the habits of internet users. They can be used to analyze “pattern of life”-when a person is usually online and where they connect to the Internet from”. GCHQ collected cookies from major website like Yahoo, Google, Hotmail, YouTube, Facebook, Reddit, WordPress, Amazon, CNN, BBC, Channel 4, and even adult website YouPorn, to cull together cookie data on a massive scale.
The GCHQ have also been attentive to the radio shows people listen to: KARMA POLICE involved analyzing the listening proclivities of some 200,000 people worldwide.
In the case of browsing records, that would mean the name of the website, and the internet address of the computer or phone accessing it.
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“Furthermore, all of GCHQ’s work is carried out in accordance with a strict legal and policy framework, which ensures that our activities are authorised, necessary and proportionate, and that there is rigorous oversight, including from the Secretary of State, the Interception and Intelligence Services Commissioners and the Parliamentary Intelligence and Security Committee”.
