Leaked documents reveal the extent of GCHQ spying.
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To alleviate the problem of having to sort through that plethora of data, the GCHQ automatically sorts it into different sub-systems depending on what type of activity it is (web browser history, instant message, GPS, etc.), and the information is used to build a profile on each internet user.
In order to keep track of every user on the internet – which if you didn’t know, comes out to be over 3.2 billion people today – it is unsurprising that a massive amount of data needs to be collected and stored.
The program began seven years ago “without any public debate or scrutiny” but just recently uncovered through documents obtained by former U.S. National Security Agency employee and infamous whistleblower Edward Snowden.
The Karma Police system collected and stored records of visits to Google, Facebook, Yahoo and Reddit – as well as porn website YouPorn.
The program was initially used to find intelligence on people who listen to online radio shows – collecting over 7 million metadata records within three months.
That’s the revelation contained in documents published today by The Intercept, which detail a GCHQ operation called “Karma Police“-a program that tracked Web-browsing habits of people around the globe in what the agency itself billed as the “world’s biggest” Internet data-mining operation, meant to eventually track “every visible user on the Internet”.
Its stated aim, the documents say, is to map “every user-visible to passive SIGINT [singals intelligence] with every website they visit”.
Kevin Mazur/WireImage ‘Karma Police’ is also the name of a 1997 Radiohead song. Though the GHC were looking for stations that “spread radical Islamic ideas”, it mostly found that the programs their unfortunate targets were listening to were unrelated – one of the most popular was France’s Hotmix Radio, “which plays pop, rock, funk and hip-hop music”. Analyses of the data was conducted “to assess the Islamic radicalization risk”. These ones were targeted for more data collection including the identification of Skype and social networking accounts.
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The program, referred to then as the “Interception Modernisation Programme”, was slated to allow spy chiefs at GCHQ to effectively place a “live tap” on every electronic communication in Britain in the name of preventing terrorism. The GCHQ uses IP addresses, cookies and other online metadata to figure out who’s doing what online. Trillions of metadata records were kept, many of them in a storage repository called the Black Hole.
