'British secret service working on biggest government surveillance system on the world'

The British secret service Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) collects data about internet usage on a large scale about users within and outside the United Kingdom. Each day the agency collects billions of pieces of metadata. The information was posted by The Intercept which found the info in documents obtained from whistleblower Edward Snowden.

The GCHQ runs a program it calls  'KARMA POLICE' that aims to collect the browsing habits of 'every visible internet user'. Internet data is collected through international internet connections that often pass the United Kingdom.

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A GCHQ graphic illustrating how KARMA POLICE works. Source The Intercept.

While in 2012 Karma Police collected about 50 billion pieces of metadata, the GCHQ hoped to ramp up that number to 100 billion by 2013. The GCHQ hoped to build the "biggest government surveillance system anywhere in the world".

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About 41% of the data the agency collects consists of the browsing history of internet users which are all stored in a huge database called 'Black Hole'.  Other data includes emails, instant messenger records, social media activity, search engine queries but also usage of tools used to browse the internet anonymously.

That data is made available to analysts of the GCHQ that can use the database to search information about suspects. By also collecting cookies of internet users the GCHQ is also able to connect IP addresses to personal data such as email addresses. This allows the secret service to determine which user visited a website through which IP address.

The GCHQ mentions in the documents that it uses cookies of, amongst others,  Google, Yahoo, Facebook, Reddit, WordPress, Hotmail, CNN, Reuters, Youporn and the BBC

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GCHQ is allowed to search through the internet usage of users outside the United Kingdom without explicit permission. When the agency wants to search through the full data of users within the United Kingdom it requires additional permissions, but it is still allowed to search through metadata without permission.

To test Karma Police, the GCHQ analyzed meta data of users that listened to internet radio stations. The listening behavior of about 200,000 users in 185 countries was analyzed where the GCHQ hoped to find information about users listening to radical-islamic stations. However also data from 'innocent' listeners was collected.

During the test the GCHQ found one Egyptian that listened to a radical-islamic station, through Karma Police they also found he visited Facebook, Yahoo, Youtube, Blogspot, Flickr and porn site Redtube.

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