KARMA POLICE: GCHQ’s plan to track every Web user in the world
CORY DOCTOROW
BoingBoing.net
FRI SEP 25, 2015
The KARMA POLICE program is detailed in newly released Snowden docs published on The Intercept; it began as a project to identify every listener to every Internet radio station (to find people listening to jihadi radio) and grew into an ambitious plan to identify every Web user and catalog their activities from porn habits to Skype contacts.
The program began in 2007/8 and it mined BLACK HOLE, which is GCHQ’s repository for all the data sucked up by its fiber taps (which it calls “probes”). It attempted to map IP addresses to peoples’ identities, and cross reference users’ identities on various systems and in various locations, collecting them into “a web browsing profile for every visible user on the Internet.”
Part of this was accomplished by looking at a users’ cookies — if you log into Google on your phone and your laptop, GCHQ use its surveillance views into that cookie to connect all the traffic from your laptop and phone with a single identity. The agency exploited cookies from a wide variety of popular websites that put like/share buttons, beacons, and other assets on a many other sites. The targeted cookies came from Google, Microsoft, Facebook, Reddit, the BBC, Amazon, WordPress, Yahoo, and others.
KARMA POLICE drew on a frankly bewildering array of other programs, which sucked up data from a variety of sources. These programs were given exotic codenames by GCHQ: SOCIAL ANTHROPOID, MEMORY HOLE, MARBLED GECKO, INFINITE MONKEYS, etc. These logged different kinds of Internet events — search queries, Google Maps searches, and BBS/message-board posts.
The UK spy agency had an extraordinary view into the world’s Internet traffic thanks to the number of oceanic fiber links that make landfall in the UK.
The Rest…HERE
