14 DAY TRIAL // A recent batch of NSA documents offered by Edward Snowden to The Intercept online newspaper reveal a super-secret British spying project that's been logging online traffic for all Internet users around the globe.
The project, called Karma Police, has the GCHQ (Government Communications Headquarters), a British security and surveillance agency, in charge of creating and managing a database of online activities for Internet users around the globe, with the purpose of detecting criminal and terrorist behavior from online habits.
The UK has been illegally tapping Internet cables
The recent Snowden documents reveal that the GCHQ has been illicitly tapping into international Internet cables and snooping Web traffic, recording metadata in its massive data centers.
According to the files, the GCHQ has been tracking everything it can get its hands on, from browsing history to social network activity, and from the online radio shows people like to listen to to the adult sites they visit.
All this data is stored and organized using special applications. The biggest of all is called the Black Hole and contains bulk data detailing each Internet user's browsing history. Its accompanying tool is Mutant Broth, used by GCHQ employees to search the Black Hole database, and more specifically for browser cookies.
Other programs also include Social Anthropoid (social networks, IM apps, emails, Skype calls, and telephony data), Tempora (searching the Social Anthropoid metadata), Memory Hole (search engine queries), Marbled Gecko (Google Maps, Google Earth), Infinite Monkeys (forums), and Samuel Pepys (real-time Web browsing, email, and IMs).
No legislation to inhibit its actions
All of this was extremely well organized inside GCHQ's structure and allowed the government agency to gather 30 billion metadata records each day during 2010. This number eventually grew to 50 billion per day in 2012, and documents are also pointing out efforts to bring this number to 100 million in the coming years.
Because no UK legislation prohibited such behavior, the GCHQ operated without any fears all these years. Even worse, the British government doesn't seem to be interested in placing any restrictions on this program at all, and recent legislative proposals seem to be aimed at helping the program gain more traction and even give it a legal base.
More in-depth details can be found in Ryan Gallagher's investigative piece, along with links to some of the recent Snowden documents.