Karma Police

In the Edward Snowden leaks more than just information about the NSA was released.  Information about other countries surveillance agencies were released, one of which was the United Kingdom’s.  On September 25, 2015 The Intercept, a British news outlet, released more than two dozen documents about the UK’s surveillance programs.  The major program that was revealed was called “Karma Police.”  “Karma Police” was an extensive program that had many different aspects from creating profiles of people’s internet activity to analyzing communications between people.  The program also documented “suspicious” google searches and google map searches.  The program had the legal ability to spy on people from the UK as well as other countries including the U.S. and a total of 185 countries.  The program was reportedly thought up and designed in 2007 or 2008 and implemented in 2009.

One of the ways that the surveillance program collected data was by targeting internet radio sites that played excerpts from the Quran.  They then track anybody who listens to the site and finds there information for social media and internet communications sites.  They then would collect all of the data that was found on the people and create profiles on them so that they could easily track all of the people’s movements. 

The UK was able to spy on all the countries they had been spying on because of their location.  Being located in between Europe and North America 25 percent of the world’s internet traffic runs through the UK through 1600 different cables. “Karma Police” would survey most of the cables and select which cables were most valuable and then monitor those selected cables with the most precision.

The major issue with having this kind of surveillance in place is that there seems to be a large amount of loopholes and ways for the government to get away with spying on their own citizens.  The English parliament had been made aware of the loopholes that were being used and very quietly dismissed the issue and nothing was done about it.  This is interesting to me because in the U.S. people seem to be fairly angry about the spying that the NSA was doing and in England parliaments entire Security Council just let it be and accepted it for being the best option.  In the U.S. what was done was against the law and in England it was technically legal.  In my opinion if the spying is being done legally then there are more issues than if it is being done illegally.  The reason I believe this is that the fact that doing this kind of thing is legal is much more like a surveillance state than if it is illegal because if this kind of thing is legal it is much more likely to grow and become a more involved surveillance program.

Source:

https://theintercept.com/2015/09/25/gchq-radio-porn-spies-track-web-users-online-identities/