When British spies gave their Internet surveillance program the codename Karma Police they may have given away a little too much about its epic purpose: “To build a web-browsing profile for every visible user on the Internet.”

The system ultimately gathered trillions of metadata records about Internet users’ browsing habits.

In official documents obtained by The Intercept, the intent of Karma Police stands out alongside more cryptically named projects such as Moose Milk (using data mining to detect suspicious use of telephone kiosks) or Salty Otter (a technique for detecting when use of one medium, such as a telephone call, is used to trigger another, such as a chat service).

The documents, from the cache leaked by former U.S. National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden, show that a division of the U.K. Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) gave the go-ahead for more work on the Karma Police. However, the Pull-Through Steering Group (PTSG), which evaluated prototype surveillance technologies for further development, noted in the minutes of its February 2008 meeting that “the legalities with respect to ‘content’ need to be cleared.”

Read the Full Article: Source – CSO Online
Browsing Privacy: (CSO Online) – British spies cast net to monitor every web surfer, everywhere, leaked documents show

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