‘Karma Police’: Illegal GCHQ operation to track ‘every visible user on the internet’

New documents shared by whistleblower Edward Snowden reveal GCHQ mass-surveyed “every visible user on the internet,” codenaming the operation Karma Police after a popular song by Radiohead. The mission was started in 2009, without the agency obtaining legal permission to carry out the operation. Also there was no Parliamentary consultation or public scrutiny, documents published by the Intercept website show. GCHQ - Government Communications Headquarters – is a UK spy agency responsible for providing intelligence by intercepting communications between people or equipment. The data is handed over to the British government and armed forces. The recently revealed operation was developed by GCHQ in 2007-08. It aimed to link "every user visible to passive SIGINT with every website they visit, hence providing either (a) a web browsing profile for every visible user on the internet, or (b) a user profile for every visible website on the internet." The numbers of surveyed users were astonishing: in 2012, GCHQ gathered some 50 billion online metadata records a day, and the agency planned to boost its capacity to 100 billion records a day by the end of this year.The information was held for months in a vast store nicknamed the Black Hole and was carefully examined by data analysts.