You know what I learned today? I learned as early as 2008, government agencies all over the world plotted to spy on ordinary citizens. I learned of Great Britain’s disturbing name and spy system.
It’s called the Karma Police. This mass surveillance project began in 2008 by British government spies without the knowledge, approval or debate of the British people. The UK people can thank Government Communication Headquarters, or GCHQ, for this one. For years, they recorded the online activities of every British Internet user. This include their visits to adult websites, news websites, blogs, search engines, social media sites, you name it. The GCHQ’s doings were exposed by Edward Snowden‘s The Intercept article. Not only that, these revelations come when the UK government pushes for even more surveillance. The Karma Police comes in compartments. One compartment builds profiles displaying web users’ habits. Another compartment analyses?all, and I do mean all, aspects of online communication, from emails to texting to social media postings. One compartment kept tabs on…ahem…suspicious search engine inquiries. And the GCHQ can do all this spying without any legal ramifications or accountability. By the end of 2012 (The Intercept article came out in 2014), they had about 100 billion metadata records. There is some good news to this. According to this metadata, the content of calls or emails weren’t recorded, just the senders and recipients of that call.
Well, I can take that as good news. But it still doesn’t excuse the fact this organization has countless documents of innocent people. And now they have the audacity to ask for even more surveillance? ?Yeah, I’m sure the British people will love that one. I don’t know much about their Magna Carta, but I’m sure it wouldn’t condone this any more than our Constitution would condone it. I‘m sure many British legislatures will say, “But we need it to fight terrorism and other serious crimes.” How many terrorist and serious crimes have the Karma Police caught so far?