Online spies: British government tracking.

• Author: Suderman, Peter
• Position: Citings - Brief article

EVERY DAY, across the globe, billions of people make billions of visits to an ever-larger number of online destinations. And the Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ), which essentially serves as the United Kingdom's CIA, has tried to track all of them.

Between 2007 and 2008, the GCHQ drew up a series of plans for a program called "Karma Police," which is probably a reference to a song by the band Radiohead. The goal: to create " 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 project may not have ever achieved that level of totality, but the amount of data it eventually swept up was nonetheless staggering. According to documents released in September by The Intercept, which first reported...