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Phoenix666 writes:

The release of yet more of Edward Snowden's leaked files reveals the still-astonishing scale and breadth of government surveillance after more than a year of revelations. These recent papers revealed by Wikileaks discuss a programme within Britain's GCHQ known as "Karma Police", in which the intelligence agency gathered more than 1.1 trillion pieces of information on UK citizens between August 2007 and March 2009.

Spurred on by the expansion of intercept warrants under the Terrorism Act 2006, this information is users' internet metadata – details of phone calls, email messages and browser connections that includes passwords, contacts, phone numbers, email addresses, and folders used to organise emails, but not the actual content of messages or emails.

Metadata can help identify people of interest, build profiles, and assist with decisions to start or escalate surveillance of individuals. All this information can be collected often at a fraction of the cost of doing this through traditional methods. In other words, metadata is not insignificant – and this is precisely why governments are so committed to collecting and processing it. However, bulk metadata collection – where information is collected from everyone whether a "person of interest" or not – is rightly a source of deep anxiety from both security and human rights perspectives.

Original Submission