Report: U.K. Conducting Massive Online Monitoring

The U.K. government has been collecting info on World Wide Web use, particularly online porn, news and social media sites, amounting to billions of pieces of data from virtually everyone on the Internet they could identify.

Websites monitored visits to Yahoo!, Google, Facebook, reddit, CNN, BBC, Reuters and others.

The Intercept, an online publication launched partly as a platform for stories based on the leaks of NSA contractor Edward Snowden, is reporting that the British government had a spy program, KARMA Police (after the Radiohead song, presumably), whose goal was to track the web browsing and other online activities of "every visible user on the Internet."

The site reported, based on information leaked by Snowden, that some 50 billion metadata records per day were being collected and stored from browsing histories and habits as well as emails and phone calls.

Intercept said the info was collected without notice or warrants and archived and searched for connections to terrorism or criminal activity.

John Eggerton

Contributing editor John Eggerton has been an editor and/or writer on media regulation, legislation and policy for over four decades, including covering the FCC, FTC, Congress, the major media trade associations, and the federal courts. In addition to Multichannel News and Broadcasting + Cable, his work has appeared in Radio World, TV Technology, TV Fax, This Week in Consumer Electronics, Variety and the Encyclopedia Britannica.