KARMA POLICE: GCHQ's Plan To Track Every Web User In The World

KARMA POLICE: GCHQ's plan to track every Web user in the world

The KARMA POLICE program is detailed in newly released Snowden docs published on The Intercept; it began as a project to identify every listener to every Internet radio station (to find people listening to jihadi radio) and grew into an ambitious plan to identify every Web user and catalog their activities from porn habits to Skype contacts.

The program began in 2007/8 and it mined BLACK HOLE, which is GCHQ’s repository for all the data sucked up by its fiber taps (which it calls “probes”). It attempted to map IP addresses to peoples’ identities, and cross reference users’ identities on various systems and in various locations, collecting them into “a web browsing profile for every visible user on the Internet.”

Part of this was accomplished by looking at a users’ cookies – if you log into Google on your phone and your laptop, GCHQ use its surveillance views into that cookie to connect all the traffic from your laptop and phone with a single identity. The agency exploited cookies from a wide variety of popular websites that put like/share buttons, beacons, and other assets on a many other sites. The targeted cookies came from Google, Microsoft, Facebook, Reddit, the BBC, Amazon, WordPress, Yahoo, and others.

KARMA POLICE drew on a frankly bewildering array of other programs, which sucked up data from a variety of sources. These programs were given exotic codenames by GCHQ: SOCIAL ANTHROPOID, MEMORY HOLE, MARBLED GECKO, INFINITE MONKEYS, etc. These logged different kinds of Internet events – search queries, Google Maps searches, and BBS/message-board posts.

The UK spy agency had an extraordinary view into the world’s Internet traffic thanks to the number of oceanic fiber links that make landfall in the UK.

Like the NSA, GCHQ relied on secret interpretations of the laws on spying to paper over its activities, so that it could tell its governmental overseers that all its activities were lawful. It amassed records on people from all over the world, including Britons, and routinely allows its spying partners to search its databases. The US NSA, as well as spy agencies from Canada, Australia, and New Zealand all have access to its data on British citizens and people from all over the world.

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#Chocoholic: We sure love our chocolate, but it'd be a lot sweeter if it wasn't coming from child labor.

WATCH the short video here.

+2 million children work in cocoa production in Ghana and the Ivory Coast. This year, Nestlé, Mars Bar, and HERSHEY'S were sued for knowingly partnering with suppliers that use child workers.

DEMAND that these chocolate companies become Made In A Free World here: madeinafreeworld.com/action!

Energy conversion: Speeding up material discovery

Algorithm take months, not years, to find material for improved energy conversion

In even the most fuel-efficient cars, about 60 percent of the total energy of gasoline is lost through heat in the exhaust pipe and radiator. To combat this, researchers are developing new thermoelectic materials that can convert heat into electricity. These semiconducting materials could recirculate electricity back into the vehicle and improve fuel efficiency by up to 5 percent.

The challenge is, current thermoelectric materials for waste heat recovery are very expensive and time consuming to develop. One of the state of the art materials, made from a combination of hafnium and zirconium (elements most commonly used in nuclear reactors), took 15 years from its initial discovery to optimized performance.

Now, researchers from the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS) have developed an algorithm that can discover and optimize these materials in a matter of months, relying on solving quantum mechanical equations, without any experimental input.

“These thermoelectric systems are very complicated,” said Boris Kozinsky, a recently appointed Associate Professor of Computational Materials Science at SEAS and senior author of the paper. “Semiconducting materials need to have very specific properties to work in this system, including high electrical conductivity, high thermopower, and low thermal conductivity, so that all that heat gets converted into electricity. Our goal was to find a new material that satisfies all the important properties for thermoelectric conversion while at the same time being stable and cheap.”

Wanted: Shredder for five million tires dumped in Spain

Spanish authorities are struggling to dispose of five million tires dumped on a site close to a housing development north of Toledo. The 90,000 tons’ worth of tires have been dumped there since 2002.

Environmentalists say that should a fire break out, it could not be extinguished with water and would have to be smothered with earth. In the event of a fire, Madrid’s main airport would likely have to be shut down and an estimated 11,000 homes evacuated. | Read more

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9 years ago

Three quarters of Britain’s juniper is found in Scotland, where it’s important not only to local gin production but also to wildlife, such as the juniper shield bug. Plantlife Scotland has published a free guide to help both professional and amateur botanists and horticulturalists identify, survey and protect the plants. Anyone can participate in the group’s survey and guardianship project.

(via Protect British juniper or risk losing gin’s distinctive flavour (Wired UK))

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7 years ago

This terrifying eel-robot will perform maintenance on undersea equipment

Nope.

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9 years ago

Baby Tortoises Show Up In The Galapagos For The First Time In Over A Century

There hadn’t been one single baby tortoise sighting in more than a century on the Galapagos Island of Pinzon, until a small group of the tiny, shelled youngsters were spotted this year.

The recent births are helping to pull the critically endangered animals back from the brink of extinction after they were nearly laid to waste as a result of human activity.

This is huge news for a species that has been struggling to survive for a century, relying on humans raising young tortoises bred in captivity until they are large enough to not fall prey to rats and predators.

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9 years ago

Byzantine 'flat-pack' church to be reconstructed in Oxford after spending 1,000 years on the seabed

Centuries before the Swedes started flat-packing their furniture, the Holy Roman Emperor Justinian had his own version, sending self-assembly churches to newly conquered parts of his empire.

Now one of the “Ikea-style” churches, which spent more than 1,000 years on a seabed after the ship carrying it sank, is to be reconstructed for the first time in Oxford.

The Byzantine church will be on display at the Ashmolean Museum of Art and Archaeology as part of the exhibition Storms, War and Shipwrecks: Treasures from the Sicilian Seas, opening in June.

Paul Roberts, co-curator of the exhibition, said: “Everything in the exhibition will be from under the sea. It’s very different from what’s been done before. Read more.