Squeaky Dolphin is a program developed by the

Government Communications Headquarters Government Communications Headquarters, commonly known as GCHQ, is an intelligence and security organisation responsible for providing signals intelligence (SIGINT) and information assurance (IA) to the government and armed forces of the ...

(GCHQ), a British

intelligence Intelligence has been defined in many ways: the capacity for abstraction, logic, understanding, self-awareness, learning, emotional knowledge, reasoning, planning, creativity, critical thinking, and problem-solving. It can be described as the a ...

and

security" \n\n\nsecurity.txt is a proposed standard for websites' security information that is meant to allow security researchers to easily report security vulnerabilities. The standard prescribes a text file called \"security.txt\" in the well known locat ...

organization, to collect and analyze data from

social media Social media are interactive media technologies that facilitate the creation and sharing of information, ideas, interests, and other forms of expression through virtual communities and networks. While challenges to the definition of ''social me ...

networks. The program was first revealed to the general public on

NBC The National Broadcasting Company (NBC) is an American English-language commercial broadcast television and radio network. The flagship property of the NBC Entertainment division of NBCUniversal, a division of Comcast, its headquarters ...

on 27 January 2014 based on documents previously leaked by

Edward Snowden Edward Joseph Snowden (born June 21, 1983) is an American and naturalized Russian former computer intelligence consultant who leaked highly classified information from the National Security Agency (NSA) in 2013, when he was an employee and s ...

Scope of surveillance

According to a document of the GCHQ dated August 2012, the program enables broad,

real-time Real-time or real time describes various operations in computing or other processes that must guarantee response times within a specified time (deadline), usually a relatively short time. A real-time process is generally one that happens in defined ...

surveillance of the following items: *

YouTube YouTube is a global online video sharing and social media platform headquartered in San Bruno, California. It was launched on February 14, 2005, by Steve Chen, Chad Hurley, and Jawed Karim. It is owned by Google, and is the second most ...

video views * The

Like button A like button, like option, or recommend button, is a feature in communication software such as social networking services, Internet forums, news websites and blogs where the user can express that they like, enjoy or support certain content. I ...

Facebook Facebook is an online social media and social networking service owned by American company Meta Platforms. Founded in 2004 by Mark Zuckerberg with fellow Harvard College students and roommates Eduardo Saverin, Andrew McCollum, Dustin ...

. Facebook has since then encrypted the data. * Blogspot/Blogger visits *

Twitter Twitter is an online social media and social networking service owned and operated by American company Twitter, Inc., on which users post and interact with 280-character-long messages known as "tweets". Registered users can post, like, and ...

, which has however encrypted its communications since this presentation was made The program can be supplemented with commercially available analytic software to determine which videos are popular among residents of specific cities. The dashboard software chosen was made by

Splunk Splunk Inc. is an American software company based in San Francisco, California, that produces software for searching, monitoring, and analyzing machine-generated data via a Web-style interface. Its software helps capture, index and correlate ...

. The presentation, which was originally shown to an NSA audience and was made public by the NBC, contains a note saying the program was "Not interested in individuals just broad trends!". However, "according to other Snowden documents" obtained by NBC, in 2010, "GCHQ exploited unencrypted data from Twitter to identify specific users around the world and target them with propaganda."

References

{{Reflist

External links

Slides released by NBC
GCHQ operations Mass surveillance National Security Agency Surveillance scandals Social media

Scope of surveillance

See also

References

External links