According to Edward Snowden's latest leaked documents, the British government has the capacity to track behavior on YouTube, Facebook, Twitter and more social media sites, though it denies snooping on individual users.
These newest documents were released by NBC News in conjunction with Glenn Greenwald, the journalist who first revealed the vast scope of NSA and UK spying operations when he worked for The Guardian.
See also: Report: NSA Snoops on Angry Birds and Other Apps
The documents on which the report is based, and which appear in full below this article, come courtesy of Snowden, the former NSA contractor who has been the source of information for Greenwald and other journalists. In its report, NBC doesn't mention when it obtained the information.
The government program, called Squeaky Dolphin, reportedly allows agents to troll for specific information such as what videos are being watched, what pages are being Liked, and more. The apparent purpose of the tracking is to map online trends going on in cities all over the world, but experts consulted by NBC say the program could easily be used to track individuals' behavior online.
Officials from the Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ), a British intelligence agency, reportedly demonstrated its social media snooping system in a presentation (embedded below) to its American counterpart in August of 2012 by showing how it grabbed social data from fiber optic cables with "commercially available" software, which then allowed agents to display the information in graphs on their computers.
The report also says "the NSA does analysis of social media similar to that in the GCHQ demonstration."
"The presentation showed that analysts could determine which videos were popular among residents of specific cities, but did not provide information on individual social media users," according to NBC.
But NBC then suggests that agencies could use the data to track an individual's activity if they were so inclined. They'd just have to sift through any information that is unencrypted, such as Facebook Likes, and they'd be able to pick out specific users.
GCHQ reportedly only used the data to track online trends, but it's not clear why information gleaned from Twitter's trending topics or publicly available Facebook trend data wouldn't have sufficed if that is the case.
Neither organization is technically operating outside the laws of their respective nations, but the tech companies and other detractors have called this and other such snooping a transparency issue that undermines government credibility. The agencies had not informed the public that they were collecting people's social media data, and they reportedly don't have permission from Google, Facebook, Twitter or anyone else to be doing so.
"We have long been concerned about the possibility of this kind of snooping," a Google spokesperson, who wished to remain anonymous, told Mashable via email. "We do not provide any government, including the U.K. government, with access to our systems. These allegations underscore the urgent need for reform of government surveillance practices."
Twitter declined to comment about this specific case and Facebook did not respond to a request for comment.
Steven Bellovin, Ph.D., a computer science professor at Columbia University, told Mashable that British agents could have accomplished the social media snooping by tapping directly into a relevant fiberoptic cable or by persuading a telecommunications company to allow the agents to tap their data.
Bellovin also said agents could conceivably use this kind of data to track an individual's behavior online so long as the websites they're monitoring are supported by ads like the ones found on Facebook. Those websites send out cookies that make it easy for someone with access to social media data to find a specific person.
"Once you've found the login name for some user of interest, you can easily spot that user when they're somewhere else," Bellovin said.
The GCHQ neither confirmed nor denied the revelations, and the NSA stated that it is not interested in the everyday social media correspondence of ordinary people. Both admitted they collect a lot of data in the final paragraph of the report, according to NBC, but alleged that they use hardly any of it.
Snowden YouTube NBC Document

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