Squeaky Dolphin is a program developed by the Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ), a British intelligence and security organization, to collect and analyze data from social media networks. The program was first revealed to the general public on NBC on 27 January 2014 based on documents previously leaked by Edward Snowden.
Scope of surveillance
According to a document of the GCHQ dated August 2012, the program enables broad, real-time surveillance of the following items:
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.
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."