Jacqui Smith's secret plan to carry on snooping
The home secretary has vowed to scrap a ‘big brother’ database, but a bid to spy on us all continues
SPY chiefs are pressing ahead with secret plans to monitor all internet use and telephone calls in Britain despite an announcement by Jacqui Smith, the home secretary, of a ministerial climbdown over public surveillance.
GCHQ, the government’s eavesdropping centre, is developing classified technology to intercept and monitor all e-mails, website visits and social networking sessions in Britain. The agency will also be able to track telephone calls made over the internet, as well as all phone calls to land lines and mobiles.
The £1 billion snooping project — called Mastering the Internet (MTI) — will rely on thousands of “black box” probes being covertly inserted across online infrastructure.
The top-secret programme began to be implemented last year, but its existence has been inadvertently disclosed through a GCHQ job advertisement carried in the computer trade press.
Last week, in what appeared to be a concession to privacy campaigners, Smith announced that she was ditching controversial plans for a single “big brother” database to store centrally all communications data in Britain.
“The government recognised the privacy implications of the move [and] therefore does not propose to pursue this move,” she said.
Grabbing favourable headlines, Smith announced that up to £2 billion of public money would instead be spent helping private internet and telephone companies to retain information for up to 12 months in separate databases.
However, she failed to mention that substantial additional sums — amounting to more than £1 billion over three years — had already been allocated to GCHQ for its MTI programme.
Shami Chakrabarti, director of Liberty, said Smith’s announcement appeared to be a “smokescreen”.
“We opposed the big brother database because it gave the state direct access to everybody’s communications. But this network of black boxes achieves the same thing via the back door,” Chakrabarti said.
Informed sources have revealed that a £200m contract has been awarded to Lockheed Martin, the American defence giant.
A second contract has been given to Detica, the British IT firm which has close ties to the intelligence agencies.
The sources said Iain Lobban, the GCHQ director, is overseeing the construction of a massive new complex inside the agency’s “doughnut” headquarters on the outskirts of Cheltenham, Gloucestershire.
A huge room of super-computers will help the agency to monitor — and record — data passing through black-box probes placed at critical traffic junctions with internet service providers and telephone companies, allowing GCHQ to spy at will.
An industry insider, who has been briefed on GCHQ’s plans, said he could not discuss the programme because he had signed the Official Secrets Act. However, he admitted that the project would mark a step change in the agency’s powers of surveillance.
At the moment the agency is able to use probes to monitor the content of calls and e-mails sent by specific individuals who are the subject of police or security service investigations.
Every interception must be authorised by a warrant signed by the home secretary or a minister of equivalent rank.
The new GCHQ internet-monitoring network will shift the focus of the surveillance state away from a few hundred targeted people to everyone in the UK.
“Although the paper [work] does not say it, its clear implication is that those kinds of probes should be extended to cover the entire population for the purposes of monitoring communications data,” said the industry source.
GCHQ placed an advertisement in the specialist IT press for a head of major contracts to be given “operational responsibility for the ‘Mastering the Internet’ (MTI) contract”. The senior official, to be paid an annual salary of up to £100,000, would lead the procurement of the hardware and the analysis tools needed to build and run the system.
Ministers have said they do not intend to snoop on the actual content of e-mails or telephone calls. The monitoring will instead focus on who an individual is communicating with or which websites and chat rooms they are visiting.
Advocates of the black-box system say it is essential if the authorities are to keep pace with the communications revolution. They say terrorists are stateless, highly mobile and their communications are difficult to detect among the billions of pieces of data passing through the internet.
Last year about 14% of telephone calls were made using voice over internet protocol (Voip) systems such as Skype. A report by a group of privy counsellors predicts that most calls will be made via the internet within five years. GCHQ said it did not want to discuss how the data it gathered would be used.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/05/03/gchq_mti/
Jacqui's secret plan to 'Master the Internet'
'Climb down' on central database was 'a sideshow'
By Chris Williams • Get more from this author
Posted in Government, 3rd May 2009 10:02 GMT
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Spy chiefs are already spending hundreds of millions of pounds on a mass internet surveillance system, despite Jacqui Smith's announcement earlier this week that proposals for a central warehouse of communications data had been dumped on privacy grounds.
The system - uncovered today by The Register and The Sunday Times - is being installed under a GCHQ project called Mastering the Internet (MTI). It will include thousands of deep packet inspection probes inside communications providers' networks, as well as massive computing power at the intelligence agency's Cheltenham base, "the concrete doughnut".
Sources with knowledge of the project said contracts have already been awarded to private sector partners.
One said: "In MTI, computing resources are not measured by the traditional capacities or speeds such as Gb, Tb, Megaflop or Teraflop... but by the metric tonne!.. and they have lots of them."
The American techology giant Lockheed Martin is understood to have bagged a £200m deal. The BAE-owned British firm Detica, which has close links to MI5 and MI6, as well as to GCHQ, has also been signed up to help on MTI.
A spokeswoman for GCHQ said the agency does not comment on individual contracts. "GCHQ works with a broad range of industry partners to deliver a complex portfolio of technical projects," she said. Detica also declined to comment, and Lockheed Martin did not return calls.
Sources said MTI received approval and funding of more than £1bn over three years in the October 2007 Comprehensive Spending Review. GCHQ, like MI5 and MI6, is funded out of the opaque Single Intelligence Account. For 2007/8 the planned budget for the three agencies was over £1.6bn.
GCHQ began work on MTI soon after it was approved. Records of job advertising by the agency show that in April 2008 it was seeking a Head of Major Contracts with "operational responsibility for the ‘Mastering the Internet’ (MTI) contract". The new senior official was to be paid an annual salary of up to £100,000.
The advertisement also indicated that the head of Major Contracts would be in charge of procurement on MTI and be expected to forge close links with the private sector.
According to sources, MTI is a core piece of the government's Interception Modernisation Programme (IMP). On Monday of last week, the Home Secretary Jacqui Smith announced that under IMP, rather than build a central warehouse, responsibility for storing details of who contacts whom, when and where will be imposed on communications providers.
The news was welcomed by privacy advocates and civil liberties campaigners, but sources described it as a "side show" compared to the massively increased surveillance capability that MTI will deliver. It will grant intelligence staff in Cheltenham complete visibility of UK Internet traffic, allowing them to remotely configure their deep packet inspection probes to intercept data - both communications data and the communication content - on demand.
Shami Chakrabarti, director of Liberty, said: "We opposed the big brother database because it gave the state direct access to everybody’s communications. But this network of black boxes achieves the same thing via the back door."
GCHQ's spokeswoman said: "GCHQ does not discuss 'how' we use data, as this may lead to revelations about our capability which damage national security.
"GCHQ is constantly updating its systems in order to maintain and renew its capability."
Advocates of MTI and IMP say they are essential if intelligence agencies are to maintain their capability to monitor terrorist and other criminal networks.
A Home Office consultation on the storage of communications data is now open. Meanwhile, work and spending on the all-seeing system to intercept and retrieve it is already underway. ®
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