GCHQ, the government's
electronic spy house, is moving ahead with a
£2bn plan to analyse data from internet communications traffic
despite Home Office assertions that it is not setting up a
centralised Big Brother database.
Reports in weekend papers suggested that the government has
already issued contracts, one for £200m to
Lockheed
Martin, the US defence company, and another to
Detica, for hardware and
software for the so-called Mastering the Internet (MTI)
project.
Lockheed Martin already supplies the IT for the national air
traffic control centre at Swanick, and for the 2011 national
census. Detica, which has close links to the law enforcement
community, has data mining software that can
detect links between individuals based on their contacts with
sometimes widely separated organisations. Spokesman for the two
firms referred queries to GCHQ.
GCHQ declined to comment beyond
its statement
issued at the weekend. This said accelerating technological change
was putting pressure on it to keep up with the people it is
watching. "One of our greatest challenges is maintaining our
capability in the face of the growth in internet-based
communications and voice over internet telephony," it said.
The
Sunday Times said GCHQ was looking for companies to develop a
"black box probe" that would sit inside communications service
providers' premises to intercept messages.
GCHQ said the new technology that GCHQ was developing would work
under the existing legal framework, which includes the Intelligence
Services Act 1994 and the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act
2000 (RIPA).
It said, "GCHQ is not developing technology to enable the
monitoring of all internet use and phone calls in Britain, or to
target everyone in the UK. Similarly, GCHQ has no ambitions,
expectations or plans for a database or databases to store
centrally all communications data in Britain."
The government has
obliged commercial communication services providers to collect
message header and other data under the European Data Retention
Directive and to keep it for a year, pending requests from law
enforcement authorities for access to it.
GCHQ said it does not target anyone indiscriminately. "All our
activities are proportionate to the threats against which we seek
to guard and are subject to tests on those grounds," it said.
This suggests GCHQ could use the probes to grab subsets of the
traffic from different CSPs, combine them in a data warehouse, and
then use Detica's connection-finding software to identify or
confirm suspects' social networks and transactions.
Meanwhile, in an advertisement in this week's Computer Weekly,
another national security agency,
HM Government
Communications Centre (HMGCC), has called for "technical
experts to develop, maintain and safeguard our IT systems".