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Secret Black Box Probe Will Monitor Web Activity

Saturday, May 2nd, 2009

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.

David Leppard and Chris Williams

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Paying billions for our database state

Friday, April 24th, 2009

It is cost rather than privacy concerns that will save us from Labour’s megalomaniac surveillance schemes – a point underlined this morning when David Cameron was interviewed on the Today programme. With the vast choice of public expenditure open to him, he would single out only the identity card scheme and the children’s database ContactPoint as definite targets for immediate cuts.

There are many more savings to be made. Earlier this year, I and a couple of researchers started to calculate the costs of the database state and came up with a total of about £35bn from published figures. The Rowntree Trust followed with a report that claimed that £16bn was spent each year on IT schemes and that spending plans over the next five years amounted to £100bn.

So we are talking very big figures indeed, although no one really knows how much the surveillance state will cost. When you confront civil servants like Sir David Varney who is in charge of the transformational government project, which will make all information about individuals available to all departments and agencies, they say that the savings will pay for the scheme.

But recent investigations by the Times and Computer Weekly showed that the overrun on large-scale IT projects totals £18.6bn. For instance, the cost of the NHS Spine – a controversial plan to computerise all patients’ records – has risen from £2.3bn in three years to £12.7bn, and the system still is not working.

Here are some figures:

ContactPoint

The projected cost of the database, which will contain the personal details of every child of school age in the UK, is £224m with operating costs of £41m per annum over 10 years. The total cost of ContactPoint is £634m.

ID Cards and national identity register

A report in June 2005 from the London School of Economics predicted that the ID card scheme would cost in total between £10.6bn and £19.2bn over 10 years. The original Home Office estimate was £3.1bn. The official figure was revised up and down to £5.4bn and £4.5bn. The difficulty with the ID card scheme is working what the Home Office has passed on to other ministries and what costs it is hiding. Most estimates outside the government believe the final bill to be somewhere between £10bn and £11bn.

e-Borders

The e-Borders scheme will monitor everyone crossing UK borders. Those leaving the country will be expected to supply up to 53 pieces of information to the government. The estimated cost over the next decade is £1.2bn. Costs to the UK travel industry for the same period, which are expected to be passed onto the travelling public, are £360m. Therefore costs to the taxpayer and indirectly to the public equal about £1.5bn. Again this is unlikely to be the final story, especially when you consider that £650m alone was earmarked for the Raytheon Systems over the next 10 years. As yet there is no publicised estimate for the spy centre at Wythenshawe, which will track all our movements. Known costs are about £1.5bn.

Interception modernisation programme

Proposed in the communications data bill, the IMP will store data from every text, phone call, email and internet connection. The costs of the data silo are estimated at £12bn, although the Home Office has suggested it might be run in the private sector. Experience suggests this is unlikely to cut costs and that the security of the system would be compromised. Estimated cost: £12bn.

Automatic number recognition camera network

This system tracks, records and stores the details of all journeys undertaken on major roads and through city centres. The information is stored for five years. In 2007 this was said to have costs £32.5bn in funding with a further £10m since then; a total of £2m per annum is spent. The final bill over five years is £52m.

NHS spine

This is a computerised system linking health records. Estimated cost: £12.2bn.

Some important points: first, a lot of this money is being spent with foreign systems companies; second, the government has never produced a global figure for the surveillance state; third, there are no estimates of the vast amounts of money being wasted locally, for instance on CCTV schemes, which are held by police officers and the House of Lords to have little effect on crime reduction.

If people with knowledge of the economics of surveillance are reading this, they may like to help to refine the bill.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/henryporter/2009/apr/24/database-state-surveillance

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RIPA review proves snoopers’ charter got out of hand

Monday, April 20th, 2009

Commenting on Government review into the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act (RIPA), Liberal Democrat Shadow Home Secretary, Chris Huhne said: “This consultation is a tacit admission by the Government that its surveillance society has got out of hand.”

“For too long, powers we were told would be used to fight terrorism and organised crime have been used to spy on people’s kids, pets and bins.

“Without reform, RIPA will continue to be a snoopers’ charter. Surveillance powers should only be used to investigate serious crimes and must require a magistrate’s warrant.

“Ministers must ensure that this consultation results in real changes and not just warm words.”

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This entry was posted on Saturday, May 2nd, 2009 at 10:15 pm and is filed under Surveillance, Civil Liberties & Human Rights News . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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