GCHQ: Mastering the Media

GCHQ has been hard at work in the last two days spinning against our revelations on Sunday that it is spending more than £1bn on monitoring and analysis equipment under a secret project called Mastering the Internet.

Mastering the Internet has been underway for over a year and contracts worth hundreds of millions of pounds have been awarded, our sources confirmed. A network of remotely-configured deep packet inspection probes inside internet and phone providers will grant GCHQ complete visibility of UK internet traffic.

The folks at the concrete doughnut, apparently uncomfortable with such work becoming public knowledge, would however like you to think the resultant expansion of their power is no big deal.

Here's the substantive sentence in GCHQ's lengthy statement in response to the story: "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."

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