Spying in the UK

Spying on Individuals and Organizations: Anglo-American Defense Giants Entrusted with "Mastering the Internet"
By Tom Burghardt

Global Research, May 8, 2009Antifascist Calling
The Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ), the National Security Agency's "kissin' cousin" across the Atlantic pond, has awarded a £200m ($300m U.S.) contract for an internet panopticon.
American defense and security giant Lockheed Martin and BAE subsidiary Detica (yet another firm specializing "in collecting, managing and exploiting information to reveal actionable intelligence"), snagged the contract The Register and The Sunday Times revealed May 3.
According to The Register the new system, called Mastering the Internet (MTI) "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'."
Lockheed Martin and Detica aren't talking and have referred all inquiries on the MTI contract to GCHQ. ComputerWeekly however, reported May 6 that Detica, a firm with close ties to MI5 and MI6, "has data mining software that can detect links between individuals based on their contacts with sometimes widely separated organisations."
The magazine revealed in 2007 that the Insurance Fraud Bureau (IFB) "has outsourced its data mining operations to Detica, a specialist IT company. Its NetReveal software applies social network analysis to huge amounts of data to identify, understand, and evaluate higher-level networks of potentially collusive individuals and organisations."
It would appear the system under construction by GCHQ will apply a similarly unsound and unscientific approach to "counterterrorism." As the National Research Council revealed in their 2008 report on data mining and other dodgy methodologies such as link- and social network analysis for reading digital tea leaves, such techniques "are likely to generate huge numbers of false leads."
However, as a repressive tool for corralling recalcitrant individuals such as antiwar campaigners, environmental activists, socialists and Muslims under Britain's draconian 2006 Terrorism Act, thousands of digital nodes designed to "master the internet" would certainly fit the bill for spooks-gone-wild.
While £200m is a lot of boodle to spy and data mine the private communications and internet browsing habits of British citizens, as James Bamford revealed in Body of Secrets, GCHQ is a key member of the exclusive "UKUSA club." Under terms of the Cold War-era UKUSA Communications Intelligence Agreement, a surveillance nexus linking the United States, Canada, Britain, Australia and New Zealand, a cosy relationship was created where member agencies agreed to share information, including that obtained illegally on their citizens, with one another. "By the late 1980s," Bamford wrote, "there was barely a corner of the earth not covered by a listening post belonging to one of the members, or by an American satellite."
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