Good to hear some calm common sense in the midst of all the headline grabbing bluster.

A huge difference between a capability to selectively monitor (within a regulatory system) an individual or location and wholesale eavesdropping / data archiving of all coms.

I'm fine with the idea that in extreme cases (bomb plot for example) a couple of men in black and a c++ guy (accountable to ministers who in turn are reviewed by the judiciary) can show up at anISP to install a capture for the duration of an investigation.

Any suggestion of comprehensive real time data monitoring, archiving or profiling is not ok.

IIRC, the place hasn't been called GCHQ for years (if it ever officially was) although I've forgotten the "correct" name for it.

Whilst their statement is almost certainly excruciatingly correct, the devil, as usual, is in the details: What exactly constitutes damage to the UK or its "economic interests"? As an example, leaving aside, for the moment, questions of the legality of the activity, does this include pirating of movies or music? As you so correctly point out, they are not aiming to monitor *everyone*, just *anyone*. whenever they want. And if they happen to latch on to something they deem interesting and within their (gargantuan and ill-defined) remit whilst searching for something else, why then, it behoves them to look at it, right?

GCHQ has, for years, been a master of finding every tiny chink in the legislation which governs its behaviour and exploiting them to do exactly what its "customers" want, often without anyone else knowing about it. This is possible because of the nature of the classifications it applies to most of what it does. You can bet your life that the various Commissioners etc who are supposed to oversee its operations aren't on the lists whose codewords are part of the classification of the most questionable documents and information. And will, therefore, never even get to know they exist.

Of course, the place does do useful work and, to be fair, finding the right balance between accountability (and lost laptops) and the secrecy required for operational usefulness is never going to be easy.

The clever/professional crooks/terrorists/etc will just (multiple) encrypt stuff & use proxies etc, thus leaving the spooks blind to what they're doing anyway.

Never believe anything until it's been officially denied.

To the engineers its just the box with the Phorm Sticker on it..

Phucked up.

For those living in a cave the swedish PirateParty received 5.1% in the latest polls for the EC-election.

Unless we bomb them (Barrack, can we borrow some intercontinental missiles pretty please) the only option is to USE YOUR VOTE!

The old media and politicians nearly soiled themselves when the numbers were published and same could work for UK.

Why not give it a try?

Meanwhile Im moving to Ulan Bator or some place where a printer is an expensive door stop.

I wonder how far we are from needing permission to brush our teeth with toothpaste in the morning, after all, toothpaste tubes can be used to hold volatile chemicals that can threaten the UK and its citizens after all.... Go the Government! I feel soo safe now

"Just as our predecessors at Bletchley Park mastered the use of the first computers, today, partnering with industry, we need to master the use of internet technologies and skills that will enable us to keep one step ahead of the threats. This is what mastering the internet is about. 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.

Because we rely upon maintaining an advantage over those that would damage UK interests, it is usually the case that we will not disclose information about our operations and methods."

Hmmmm ... do GCHQ not realise that " today, partnering with industry, we need to master the use of internet technologies and skills that will enable us to keep one step ahead of the threats" and " maintaining an advantage over those that would damage UK interests" requires at least "developing technology to enable the monitoring of all internet use and phone calls" or buying into those who they may perceive as having Advanced InterNetworking Mastery.

And don't anyone chirp in with some nonsense about there being no Funds for anyone worthy of dragging GCHQ to the ForeFront of IntelAIgent Global Leadership will Counter with Advice to Virtually Deposit Quantitatively Eased Credit to a MaJIC Working Current Account. ..... No Peanuts Allowed No Monkey Employed.

And such is the Perception Pimped that Anyone and Everyone posting here is a Possible Person of Interest and some may even be into Reverse Engineering of Honey Entrapment and BetaTesting of Quantum Communications for Control of SCADA Systems ...... and just Exactly what is Needed for Feeding to Virtual Leaderships ...... Covert Controllers

And in such Games as are being Played, does Real Virtual Inaction Signal the Opposite of Understanding Leaderships into Royal and Ancient Arts and Internet Mastery of Magical Mystery Turing AIdVenturing ........ and Kind Man's NeuReal Virtual Machine Frontier.

"We will watch all of the people some of the time and

some of the people all of the time but not all of the

people all of the time. So that's alright then."

So they installing DPI black box probes, or in tech speak - routers. Hmm.

Anyone heard / know about meaning-based computing? Its all the rage don't you know!

Quite interesting, check out the streaming data analyst requirements for GCHQ

https://www11.i-grasp.com/fe/tpl_gchq01ssl.asp?s=eziKhNSpCaRDiFfRax&jobid=26073,1251216561&key=3674351&c=998665237778&pagestamp=sedsvboqmeiddhhrgp

I propose a vote of thanks to amanfromMars for single-handedly tying up all of Their analysis capacity thus allowing the rest of us to stay under the radar.

I vote that we should now post all our communications through a new 'amanfromMars' filter ;) let GCHQ try to deep packet inspect and decipher that, should keep em busy for weeks :)

quote: "all our activities are proportionate to the threats against which we seek to guard.."

just a couple of questions regarding the above quote, to make sure i understand this correctly:

- exactly what threats? terrorists? what else besides that non-existent enemy?

- whom exactly is under threat from within the populace? the people? or the government?

oh, and we've all seen what the government call 'proportionate'....

I want to thank AC @ 13:49 GMT and 14:21 GMT for posting those job adverts. I do hope the media (El Reg at least) press GCHQ, the Home Office, etc, on these.

Many years ago I used to work at the Cheltenham branch of Dixons, where GCHQ bought shedloads of Amstrad PCs. The great thing about it was that since they could not return them when faulty because of the data held on them, we never got the grief all other users gave us!

They eventually found other sources of reliable PC kit, but for a while I rode the gravy train as they became experts at keeping their hardware working...

When phoning, the receptionist would only ever answer by asking what extension you wanted and all deliveries were made to a Room Number, anticipated by the guards at the entrance gate.

Paris because we'd all love to know what room she's staying in while visiting the UK.

At Bletchley park they used to crack the encryption used by the enemy. A jolly good job they made of Enigma too. If we really have that many "enemies within" that we need this mass surveillance, I suggest we start asking the government what they are doing that annoys so many people so much.

I don't have a problem with warranted interceptions. How hard can it be to tap someone's ppp stream coming in over ADSL at the ISP? You don't need massive data slurping. Of course, any serious threat to national security will be using proper ipsec vpns which GCHQ will fail to decode anyway. So they'll be left with monitoring either incompetents who aren't much of a threat or the general populace. Now that looks fishy. I'd like some hard numbers on "convictions gained for (attempted/conspiracy) murder" where the cinching data came from this sort of activity and could not be gained in another manner.

Governments - until they consistently look as though they are on my side, I don't trust them.

Occasionally, I see it said that different countries mutually snoop on each other's citizens, so as to get around domestic laws protecting citizens from their own (but not each other's) governments.

"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."

If, instead, it's to monitor all foreign traffic that passes through the UK, and if, say, various other countries are doing likewise, the end results would be much the same - we're all getting spied and snooped on, monitored, logged and so on, anyway. With international co-operation in the fight against terrorism, extremism (non-mainstream politics), organised crime, etc (everything else), it means that GCHQ's MTI project might be even more sinister, partly because it's not directly targetted at UK citizens.

Compare it with Jacqui Smith's recent "climbdown" regarding IMP. Rather than have a single, central database run by the State, she wants ISPs to build and run distributed databases instead. The feeble excuse of privacy concerns obviously doesn't stand up for even a second, but it does show how she regards us, the masses. She'll spin as a climbdown something that's no better, and possibly worse.

Joining up the dots, why wouldn't MTI (or some other GCHQ project) be part of some grand international collaboration to get around domestic privacy laws and the like?

Maybe that sounds a bit tinfoil hat, but how much stuff these days sounded tinfoil hat ten or fifteen years ago? Imagine in 1994 if someone claimed that, in 2009, the UK government would be pressing ahead with plans to log details of all phone calls, emails, web browsing, etc. Wouldn't that have sounded tinfoil hat? And again with taking photos in public places, seeking details of police officers, etc, etc.

If MTI isn't for snooping on UK citizens, then who is it for snooping on? And what's the bigger picture that really fits into?

@Dave Harris: GCHQ definitely is called GCHQ. Maybe you were thinking of CESG, the InfoSec branch, which used to be the only bit of GCHQ that the government would admit existed.

@Register: It's not the "Doughnut", it's the "D'OHnut". Get it right.

“but it's possible they'd be a lot of false positives as well.“

Unless you believe that a *very* substantial portion of the UK population are terrorist suspects that "possible" should read "near certain" The US national Science Foundation concluded this find-a-terrorist-through-their-comms-pattern idea is *highly* suspect. It was Claud Shannon who pointed out all information is a subset of noise. But then we have seen a Govt. Minister talking of "something leading to something else" and therefor we should ban sexually suggestive drawings of children because of this. So maybe they are not that bothered about little things like evidence.

"Maybe I'm wrong but I believe that's the sort of system they want to set-up. "

You have fallen for the deliberate mixing of 2 different things. Let me seperate them. Interception Improvement *is* exactly about listening in on people's conversations and reading the *contents* of their emails, texts, instant messages etc. It's UK specific and should (given what it is) come under RIPA. IE specific warrants for specific people. NB HMG has had such ability since the GPO days. And yes that is what the computers are likely to be doing.

The wholesale collection of call records (who from, who to, header lines, time, date, duration) is the EU Data Retention Directive. Note it was introduced by the UK when it had the presidency. So watch out for the "The EU made us do it" line. IIRC the Directive states this info is for National Security purposes only. And I think analysis of the data is forbidden as well on privacy grounds.

Some numbers for you to think about. The Interception Commissioner's annual report said last year there were about 500k requests for call records (which could not include internet pages then, but will soon if not already) a year. IIRC he did not break out how many were for actual phone taps. The head of MI5 in a speech to newspaper editors said there are c4k terrorist suspects in the UK. That's 1 in 15000.

So how much of the UK's telephone and IP infrastructure's back capcity *should* be set aside (or can be pre-empted by the government on demand)?

So how many simultaneous telephone conversations should GCHQ be able to monitor? With enough capacity (money) it could monitor everyone.

It might help you to know that an intelligence sharing agreement exists between the UK,USA, Canada, Australia and (IIRC) New Zealand. IIRC it dates from sometime in the late 40s or early 50s. It may be a cold ware era document but AFAIK it is still in effect. Remember it is already known to Reg readers that they will *not* be storing all call records themselves, it will be on demand at the service providers.

and now everyone knows about it. Doesn't it rather defeat the object? I think this is all a blind. What are they really upto?