Mastering the Internet

Mastering the Internet (MTI) is a mass surveillance project led by the British communications intelligence agency Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ), with a budget of over £1 billion. According to reports in The Register and The Sunday Times, as of early May 2009, contracts with a total value of £200m had already been awarded to suppliers.

Responding to these reports, GCHQ issued a press release countering these claims of mass surveillance, stating that "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".

However, the 2013 mass surveillance disclosures revealed that the GCHQ gathers “raw” information (without filtering out the communications of British citizens) from the web as part of its "Mastering the Internet" programme.

Background
"Mastering the Internet" (MTI) is part of the Interception Modernisation Programme (IMP) of the British government. The system was described in 2009 by The Register and The Sunday Times as the replacement for scrapped plans for a single central database, involving thousands of DPI (deep packet inspection) "black boxes" at various internet service providers in association with the GCHQ base in Cheltenham, funded out of a Single Intelligence Account budget of £1.6 bn, including a £200m contract with Lockheed Martin and a contract with BAE Systems Detica.

As of 2013, the system is capable of vacuuming signals from up to 200 fibre-optic cables at all physical points of entry into Great Britain.

International cooperation
During the course of the 2013 mass surveillance disclosures, The Guardian revealed that the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) had been involved in "Mastering the Internet" as part of the "Five Eyes" alliance between several English-speaking Western democracies. According to documents leaked by Edward Snowden, the NSA paid the GCHQ over £17.2 million for running the latter's "Mastering the Internet" programme.

Back in 2007, John Adams, chief of Canada's intelligence agency Communications Security Establishment, appeared before the Parliament of Canada, where he acknowledged the plans of the "Five Eyes" to master the Internet:

""We want to master the Internet. That is a challenge that no one institution — be it ours or the National Security Agency, NSA, for that matter — can manage on their own. We try to do that in conjunction with our allies.""

- John Adams