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.

"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 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.

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