science

Mastering the Internet

Mastering the Internet is a science topic covered in the lgStudy science library. This page brings together a partial reference excerpt, illustrations, worked examples, real-world applications and a short study plan, so you can understand Mastering the Internet rather than just read about it. In short: Mastering the Internet (MTI) is a mass surveillance project led by the British communications intelligence agency Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) budgeted at over £1 billion. According to reports in The Register and The Sunday Times in early May 2009, contracts with a total value of £200m had already been awarded to suppliers.

Key takeaways

Mastering the Internet belongs to science; place it in that map before memorising details.
Learn the definition first, then one example that makes the definition concrete.
Connect Mastering the Internet to a quantity you can measure, compute or draw — that is where exam questions come from.
Reproduce the core statement of Mastering the Internet from memory before moving on to harder problems.

Reference excerpt

Mastering the Internet (MTI) is a mass surveillance project led by the British communications intelligence agency Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) budgeted at over £1 billion. According to reports in The Register and The Sunday Times in 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 denying the claims that the program involved 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 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 a project by the British government and part of the Interception Modernisation Programme (IMP). The system was described in 2009 by The Register and The Sunday Times as the replacement for scrapped plans for a single central database. This involves 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. As of 2013, the system is capable of copying signals from up to 200 fibre-optic cables at all physical points of entry into Great Britain.

International cooperation

Canada As early as 2007, John Adams, chief of Canada's intelligence agency Communications Security Establishment, told the Parliament of Canada about plans of the "Five Eyes" to master the Internet in cooperation with the NSA and other allies:

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.

United States In 2013, The Guardian provided specific details of financial contributions made by the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) 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 towards running the programme.

See also Communications Capabilities Development Programme Global Telecoms Exploitation Mass surveillance in the United Kingdom Tempora

References

Worked examples

Example 1 — a first encounter with Mastering the Internet

Start with the simplest possible case. Write down what Mastering the Internet claims or describes in one sentence, then invent the smallest concrete situation in which that sentence is true. In science, the smallest case is usually a single object, a single equation or a single measurement. Check that every symbol or term in your sentence has a meaning in that case.

Example 2 — changing one variable

Take the situation from Example 1 and change exactly one quantity: double it, halve it, or set it to zero. Predict what should happen to Mastering the Internet before you calculate. Comparing your prediction with the result is the fastest way to find out whether you understand the idea or only the words.

Example 3 — an exam-style question

Typical questions about Mastering the Internet ask you to (a) state it precisely, (b) apply it to given data, and (c) explain a limitation. Practise writing all three answers in under five minutes; the third part is what separates a full-mark answer from an average one.

Applications of Mastering the Internet

In research: Mastering the Internet appears in science research whenever the underlying quantities have to be modelled precisely. Papers usually cite it as a starting assumption and then explore where it breaks down.
In technology and industry: Engineering practice reuses Mastering the Internet in design rules, simulations and safety margins. Knowing the idea lets you read a specification sheet and understand why the numbers look the way they do.
In the classroom: Mastering the Internet is common in secondary-school and first-year university syllabi. It links to neighbouring topics Civil rights and liberties in the United Kingdom, GCHQ operations, Home Office (United Kingdom), so understanding it makes those chapters shorter.
In everyday life: Look for Mastering the Internet outside the textbook — in sport, cooking, traffic, electronics or the sky above you. An example you found yourself is remembered far longer than one you were given.

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How to study Mastering the Internet in 20 minutes

Read the reference excerpt below once, without taking notes.
Close the page and write down what Mastering the Internet means in your own words.
Compare your version with the excerpt and mark what you missed.
Work through the three examples above with pen and paper.
Explain Mastering the Internet out loud to somebody else — or to Teacher Smith in the lgStudy chat.

Frequently asked questions

What is Mastering the Internet in simple terms?

Why does Mastering the Internet matter?

Because it connects several science ideas at once: it gives you a definition you can apply, a quantity you can calculate, and a way to check whether a result is plausible.

How should I study Mastering the Internet?

Read the excerpt, restate it from memory, then work through the examples and applications listed on this page. The five-step study plan above takes about twenty minutes.

What does this page cover?

It gives you a compact reference excerpt plus original lgStudy explanations, examples, applications and study material on Mastering the Internet.