The mother country is the master of mastering the internet

The old 'Master Race' has not given up its old colonial attitudes  towards the world. It is again wanting to master not just the internet, but the world.

GCHQ taps fibre-optic cables for secret access to world's communications

Exclusive: British spy agency collects and stores vast quantities of global email messages, Facebook posts, internet histories and calls, and shares them with NSA, latest documents from Edward Snowden reveal

Ewen MacAskill, Julian Borger, Nick Hopkins, Nick Davies and James Ballguardian.co.uk, Friday 21 June 2013 17.23 BST

Secret document detailing GCHQ's ambition to 'master the internet'

Britain's spy agency GCHQ has secretly gained access to the network of cables which carry the world's phone calls and internet traffic and has started to process vast streams of sensitive personal information which it is sharing with its American partner, the National Security Agency (NSA).

The sheer scale of the agency's ambition is reflected in the titles of its two principal components: Mastering the Internet and Global Telecoms Exploitation, aimed at scooping up as much online and telephone traffic as possible. This is all being carried out without any form of public acknowledgement or debate.

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"It's not just a US problem. The UK has a huge dog in this fight," Snowden told the Guardian. "They [GCHQ] are worse than the US."

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Britain's technical capacity to tap into the cables that carry the world's communications – referred to in the documents as special source exploitation – has made GCHQ an intelligence superpower.

By 2010, two years after the project was first trialled, it was able to boast it had the "biggest internet access" of any member of the Five Eyes electronic eavesdropping alliance, comprising the US, UK, Canada, Australia and New Zealand.

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The Americans were given guidelines for its use, but were told in legal briefings by GCHQ lawyers: "We have a light oversight regime compared with the US".

When it came to judging the necessity and proportionality of what they were allowed to look for, would-be American users were told it was "your call".

http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2013/jun/21/gchq-cables-secret-world-communications-nsa