The Interception Modernisation Programme (IMP) was a

UK government His Majesty's Government, abbreviated to HM Government or otherwise UK Government, is the central government, central executive authority of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland.

initiative to extend the government's capabilities for lawful interception and storage of communications data. It was widely reported that the IMP's eventual goal was to store details of all UK communications data in a central database. The proposal was similar to the NSA Call Database (

MAINWAY MAINWAY is a database maintained by the United States' National Security Agency (NSA) containing metadata for hundreds of billions of telephone calls made through the largest telephone company, telephone carriers in the United States, including A ...

) established by

GCHQ Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) is an intelligence and security organisation responsible for providing signals intelligence (SIGINT) and information assurance (IA) to the government and armed forces of the United Kingdom. Primar ...

's American counterpart NSA and the Titan traffic database established by the Swedish

National Defence Radio Establishment The National Defence Radio Establishment (, FRA) is a Swedish government agency organised under the Ministry of Defence. The two main tasks of FRA are signals intelligence (SIGINT), and support to government authorities and state-owned companie ...

. In 2008 plans were being made to collect data on all phone calls,

email Electronic mail (usually shortened to email; alternatively hyphenated e-mail) is a method of transmitting and receiving Digital media, digital messages using electronics, electronic devices over a computer network. It was conceived in the ...

s, chatroom discussions and web-browsing habits as part of the IMP, thought likely to require the insertion of 'thousands' of

black box In science, computing, and engineering, a black box is a system which can be viewed in terms of its inputs and outputs (or transfer characteristics), without any knowledge of its internal workings. Its implementation is "opaque" (black). The te ...

probes into the country's computer and telephone networks. The proposals were expected to be included in the Communications Data Bill 2008. The "giant database" would include telephone numbers dialled, the websites visited and addresses to which e-mails are sent "but not the content of e-mails or telephone conversations."

Chris Huhne Christopher Murray Paul Huhne (born 2 July 1954) is a British energy and climate change consultant, and former journalist, business economist and politician who was the Liberal Democrats (UK), Liberal Democrat Member of Parliament for Eastleigh ...

, the

Liberal Democrat Home affairs spokesman The Liberal Democrat Home Affairs spokesperson is the spokesperson for the Liberal Democrats (UK), Liberal Democrats on matters relating to the work of the Home Secretary and Home Office. The office holder is a member of the Liberal Democrat frontb ...

said: "The government's

Orwellian ''Orwellian'' is an adjective which is used to describe a situation, an idea, or a societal condition that 20th-century author George Orwell identified as being destructive to the welfare of a free and open society. It denotes an attitude and ...

plans for a vast database of our private communications are deeply worrying." Despite this, the

Home Office The Home Office (HO), also known (especially in official papers and when referred to in Parliament) as the Home Department, is the United Kingdom's interior ministry. It is responsible for public safety and policing, border security, immigr ...

denied reports that a prototype of the IMP had already been built. Reports in April 2009 suggested that the government had changed its public stance to one of using legal measures to compel communications providers to store the data themselves, and making it available for government to access; then

Home Secretary The secretary of state for the Home Department, more commonly known as the home secretary, is a senior minister of the Crown in the Government of the United Kingdom and the head of the Home Office. The position is a Great Office of State, maki ...

Jacqui Smith Jacqueline Jill Smith, Baroness Smith of Malvern (born 3 November 1962), is a British politician, broadcaster and life peer who has been serving as Minister of State for Skills since 2024. A member of the Labour Party, she was Member of Pa ...

stated that "there are absolutely no plans for a single central store." The new plans were thought to involve spending £2bn on paying ISPs to install

deep packet inspection Deep packet inspection (DPI) is a type of data processing that inspects in detail the data (Network packet, packets) being sent over a computer network, and may take actions such as alerting, blocking, re-routing, or logging it accordingly. Deep ...

equipment within their own networks, and obliging them to perform the cross-correlation and profiling of their users' behaviour themselves, in effect achieving the original goals of the IMP by different means. A detailed analysis was published by the Policy Engagement Network of the

London School of Economics The London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE), established in 1895, is a public research university in London, England, and a member institution of the University of London. The school specialises in the social sciences. Founded ...

on 16 June 2009. The All Party Privacy Group held a hearing on IMP in the

House of Commons The House of Commons is the name for the elected lower house of the Bicameralism, bicameral parliaments of the United Kingdom and Canada. In both of these countries, the Commons holds much more legislative power than the nominally upper house of ...

on 1 July 2009. In 2010 the new coalition government apparently revived the IMP in its Strategic Defence and Security Review."Strategic Defence and Security Review"
(Press release). Department for International Development. The new version of the IMP was known as the Communications Capabilities Development Programme.

References

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External links

Intercept Modernisation
at the Open Rights Group wiki Surveillance Civil rights and liberties in the United Kingdom Mass intelligence-gathering systems Surveillance databases Government databases in the United Kingdom Home Office (United Kingdom) GCHQ

See also

References

External links