UK spy agency played catch-up to 'master the internet'
It appeared to Britain's spy agency in 2009 that technology was leaving it behind and it needed to get moving on 'mastering the internet'
The memo was finished at 9.32am on Tuesday, May 19, 2009, and was written jointly by the director in charge of the British Government Communications Headquarters' top-secret Mastering the Internet (MTI) project and a senior member of the GCHQ's cyber-defence team.
The internal e-mail was a "prioritisation and tasking initiative" to another senior member of staff about the problems facing the British spy agency during a period when technology seemed to be racing ahead of the intelligence community.
The authors wanted new ideas - and fast.
"It is becoming increasingly difficult for GCHQ to acquire the rich sources of traffic needed to enable our support to partners within HMG [Her Majesty's government], the armed forces, and overseas," they wrote.
"The rapid development of different technologies, types of traffic, service providers and networks, and the growth in sheer volumes that accompany particularly the expansion and use of the internet, present an unprecedented challenge to the success of GCHQ's mission."
The memo continued: "We would like you to lead a small team to fully define this shortfall in tasking capability [and] identify all the necessary changes needed to rectify it."
