WRITTEN ON May 4th, 2009 BY Sir Bonar Neville-Kingdom GCMG KCVO AND STORED IN Uncategorized

Sir Bonar writes from his home (where he remains on gardening leave in the wake of the unfortunate and still unresolved Arabic-themed nightclub incident):

It has been a good year for the fritilleries, and a wonderful one for violets, cowslips and our beloved euphorbias. But even while on gardening leave one is able to make occasional decisive interventions in the affairs of state.

I had a call from our friends in Cheltenham. They’re in the news about the whole “ring of soup” business and they’ve got their knickers in the most frightful twist about it. What should they do?

First of all, I said, calm down. Remember that it is vital that we should master the Internet and bring everything back under control. I invoked the forebears at Bletchley who, after all, pretty much invented all this stuff and thereby won the war against Nazi Germany. A bit of careful drafting and a press release should deal with the whole problem, I told them.

The news media is behaving as if we’re trying to listen in on every conversation. But that’s old hat. It’s the comms data we ‘re after: the who called whom, who emailed whom and visited which site, and where their mobiles are at all times. The news media talk about a “Big Brother” giant database, but as our friends at Lockheed Martin have argues so persuasively, why buy one database whan you can have several dotted around the place and wire them together, as it were? We’re always one step ahead.

So I rang the office and dictated, quite off the cuff, an email to Patricia with the following phrase of which I am particularly proud:

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. Similarly, GCHQ has no ambitions, expectations or plans for a database or databases to store centrally all communications data in Britain.

You see? Do I have to spell it out? We won’t monitor all of it, just some of it. We won’t monitor the phone call itself, just who rang whom, when, for how long and from what location. We won’t target everyone in the UK, although for reasons of equality and balance everyone’s communications data will be kept. Our actual “targets” will be a fraction of the entire population. We won’t store it centrally. It will be dispersed and for reasons of cost the actual databases will reside with our private sector partners. Thus we continue to do what we do, yet are able is issue a forceful, plausible and entirely truthful denial. This, I assured them, will put a final end to the speculation of the naysayers.

This is no more than the “Saturn” or ring of soup architecture I have described many times, including on my audio blog cast with that fellow David Bridge.

Dealing with the news media requires a subtlety which our friends in Cheltenham, with their inevitable but unhealthy introspection and somewhat “geeky” culture, have never had the proper chance to acquire. In such situations one remains happy to serve. But now another duty calls: to dead-head the last remaining daffodils…