Why Does the U.K.’s New Internet Surveillance Plan Cost Nearly $4 Billion?


Ryan Gallagher writes on the Slate web site:

How much does it cost to monitor every communication flowing through a country?

Last week, the British government published its controversial Communications Data Bill—or “snoopers’ charter,” as it has been widely dubbed—which would force U.K. telecoms firms to store records about activity on social network sites, webmail, internet phone calls (like Skype), and online gaming for up to a year.

The legislation, which could involve fitting “black-box” probes within the communications infrastructure to make data available in near real time, has been attacked by civil liberties groups that have drawn comparisons with mass surveillance systems used by authoritarian rulers in places like Belarus, China, and Iran.

Many of the technical details about the plan remain unknown at this early stage, but the huge cost of the program itself is highly revealing. The new surveillance infrastructure would cost up to £2.5 billion ($3.9 billion) over the next decade, according to the Financial Times.

It’s difficult to find any other monitoring schemes that come close to $3.9 billion, which hints at the true size of the British project. An Internet surveillance programme the Canadian government wants to legislate, very similar in every way to the U.K.’s, is reportedly priced at about $160 million for the first four years. A surveillance scheme in India that would “monitor all web traffic passing through Internet service providers in the country” is also predicted to cost $160 million.