The black box would look like any other industrial computer — but it would sit at a key point on the internet, creating a record of every interaction that passed through it, ready for the police and intelligence agencies to take a look.
There would not be just one black box but hundreds of them, possibly thousands — sucking up every email from a computer or mobile phone, every visit to Facebook and other websites or online games, every tweet, every Skype conversation, every instant message, every trip into “the cloud”, in fact every use of the internet in Britain.
Having enmeshed the country in a network of all-seeing CCTV cameras, the security state now wants to do the same online — and not just on the information superhighway but in every nook and cranny of the net where someone might be up to no good.
Source: Internet (Tim Rayment, The Times)
