Meet PRISM's English Little Brother: Socmint

An anonymous reader writes with a story at Ars Technica, according to which "For the past two years, a secretive unit in the Metropolitan Police has been developing the tools for blanket surveillance of the public's social media conversations. Operating 24 hours a day, seven days a week, a staff of 17 officers in the National Domestic Extremism Unit (NDEU) has been scanning the public's tweets, YouTube videos, Facebook profiles, and anything else UK citizens post in the public online sphere. ... Surveillance operations often require a ministerial sign-off or permission from a superior, but it is unclear whether targeting of public social media data requires the same level of oversight, as head of research at Privacy International Eric King points out."

Comments

I'm a WhistleBlower

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm blowing the whistle on Facebook. I work for Facebook and support systems that also scour posts and collects personal information and trends. It is my understanding that this data, which is in the 1000's of TB's, is sold to governments and capitalist entities. I complained once, but they told me I was doing my country and the community great favors by what I was doing. Then my cat disappeared that night. Like I sai

Re:I'm a WhistleBlower

[Anonymous Coward]

It's worse than that. I have come into ownership of secret information about a classified NSA program known by the code name Magellan. The system is said to scour the whole Internet and present a simple user interface for searching this gigantic database, allowing the NSA to instantly conduct searches for information that used to be private and known only through word of mouth. This is only the first generation of this technology. The corporation Digital Research, heavily connected to the military-industrial complex, is working on a next-generation version called Alta Vista that will include a translation component called Babel Fish that will allow non-English content to be retrieved through English search queries, and the CIA has a classified program called Dog Pile that can tie the different systems together.

It's really scary. You don't want to step into this world. Just getting a whiff of Dog Pile disgusts me. If anyone reading this has a position in Dog Pile, please tell us everything you can about what it's like.

Captcha: "seminal". THE NSA IS IN MY BALLS!

Re:The Netherlands.

[jbeaupre]

Outsourcing to GB and USA?