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Meet PRISM's English Little Brother: Socmint

Posted by timothy on from the do-you-know-winston-smith-in-real-life dept.

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."

4 of 76 comments (clear)

  1. So it's not really the same then... by Xest · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Because all it does is just scrape public data, whilst Prism targets private data, which is kind of a fundamental difference.

    1. Re:So it's not really the same then... by AmiMoJo · · Score: 3, Insightful

      The problem is that it is the long predicted end-game of the mass adoption of social media where everything gets put online. It borders on pre-crime, where the police actively look for people who seem like they might commit and offence.

      You also have to remember that many members of the police force are scum and will abuse this as much as possible. We already know they like to dig for dirt on people they don't like. It's becoming standard practice to throw in a few dubious but terrifying child porn charges based on the contents of a suspect's browser cache if they are not cooperating to the police's satisfaction. Now everything you ever said or posted can and will be used against you, out of context and even after you deleted it.

      It's somewhat like the Stasi. They had a file on everyone, spies everywhere potentially monitoring anything and everything being said or written for deviant behaviour. The effects were chilling.

      --
      const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
      SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
  2. Don't you mean IngSocmint? by SomePoorSchmuck · · Score: 5, Insightful

    As I said of Western governments many years ago, "WE read 1984 and took it as a warning. THEY read 1984 and took it as a blueprint."

    --

    Hollywood, Television, has become the dream machine. We need to take that back; each of us is a Dream Machine
  3. Re:The Netherlands. by JaredOfEuropa · · Score: 3, Insightful

    You laugh, but the director of the Dutch secret service recently admitted to gathering intel on a large scale "so they'll have something valuable to trade with their counterparts abroad". Apparently you need to give up the goods on your own citizens in order to play the spy game on an international level.

    --
    If construction was anything like programming, an incorrectly fitted lock would bring down the entire building...