Slashdot Mirror
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."
I wonder what kind of spying methods the Netherlands use. We were the best of the world in tapping telephone conversations for a very long time. But our government has a good reputation for fucking up IT projects in catastrophic ways, so I'm curious how they fare in the "spying on your own people" business.
-- Cheers!
Yeah.
Basically anything they are doing there, I could do and not get into trouble (so long as you stick to the DPA, etc., and there's no evidence to suggest they don't). Hell, Google already do it too, and just about any number of web crawlers.
That's a whole different ball game to "monitoring my conversations" when it comes to doing so by looking into the private records of my account, rather than what you can already find on Google.
Oldest and most corrupt?
They have been so many scandals since my birth, that naming them all would take too long, so I'll name the ones that are current in my mind.
Currently they are investigating themselves for a victim smear campain. Last year 50 were suspended for corruption. They've been labled as "institutionalised racists" in the past. They've murdered people like Ian Tomlinson and Jean Charles de Menezes in recent years. They've sold out to the national press, more than once.
'ello, 'ello, 'ello, what a 'orrible lot we are.
This post contains benzene, nitrosamines, formaldehyde and hydrogen cyanide.
"I now know I'm on The List and that limits my other activities on the internet too. It's shitty."
Fucking ridiculous. Is this something you need to feel in order to satisfy your victim complex or something?
Tweeting a bunch of crap to a politician makes you part of the Background Noise...it doesnt make you some serious threat that anyone is going to waste time and resources on.
Get over yourself, youre not really all that important.