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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."

5 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.

  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. I'm a WhistleBlower by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Funny

    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

  4. Re:Who are the "Metropolitan Police"? by Xest · · Score: 4, Informative

    It's okay, you can be forgiven for not having heard of them, it's not like they're the oldest police force in the world or anything:

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metropolitan_Police_Service

  5. Re:Who are the "Metropolitan Police"? by Inda · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.