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A comment on Meet Prism's little brother: Socmint.

Re:Meet Prism's little brother: Socmint by gregparadee on Wednesday June 26, 2013 @10:14AM (#5946151)
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.

The HUGE difference here is the last three words of that paragraph, "public online sphere." They are doing no more then analyzing publicly accessible data just like any other company, specifically advertising and marketing companies, do on a daily basis.

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Re:Meet Prism's little brother: Socmint by rob_mccann on Wednesday June 26, 2013 @10:22AM (#5946209)
TLDR: This is nothing like Prism. Prism (illegally) accesses private data, NDEU legally accesses data made public.
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Re:Meet Prism's little brother: Socmint by _djo_ on Wednesday June 26, 2013 @11:11AM (#5946534)
Not quite, PRISM provides access to data legally acquired through mechanisms (like FISA requests) that should ideally not be legal.
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