[gregparadee]

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.

[rob_mccann]

TLDR: This is nothing like Prism. Prism (illegally) accesses private data, NDEU legally accesses data made public.

[_djo_]

Not quite, PRISM provides access to data legally acquired through mechanisms (like FISA requests) that should ideally not be legal.