Originally posted by 5 oClock
This is a small list of the agencies with the legal right now and the potential to dig through the web to find website and posts that they feel may be
a threat to to OUR CORRUPT GOV. thanks to the patriot act.
www.fbi.gov...
www.cia.gov...
www.dhs.gov...
www.defenselink.mil...
www.atf.gov...
Well, there's still a gap here. If you're worried about the ones that can haul you in, then at the fed level it's only ATF, DHS and FBI - CIA
isn't chartered for domestic and generally won't touch it unless foreign nationals are involved.
On the other hand, you also seem to be worried about "monitoring"; someone upthread was worried about "data mining" as well, and there are groups
that do that but don't have explicit enforcement powers.
So you've got ones that generally don't data mine as such but can put you in jail, and ones that data mine but can't do anything about it, and
others that could, but only under specific circumstances. Well, on ATS that's pretty much all the time, to be sure. For NSA and CIA there's the
vampire rule, if you let them in the door by having a FORN post on a particular thread, and certainly some ATS members are Canadian, then they're in.
So if they wanted to, they have a USSID that gives them permission to do so, although CIA doesn't have domestic enforcement capability. and NSA has
none at all.
Then you've got people who can "look up things about you", if there's a decent reason to do so. Say you're military or former service, for
example, or say you are as part of your ATS persona. Expose your name, or enough details to narrow it down to a few people, and then make some
statement pertaining to the military, and you've given permission for such a person to do at least a lookup on your bonafides, get your open
information and peruse it. That gives them your top level service info - what branch, what rank held, where served, any special training, what sort of
clearance you have or had, your home address, unlisted land line or cell numbers, relatives residing with you, current income etc. The more poop you
were into in the service, the more accurate and detailed your personal info will be, because SF and up have little clerks following them for seven
years ETS.
That gets harder to do if you don't provide explicit details like your name. But if you provoke them enough, they can get it anyway. A thing that can
piss them right off enough to cause that is a solicitation of classified material. If you had someone on ATS that was likely to have been party to
such a thing, say you had an actual military officer on a thread being interviewed, and he was party to SCI info, and someone was making a well
informed and somewhat subtle attempt to get that info, i.e. not "Tell us about the secret UFOs!", then you might get DIA interested in you enough
for them to assign some case workers to it and see who you are. I'm not sure the opportunity for that happens a lot here.
However, DIA is one of the groups that I do know browse other web sites that are at least superficially similar to ATS, looking for overly talky
military guys. That happens more on, say, military.com's forums than here, I'd imagine. DIA is basically resident there. I was surprised to discover
they had a couple of guys assigned to Fark.com, although there is both a DOE and military contingent that post there a lot, and back when there were
several agency guys. They've only got enforcement power over active and former military with NDAs that are still in force, or contractors to DIA with
NDAs, so again it doesn't matter much for ATS.
The various military branches do their own little data mining projects, but can't enforce. The Army is really big into this. So, somewhere here in
town, in a big non-descript building full of expensive supercomputers, it's possible that there is a data file that says that Phage tends to post in
the science forum, that he doesn't put his real name in his profile. But maybe phage posts under "phage" on some other science forum where he DID
put his real name, and now we know who Phage is. Or maybe when he joined Yahoo! mail he used Phage, and gave an email address, Yahoo! shares with the
Army, as does Facebook et al, so that's that. Most people tend to use the same passwords too, so maybe user Phage at the honeypot site
ufosarereal.com is the same user Phage at ATS.com - let's try that password, yep, same one and now we have Phage's email address THAT way.
Those guys are only interested (mainly anyway) with seeing who you are associated with, for purposes of establishing likely terrorist groups that they
weren't aware of. But it is interesting to see how they can get your info without necessarily physically visiting a site's hosting service and
getting copies of the membership data.
As a rule, if you're REALLY worried about such things, don't ever use a user name at more than one site, don't use the same password at more than
one site, and use a throwaway email address from Yahoo or whatnot when you first join. Also you might want to go through at least one IP obfuscator,
and you should do so when you get the email address - Yahoo saves the IP that the email signup comes from. Don't trust TOR, and assume that even if
you do all these things, that they can still find you given enough time and interest, it just pisses them off more.
YMMV.