Can the government bring this site down?

Why would they shut down ATS when they can gain intel on civilians who they can add to their blacklists? ATS is an easy way to spread propaganda, while the "real" news gets dropped to page 10. A site like this helps the government minutely and could be used to prosecute certain "terrorists" should they have the need/want to do so...Scary thought but true.

Originally posted by leapofdreams
I am close to sure the feds would close this site if leaks contenued to occure. However would it be better for them to act as if it were not there. It is very hard to find the truth in a pile of lies when you dont know what truth you are looking for.

If they were to shut ats down then it would be a red flag for all of us paranoid people. So by shuting down ats it would end up adding strenth to the cause. They probally enjoy takeing us out one by one. more torture fun for the military.

I'll assume you're foreign, so, no attacks on your use of grammar or spelling.
First-- What cause. If we closed it down, you'd still have to sift through a pile of rubbage from here to the moon to find one or two discussions of consequence. And even then, it may've been over something as small as non-cooperation with a request to take a post down or something.

Second-- As a member of the armed forces, I enjoy how you feel free to characterize more than one-hundred thousand people 'enjoying torture' or whatever other blithering nonsense you feel is true.

Learn to watch your mouth.

Much love, Iblis.

Originally posted by ufia
I can't predict, but I doubt they would take ATS down.

In the past I've seen assassination threat toward the US president posted as a joke on another forum, the Secret Service tracked only the original poster for interrogation and sent some sort of cease and desist letter to the site administrator to remove the threatening post in question, but the site was never taken down by the government and the rest of members in the forum remained out of trouble as far as I know.

oh really i must have missed out on that day to, ive seen many a boards where joke assasinations were placed an nothing seems to have happened

Originally posted by Circa
i'm pretty sure that someone from the government has an acct to this site. So far they haven't taken it down...and that just means that nothing here has even gotten close to the truth.

No, I know two people on this site that were hunted down. One was blackmailed and the other one was followed and breaking an entering her house and scaring her. All I can say to avoid being hunted myself is David Icke= CORRECT INFO. My friend spoke of something like David Icke excpet he does his own research and they made sure he didn't say anything. And since he told me, now they follow me once and awhile. Which is cool but annoying.

If something important were revealed,this site would be off of the internet backbone routers faster than you can say four three digit numbers.

Interestingly, a computer scientist once told me that , outside the United State, in places like Brazil, they might have a harder time diverting traffic from the site to an alternate clone site. He also said that there are at least 5 different ways to "Ownz the Internet".

Originally posted by DalairTheGreat
oh really i must have missed out on that day to, ive seen many a boards where joke assasinations were placed an nothing seems to have happened

Just passing along this recent news report about a teen who got a visit from the Secret Service for posting death threats against the president on her blog.

sfgate.com: California teen questioned over threats to Bush posted on MySpace

The following link is unrelated to ATS but I thought it was interesting to see how a web site shut down by the FBI looks like: www.ibackups.net...

iBackups was selling pirated softwares. You can see archived copy of the web site before it got busted at www.ibackups.net..." target="_blank" class="postlink">archive.org

If you do a Google search for the string "PERMANENTLY SHUT DOWN BY" you get a bunch other web sites shut down by the FBI.

[edit on 14-10-2006 by ufia]

My guess is that not just "The" government, but in fact several governments, and indeed a large number of public and covert agencies within those governments continually and consistently monitor ATS for several practical, logical reasons.

!st: It is source of information, intel being the bread and butter of many govt agencies raison d'etre. Granted, you have to sift through mountains of chaff to get anything worth noting, but the occasional needle in the haystack makes the painstaking process worthwhile.

2nd: Because ATS and like-minded boards attract a wide variety of posters from all walks of life; by keeping tabs on threads many agencies can get a feel for overall sentiment in society. Politicians, demographers, sociologists and 3-letter employees of many stripes can make policy decisions, recommend courses of action, and advise the upper echelon based in part on the gist of sentiment here and elsewhere. They can and do conduct this scrutiny without interference and consider it of great value. Intel thrives on data - as much and as from as many sources as possible. ATS is a source of such data.

3rd: The overly security-sensitive branches must be vigilant for any leaks of potentially intel-threatening or just perceived-threatening disclosures. By having a few 'observers' keeping an eye on posts such as this 365/24/7, they might be able to catch a potential 'situation' and take some sort of evasive action (but NOT TO include interference w/ATS of any kind) by either covering the disclosure, removing the threat, spreading counter-intel/disinformation, and many other means available to them. The threat may come from a disgruntled employee, a spurned contractor, an informant/third party, a diligent researcher, a spouse/snoop, or just a lucky ‘net sharpshooter. That’s irrelevant – the important thing is the discovery process. They can’t defend themselves against it if they don’t know it exists.

4th: Not suggesting this is the case; however, one must assume that if sufficient motivation exists, the capability is certainly there for an agency to use the board to “test’ the waters, inject a piece of information/disinformation to gauge reaction, or to lead a chain of thought/respond in kind to satisfy a given directive/objective or some other reason the speculation of which is beyond the scope of this discussion. Anyone who has spent any length of time here already knows that such a possibility is within the realm of rhyme and reason of several unmentioned government entities.

There are more reasons, some not so patently obvious, some subjectively derived, some unknown – it is certain.

In a sense we are, like them, mostly after the truth. It seems ironic that ‘they’ need to look here on a regular basis in search of it…

In short: They probably can shut us down, but they would never do so. They would lose much and gain little as a result. To do so would defeat their purpose. When traveling among the stars, you don't initiate destruction of your engine if it inconveniences you with a hiccup now and then...

Carry on...

[edit on 11/4/2006 by Outrageo]

i believe they would.

granted, they probably wouldnt make it obvious that it was them (nothing like that "site has been shut down by"). they would probably do a DDOS on the servers, or hire some hacker to do it.

[edit on 4-11-2006 by prototism]

I dont see ATS as an internet website that would get shut down. Why? A couple of reasons. Typically if someone has a problem with the site of above top secret they can contact this one person breaking the rules through a lawfirm or they can talk to someone else and that post usually gets removed.

I see ATS as an international community. the threats to the US government would most likely not be able to be carried out because so many different people live in so many different places.

Plus, intelligence keeps the government alive. the amount of intelligence that the government gets from the site of ATS must be overwhelming. They must get thousands of pages added to the central intelligence agency from this post. Posting posts that will get your post removed from the site will most likely add many pages to the echelon and the echelon will most likely add those pages to your personal history so that they can track you and see what you do.

The government allows freedom of expression but only to a certain point and they could just as easily track every website that violates the rules of the echelon and they could just as easily shut down all of these sites__ and what's left? Well, the problem with that is that these sites could create clone sites or alternate sites and they could pop up elsewhere.

I dont think that AtS will be shut down. I havent seen ATS shut down once.

That's just my two cents.

personally i'd have thought the US government has better things to do with their time than shut down a site used by people speculating about things.

Didn't someone come across something classified, post it on here and it got removed and they got banned? it was 'Nans desmichels' or something?

I actually joined with another account in 2004 and I joined after I saw a lot of jibber-jabber about some government agent and that was in like november I think. I dont think anyone got banned, but there was lots of talk of a government agent inspecting the site so I joined because of the excitement, but I still doubt that ATS will be shut down. Look at all the diversity we have here!

Not to knock the site but honestly, there are so many ridiculous stories, fabricated incidents, crackhead theories, and nonsense here on this site...I just cant see a better site for disinformation and distraction then one like this. Sure "the government" monitors this site, the same way as any other. It Might take a bigger team to do the job, this is a massive board and the nature of most of the subjects tend to have something to do with "the man". The objective itself though is no different, make sure sensitive information is not leaked. In my honest opinion I have a feeling the people who have been given that job probably spend most of their time here laughing at all the ridiculous people in the world, rather then trying to figure out a plan to overtake the site if info got loose... Is it possible that classified material may have been discussed here at one time or another sure, a lot of people at one time or another have been exposed to that information. However, "they" are good at what they do and have been doing it for a long time so if anything would here would ever grab the attention of the authorties im sure they already have a plan waiting... yall would probably never know anyways....

Also, I didnt want it to sound like I dislike ATS. Just kind of throwing out there as have the previous posters of this thread "its hard to find the needle in this massive haystack."

The Government won't waste their time on these forums because of the fact that most of you conspiracy theorists are a bunch of out of shape geeks, porn junkies and armchair analysts who have no life and have absolutely nothing better to do than to play PC games and post in a fantasyland forums like ATS. The Government has much better things to do than worry about what a bunch of paranoid delusionists post on an internet forum. Do yourselves a favor and take a break from Hollywood for a while, come back to reality and rejoin the human race.

Originally posted by StudiesObservationGroup
The Government..blah blah.insults etc..

Way to make friends...
Maybe instead of joining the ranks of the people you choose to insult,find something more suitable to your obviously superior intellect and physical conditioning.

Anyway.. back to Tomb Raider... MMMM Lara baby..

" Can the government bring this site down?"

This has to be one of the stupidest questions I've ever seen on this forum. Seriously.

FYI, this is a government website!

Originally posted by hanebul
" Can ..?"
..

Cor Lummee... they,re out in force today..
That particular subject has been dealt with in quite considerable length already.
Why is it stupid to ask about inadvertently discussing a subject that would have a detrimental effect on this site?

I think Simon explained it perfectly well. ''The government'' is not one almighty force.. it has numerous branches which deal with their relevant matters without much in the way of communication to the ''top dogs''..

By that way of thought you assume GWB will be hunched over his laptop right now scrutinising what you decide to discuss on a dull Sunday on ATS.

Being in the military and now a government contractor I can tell you that certain services block the site. Af installtions being one, but they also block any forums if its a major one. all video sites as well like youtube, google video. Its just the policy of the governemtn entity. And I don't doubt there are plenty of military, government contractors, agents, etc browsing the forums. Mostly because they have interests too in other peoples ideas. As for doing research on the "common person" I seriously doubt it. I mainly post here for poetry. But every now and then I see a topic I'd like to discuss. For the most part I believe its a site for intelligent conversation with people from all over the world.


-Aza

After reading over my post, and already editing some typo's...

I kinda made it seem like there might be special attention payed to this site.
I highly doubt its monitored any different then the rest of the Internet. Yet I know one thing for sure, the government doesnt take sensitive information being leaked lightly. There are guidelines to follow when information gets loose rather it be on the internet or anywhere else.

[edit on 26-11-2006 by Scyman]

They move the topics that are real and true.I once made an organic food topic and they moved it and no one could post.

[edit on 26-11-2006 by muhlis]

All that I will say on the matter is that I believe that the government does monitor the boards.