Have ATS and/or Other Boards Been Approached By Any Government Or Corporate Power Yet?

Just interested to know, I thinks personally its quite an important question. When and if they come to the door of ATS I can probably expect a call at my own, lol.


During these times of strife I am sure they are watching The boards Very carefully, I would be suprised if ATS hasnt been approached yet. I am not a disloyal ATSer, I am just another individual who became a conspiracy theorist after Oaklahoma, 9/11, 7/7, Madrid ......

reply to post by TheMindWar


Any agency that came to ATS, 3 letter I mean, CIA etc..would need proper legal documents in order to obtain any information.

So no, I doubt it. I'm sure there's been one or two occasions where law enforcement requested information, but I'm not familiar with any specific case myself, but the place has been around for over 10 years.

~Tenth

Originally posted by tothetenthpower
reply to post by TheMindWar

 

Any agency that came to ATS, 3 letter I mean, CIA etc..would need proper legal documents in order to obtain any information.

ermm... that is if they want you to be aware of it, besides that, its far more productive to adapt and become part of a community rather than sticking out like soar thumb.

reply to post by TheMindWar


How would they find, much less come to, your door with what we have? More importantly, why would they care what "TheMindWar" typed on a website?

All the information we have on anyone is their user name (typically something like "TheMindWar) ), an email address (most of those are "[email protected] and utterly unidentifiable) you registered with and the IP address you last posted from.

To answer your question, per our privacy policy and Terms and Conditions of use, we won't release what we do have without a court order and we have one of the best law firms on the planet backing us up. That said, even with a court order, it's nothing they can "find" you with unless your ISP gives you up and, if you're using a proxy they won't know who your ISP is.

Trust me when I tell you, if the government folks want to talk with you, and they won't unless you admit to perpetrating a crime or threaten the President, they'll call your ISP, they don't need us and we have virtually nothing that can help them, and that's on purpose.

Springer...

What would they be watching..... I haven't seen proof of much on this site, just alot of commentary and observations... But im always learnin something so i like it...

Why would the give a damn what goes on here? 90% of the stuff we post here are things the general public looks at as things only kooks and foil hat people would talk about. We would be kidding ourselves to think a government agency could give a crap about the stuff posted here.

Well, I think this is vitally important. The very top left corner of Drudge has the following headline:

Obama meets with Springer...

Why didn't you tell us, Boss?

Government Oversights

reply to post by charles1952

Looks like the jig is up!

Meanwhile, another thing to consider with regard to government interest in ATS is that our terms & conditions expressly forbid self-incriminating discussions. While we do talk about quite a few things that aren't considered "mainstream", we don't talk about committing crimes, don't plan terrorist attacks, don't plot the violent overthrow of governments or otherwise do anything that would attract serious law enforcement attention.

So assuming various government agencies monitor ATS (and we might as well assume everything is monitored everywhere), there's really not much here for them, and plenty of greener pastures out there on the Big Bad Internet if they're looking for someone to bust.

We also encourage members to protect their privacy, remove personal information (real names, addresses, phone numbers, etc.) when we see it and, in general, leave very little for anyone to track or identify. That contrasts rather strongly with the aims of most social networking sites that want to know everything about you (making them "target rich" environments for surveillance), and deliberately so, because we're here to talk about topics of mutual interest, not each other.

Granted, this is ATS, so it's somewhat traditional to look for conspiracies in pretty much everything. But I suspect the overwhelming majority of government attention we get is in the form of members and guests who come here for the same reasons anyone else does, because people who work for governments are still people.

And like anyone else, they're welcome to join us anytime and share their opinions, too.

Don't take ATS seriously. Seriously.

You can't be serious.

are you delirious