• This is a political forum that is non-biased/non-partisan and treats every person's position on topics equally. This debate forum is not aligned to any political party. In today's politics, many ideas are split between and even within all the political parties. Often we find ourselves agreeing on one platform but some topics break our mold. We are here to discuss them in a civil political debate. If this is your first visit to our political forums, be sure to check out the RULES. Registering for debate politics is necessary before posting. Register today to participate - it's free!

Should the U. S. Government Monitor DP For Potential Threats?

Should the U. S. Government Monitor DP For Potential Threats?

  • Total voters
    38
Smeagol said:
This is a public forum and therefore not subject to the fourth amendment. Sure but I've never seen anything posited here that I've even been alarmed over. That said, I've been on anther forum based overseas where people were sympathetic to Al Qaeda and in attempts to understand them I would ask them questions and sometimes argue, I'm sure I have an FBI/NSA file.
Click to expand...

I haven't seen anything here either, and as such, I think it is a waste of time if they are actually monitoring a forum like this.
 
Summerwind said:
So long as the list contains nothing more that what the general public or members could choose to accumulate, I don't see the problem. If they are gaining access to our non-public, non-member information without a warrant, then I see that as the tipping point.
Click to expand...

The point being that governments have long sought to produce dossiers and profiles on its citizenry. And for obvious reasons, that prospect has never been as possible or thorough as it is today.

“We know where you are. We know where you’ve been. We can more or less know what you’re thinking about.”

“Your digital identity will live forever… because there’s no delete button.”

—Eric Schmidt

Google’s for-profit surveillance problem | PandoDaily
 
Summerwind said:
I read somewhere a few years back that they actually insert posters as well to jostle things. I don't why they shouldn't read or even participate, even if that participation has a dishonest front face. All of us could, who knows for sure if some of us aren't just playing parts on here? We don't, we can't know.
Click to expand...

It is certainly true that someone could be merely putting on a dishonest front face. It would be a waste of resources, in my opinion if a government agent was posing on here for the sake of monitoring or trying to influence debate.

Summerwind said:
I was at a one forum where a woman managed to convince everyone she was a lawyer, giving out advise, being asked advise. Turned out someone met her and found out she was really a high school dropout with schizophrenia. She was convincing most of the time. There near the end, she began to loose it, and that's why someone tracked her down, but gosh, 9 years she pulled it off. It'd be nothing for someone to do a Stephen Colbert in a forum. And for an agent trained to do so, we'd never even suspect.
Click to expand...

Well, I guess it goes to show you that any good liar can be a lawyer! JK
 
Peter King said:
Yes of course, they are most certainly already doing this on a daily basis. Especially in the conservative posters here are held under high scrutiny of course by Obama and his liberal cronies ;)

No but seriously. I think that all message boards foreign and domestic have to at least be macro monitored to identify whether or not a lot of traffic comes with known countries that have many supporters of Isis and muslim terrorism. If websites are visited numerously out of areas under control of Isis or Boko Haram, then the US government would be insane not to monitor that even more closely and they can only find that if they have a macro surveillance of all websites to begin with.
Click to expand...

Hmmm

I don't know. I need to think about merely based on the amount of traffic coming from a geographical area.
 
Summerwind said:
So long as the list contains nothing more that what the general public or members could choose to accumulate, I don't see the problem. If they are gaining access to our non-public, non-member information without a warrant, then I see that as the tipping point.
Click to expand...

And in case it's been awhile since you've thought about it, or never known about Frank Church and the Church Committee, and it's conclusions in 1975, here it is again. See how you think this matches up with what the chief executive chairmen of google said above.

"In the need to develop a capacity to know what potential enemies are doing, the United States government has perfected a technological capability that enables us to monitor the messages that go through the air. Now, that is necessary and important to the United States as we look abroad at enemies or potential enemies. We must know, at the same time, that capability at any time could be turned around on the American people, and no American would have any privacy left such is the capability to monitor everything—telephone conversations, telegrams, it doesn't matter. There would be no place to hide."
"If this government ever became a tyrant, if a dictator ever took charge in this country, the technological capacity that the intelligence community has given the government could enable it to impose total tyranny, and there would be no way to fight back because the most careful effort to combine together in resistance to the government, no matter how privately it was done, is within the reach of the government to know. Such is the capability of this technology."

http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Church_Committee
 
SlevinKelevra said:
i wouldn't be surprised if they trolled all sorts of forums looking for wackos.
Click to expand...

I agree.
That does not mean they read every message.
I would think they are looking for key words.
 
Last edited:
MildSteel said:
Hmmm

I don't know. I need to think about merely based on the amount of traffic coming from a geographical area.
Click to expand...

Let's have another example, in Ar Raqqah, middle of Isis territory there is a group of hackers who is using Debate politics or some other website to create websites for Boko Haram and they are using the private messaging system to organize that and to work with a sleeper cell of hackers/web-specialists in the US to attack websites from the government and through the traffic coming from that geographical area Homeland Security finds out that this is happening.

I would think that is a good use of watching over the internet to prevent attacks/work against muslim terrorism. And it does not hurt anyone IMHO, basic snooping on the internet without going into specific data from internet users is the best way to protect the privacy of internet users and still give some security against people who want to do bad things.
 
Peter King said:
Let's have another example, in Ar Raqqah, middle of Isis territory there is a group of hackers who is using Debate politics or some other website to create websites for Boko Haram and they are using the private messaging system to organize that and to work with a sleeper cell of hackers/web-specialists in the US to attack websites from the government and through the traffic coming from that geographical area Homeland Security finds out that this is happening.

I would think that is a good use of watching over the internet to prevent attacks/work against muslim terrorism. And it does not hurt anyone IMHO, basic snooping on the internet without going into specific data from internet users is the best way to protect the privacy of internet users and still give some security against people who want to do bad things.
Click to expand...

With the little I know about the client/server paradigm of computer programming, I would be surprised if you could use the website itself to CREATE another website. The website is no more than some files stored on a computer server somewhere. Now if DP has its own computer server and what you meant by that was using that server, then I understand what you have said. That's interesting tho. I would like to know what you meant exactly by that. Perhaps there is something that I don't know about.

That aside, I suppose what I had in mind was someone actually taking the time to look at what was being said on a site like DP, to see if there might be some sort of threat. That's a waste. I know you were responding to the traffic monitoring thing, but I'm just saying.
 
paddymcdougall said:
It's a website anyone can sign up for. Now to find out our personal contact info - that should take a warrant. Reading a public website? doubt it needs one.
Click to expand...

If someone in the gvt is tasked (assigned a job) to monitor speech, they are required to have a warrant. A forum is a type of speech, even though it's on the internet.

Just FYI.
 
11Bravo said:
If someone in the gvt is tasked (assigned a job) to monitor speech, they are required to have a warrant. A forum is a type of speech, even though it's on the internet.

Just FYI.
Click to expand...

Are you sure about that? Although what you are saying makes sense to me, do you have a supporting reference?
 
MildSteel said:
Are you sure about that? Although what you are saying makes sense to me, do you have a supporting reference?
Click to expand...

Meh, I'll google the SC to find the exact text. I did various studies and contracts with the gvt. I learned a lot of the years.

This came up a million times. I've asked them many times a well (both in when I was in school, and working). They cannot legally monitor, as in task a position, to speech, without a warrant.

However, they could easily get one, and that warrant could not have an expiration date for a very long time.

Always ways around the system.

But to answer your question, let me do some googling
 
Goshin said:
No doubt they already do.
Click to expand...

But what I would say to that is if they had a list of Forums they monitor, ours would be under the category "Least Concern".

There's ALOT of forums out there, some very explicit in nature that push the boundaries of the 1st Amendment.
 
Montecresto said:
But I can say that I've never seen where one poster has threatened another
Click to expand...
Hate to disagree, but it happens regularly in the gun forum, especially to whole groups of people in real life--even policemen.
or where a poster has threatened violence to our government!
Click to expand...
Once again, there has been a huge uptick in this in the last several months with the influx of a new batch of extremely far rightists.
Such as with the way they defended the Bundy sniper who had his sights on a ATF agent .
 
MildSteel said:
Its not only you and me, its a threat to the general masses.
And actually, it is somewhat of a threat to the establishment because they need some protection from each other.
Click to expand...

Home-grown terrorists like McVeigh are much more of a concern to me than government surveillance, along with his supporters.
Surveillance was developed in response to these Okla Cty type catastrophies.

Since I'm not doing anything wrong in RL or online, I'm willing to bend on the 1st, 2nd and 4th amendments for the common good.
IMHO, people mistakenly try to act like 2015 should be treated like 1789 when the Constitution was written .
 
NIMBY said:
Hate to disagree, but it happens regularly in the gun forum, especially to whole groups of people in real life--even policemen.

Once again, there has been a huge uptick in this in the last several months with the influx of a new batch of extremely far rightists.
Such as with the way they defended the Bundy sniper who had his sights on a ATF agent .
Click to expand...

I don't go there, and preferenced my statement such. I'm sorry to hear that people have threatened each other here.
 
Last edited:
NIMBY said:
Hate to disagree, but it happens regularly in the gun forum, especially to whole groups of people in real life--even policemen.

Once again, there has been a huge uptick in this in the last several months with the influx of a new batch of extremely far rightists.
Such as with the way they defended the Bundy sniper who had his sights on a ATF agent .
Click to expand...

Were they really advocating that, or opposing government overreach?
 
Do you think their hackers or any other government's hackers are good enough to hack this website or other forums ?

Summerwind said:
So long as the list contains nothing more that what the general public or members could choose to accumulate, I don't see the problem. If they are gaining access to our non-public, non-member information without a warrant, then I see that as the tipping point.
Click to expand...
 
MildSteel said:
I agree. I think watching a relatively benign site like this is overkill and a waste of resources.
Click to expand...

They might want to keep an eye on AmericanSpartan though. He's been getting all a bit genocidey of late.
 
Peter King said:
Yes of course, they are most certainly already doing this on a daily basis.
Click to expand...
Jetboogieman said:
But what I would say to that is if they had a list of Forums they monitor, ours would be under the category "Least Concern".
Click to expand...
The NSA crawls everything on the web. Not even a question of 'if' for DP, but a question of 'how often'.

Obviously no one's reading DP as a desk job, but they've certainly have keyword searches on us. Anyone of us hits enough of those magic words in our posts, that'll flag the webpage for review.
 
Montecresto said:
The point being that governments have long sought to produce dossiers and profiles on its citizenry. And for obvious reasons, that prospect has never been as possible or thorough as it is today.

“We know where you are. We know where you’ve been. We can more or less know what you’re thinking about.”

“Your digital identity will live forever… because there’s no delete button.”

—Eric Schmidt

Google’s for-profit surveillance problem | PandoDaily
Click to expand...

The "point" as you put it is irrelevant to my comments. If all they do is gather the same information I can about posters and their posts, then I have no problem. If they can access what the owners and site operators can access without a warrant, that's would be my tipping point.
 
NIMBY said:
Do you think their hackers or any other government's hackers are good enough to hack this website or other forums ?
Click to expand...

I'm absolutely sure they can.
 
MildSteel said:
What do you think?
Click to expand...

I would suggest that they not only monitor, but have a coterie of agents who's job is to participate in the forums and project the "Perception Management" agendas of the gov't. NSA is in the crack of everyone's ass due to the Patriot Act and illegal surveillance and since Edward Snowden we know that to be true. Snowden reveals the criminality and he is pursued as the culprit. Same for Julian Assange. You, me, Grandma and the dog are the ones getting screwed, don't ya' know?
 
I blame TOT, who was the original one to threaten to contact the FBI about some of the 'terrorists' on here.
 
Summerwind said:
The "point" as you put it is irrelevant to my comments. If all they do is gather the same information I can about posters and their posts, then I have no problem. If they can access what the owners and site operators can access without a warrant, that's would be my tipping point.
Click to expand...

Well I'm sorry your tipping point is so generous towards government profiling. You and I viewing a forum don't have the infrastructure nor all the other information on posters here that the government, with the help of google and the NSA do have to analyze and profile Americans with.
 
MildSteel said:
What do you think?
Click to expand...

They monitor thousands of forums in an effort to ferret out would be Islamist militants, fellow travelers, and the like. It's how those three men who were en route to Syria to join the Islamic State were captured. This is a forum viewable by anyone in the world with an uncensored internet connection and if someone in the FBI or wherever happens to find something actionable on here I don't really see the problem. The way I see it talking on a forum is essentially the same as talking 'in public' with the one caveat being we use usernames instead of our real names. Monitoring this public fora shouldn't be an excuse for violating or exposing privacy.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top Bottom