Mystery shrouds closures of blog, forum platforms

Why would the government go after this? It has such a small user base. What about Drupal? Silverstripe? vBulletin? PHPbb? Wordpress? Blogger? If the government was out to censor they are going after the wrong people.

reply to post by eaglewingz


Ahhh, that explains it. Also found the story. Terrorists, the boogeyman of today.

Wait a minute, wouldn't those links be useful to H.S. ongoing investigations? And the traffic hitting those links? And they don't need a court order to shut down a site? Means ATS can go down forever at any moment.

Originally posted by yellowcard
Why would the government go after this? It has such a small user base. What about Drupal? Silverstripe? vBulletin? PHPbb? Wordpress? Blogger? If the government was out to censor they are going after the wrong people.

Why indeed... Of course, you should now know it was Al Qaeda that forced this action. Apparently Al Qaeda is not yet active on those other sites, but given time I am sure they can and will be found there.

The government is not seeking broad censorship, not yet.

This was simply a case of protecting secret information and temporary disruption of covert communications.

Which has failed miserably. In my opinion of course.

Originally posted by Fractured.Facade

Originally posted by dbloch7986
reply to post by Fractured.Facade

 

yea I thought that was just too convenient. Now the government can just send any tom, dick or Harry to encode some random "spy" message on a website abd shut it down.

Interesting, not something I had considered, but seems possible, If the feds had some motive to shut down a website I suppose they could do the above.

It immensely frustrates intelligence and law enforcement agencies when an investigation leads to "coded" messages posted online and they are unable to identify and locate either the sources of the messages or especially the intended recipients among thousands of users.

Or just blame it on terrorism as mentioned earlier. I think its a bit excessive to shut down an entire website for the sake of a couple of links.

Its also a matter of how much freedom of privacy to we want to sacrifice.for the sakw of a few bad apples. If parents would take a bigger role in their kids' lives bwe wouldnt have these pedo problems.

reply to post by Dbriefed


I would want to see an Al-Queda site. Im not a terrorist. Nor do I ever have plans to become one. Nor am I sympathetic to them.

Why would just the fact that someone went to one make them a terrorist? Is no one else curious about how they propagandize people so that blowing themselves up seems like a great idea to them? I am. Just going to one says nothing about my own beliefs or feelings about the matter. I have been to fundy Christian sites and didnt end up a fundy Christian.

I think that this goes a little too far, even if they have links to a terrorist sites, or bomb making stuff. They could have taken down the pages. Banned the posters. It just seems so heavy handed and arbitrary. And then to swear the site owners to silence? Weirdness.

I dont understand why they would use blogs/internet postings.
Why post this piece of spy information on a public posting..

why not create 2x hotmail accounts.
type up some bogus bs story about your holiday in moscow.
then add 10 pictures, with 1 of them being encrypted.

Originally posted by Agit8dChop
I dont understand why they would use blogs/internet postings.
Why post this piece of spy information on a public posting..

why not create 2x hotmail accounts.
type up some bogus bs story about your holiday in moscow.
then add 10 pictures, with 1 of them being encrypted.

Too easily traceable.

If you have secret information to share with either one person or a group of people and you want to do so without revealing their identities or locations then you post it online in coded/encoded/encrypted forms, then 'they' have no way of knowing who downloaded and decoded that info, nor where they are, nor hope of ever finding out, unless they fully investigate EVERYONE that accessed it, which in some cases can be 10s of thousands!

This kind of activity is far more common than you may think.

If such a coded message were posted here on ATS, and some 100,000 people have accessed it, where do you as an investigator begin?

In some cases it is obviously easier to simply throw the kill switch and/or erase an entire database to remove 'sensitive' materials. Especially when found early after posting.

In my opinion of course.

[edit on 19-7-2010 by Fractured.Facade]

When Schumer went after Usenet to protect the "children", thank you but we can protect our kids just fine mr.doogooder, he revealed a hypocrisy that I think this blogger shut down stunt should reveal to all, the idea that anything connected to something that has banned info can be shut down, in other words why not shut down http access as well, I mean there are many websites that have bad stuff, so hence shouldn't http be banned as well? Should not the technology be banned....maybe just the same vhs, dvd, recordable cameras, pencils, books also be banned, after all everyone could draw pedo art all the time given the technology they already possess without computers or internet, so why all the fuss, unless they really think they can ban something they won't try it, since they have tried it in one format such as P2P or Usenet, why not ban the rest...now it seems the devil blogs are next, notice this came on the heels of the pumped up wikileaks propaganda, it says at least to me they are trying to see what they can get away with, I think they have just turned more away from them.

They keep trying to create gatekeepers and the more they try the more people come up with counter moves and counter technologies....just an endless cat and mouse game. To me this sounds like trying to ban guns or decentralized technologies and shove us all onto coal, gas, and nuclear. They want central control over money, communications and energy. If we can get energy we can win the game folks, we needed communication decentralized to even understand what this game maybe about, the next step should be energy moves.

I'm starting to think they think they can shut it down, get away with it by blaming "hackers" from China or terrorists from Al Queada and we will not be able to figure it out, they can't be serious or they really don't understand communications technologies.

The only way to face this enemy is to ignore it. When they closed down the pirate sites, they reopened within hours elsewhere. If anyone here has a blog, save your content off line and if you are closed down, post it back up.

When the government gets the point about their obsoleteness, they will stop waisting their time.

Originally posted by Gorman91

When the government gets the point about their obsoleteness...

They will spend more.

After all, we have learned that throwing money at any government agency will improve efficiency.

That's an interesting update on the Blogetery one, sounds like they had a weak host, who just didn't want the hassle of dealing with the FBI, even when the site owner is not at fault. It would be very rare for a site like that to actually be shut down, they usually have Safe Harbor status as long as they comply with any subpoenas for IPs and DMCA takedown notices.

I posted in another thread about something I dug up on IPBFree

"#iPBFree had no legal issues. It was due to financial issues on my part due to my divorce."

twitter.com...

I checked the whois as mentioned on their feed, and it does come back as Jean Barker as said.

Perhaps the legal issues in this case, are not the government, but the other operators of the site considering legal action against the registrant Barker for shutting it down. Maybe they're just making it up to avoid flak for shutting it down.

www.abovetopsecret.com...


[edit on 19/7/2010 by harpsounds]

Originally posted by Rapacity
There are a couple of alternatives to the present Internet. The two linked below are good examples.

Unfortunately even these two can be shut down. They may not be able to infiltrate them (however I suspect they could) but all they need to do is shut down the satellites or Internet backbone and the net is dead.

Do a 'traceroute' to a site and you will see that all Internet access (for your computer) eventually goes though specific node on the backbone. For example we go through Dublin - everything in Ireland does eventually if it is going elsewhere in the world, and that then goes across to London. At that point it is uplinked to satellite and goes to the states, or may go through an undersea cable - both are possible. It is very simple to close the nodes and lock people inside their portion of the net, i.e. behind a node. Then there is DNS. (If you are not sure what I am on about this may help) If a local (ISP) DNS server does not have a DNS address record it will have to search wider. While we still use 4.4.4.4 addressing a very large proportion of these lookups will end up in the states.

Your computer does not understand three w dot name dot com or co.uk or ie etc. The main domains are controlled by the ICANN server L.ROOT-SERVERS.NET. Denying access to this 'server' would seriously hobble the Internet throughout the world under certain circumstances. This is possibly why it would have to be done on backbone level, but I consider that if they do this there is a very good chance they would be turning off world access - as well as their own of course.

There is only one alternative Internet that could work, but even this would be severely restricted to local areas or possibly countries and that is a system using WiFi routers that can communicate with each other. The system is called Netsukuku

More info here

Unless there is some kind billionaire somewhere who would put up a private satellite then as soon as you hit that boundary the WiFi net stops. Then of course they would use their new lasers to shoot it down

Edit to expand some details a bit more for comprehension.

[edit on 20/7/2010 by PuterMan]

An information war is happening in plain sight.

It is not where you look, but how.

It may be gone, but not before accomplishing a goal.

The process itself has been quite revealing, with unintended consequences and more than a few surprises.

It can't be stopped now!

Using coded postings for exchanging information can lead to amazing discoveries, which may include...

Plans, building blueprints, system specifications, electronics and avionics schematics, software and controls, weaponry systems, stolen data and logistics information, access codes and interface protocols... And more!



Pay no attention to me, I am one of those insane ATS members.