from MIke on double accounts and MT finding it.

Mike I do not want to be argumentative, but I am curious. Is this not sort of the same thing? I know the reason is good, but I mean the fact that it is tracked.

It should come as no surprise to anyone that the websites you visit track you. This site is no different.

Before you panic, please read on.

The forum is powered by free software called "InvisionBoard". This software includes a semi-robust suite of tools to aid forum administrators to monitor and to some extent control what is going on at their site.

This software alone is in use on over 10,000 message boards covering every topic imaginable. Competing products like vBulletin, Ikonboard, Yabb, phpBB, openBB, etc. all include a similar suite of tools.

Forum administrators can easily extract data that shows multiple users registered under the same email address, multiple users from the same IP address, all of the IP addresses a user has ever used at the site, and more.

These tools are not only just available, but are necessary.

It is a regular occurrence in the forum world that some people will create multiple accounts strictly with the intention of being disruptive. They will post one outrageous opinion on one account, and they will respond with an opposite, yet equally outrageous opinion from a different account.

It is up to the forum administrator to stop this.

MOUSE, there is a difference between this and government monitoring.

The main difference is that this site is a private network. While it is open to the public, it is privately funded and hosted. I, of course, have no connection to the federal government other than paying their salaries. I do not have any sort of an information-exchange agreement with the government.

I have no more information available to me than every other webpage on the web. This is just a fact of the internet.

Monitoring by this website can only occur when you visit this website. We have no capability to track where you go from here, nor would we want the capability.

And that brings us to the true distinction: Nobody is forced to participate. It is completely voluntary.

Government monitoring, however, is not voluntary. If you live here, you are now subject to government monitoring without notification.

By logging on to any website, you accept the fact that your IP address, operating system, and browser are recorded by every single website you visit. And by logging on to any well-run forum, you can ensure that your information will be pulled up in a statistics report.

Many websites maintain policies that I consider to be clear violations of privacy.

AOL, for example, monitors messages sent through their AOL Instant Messenger. Why do they do this? Who knows. Maybe to stop abusive members, maybe to harvest data. Any way you look at it, AOL is still a private network, and they have a right to monitor their systems any way they see fit.

Here come the questions...

Mike

Another difference is that a private company cannot use your posts to arrest you, without proof or charges or public trial, and throw away the key. So, don't say anything that can get you in trouble or be misconstrued.

I guess what I was pointing out was that even though you have a good, necessary to you purpose, and you are private. Private of Government it shouldn't make any difference. Privacy is privacy. Now, if the user is savvy he/she probably would not expect privacy and that is another point indeed. I am only pointing out that we are all losing less and less of our privacy whether we like it or not.
No, Danya, he cannot arrest us, but who could stop him from giving information to those who do?
I know how many times my computer gets "pinged". The firewall is "alive with activity" Think about this when banking on line and using credit cards.
It is a scary world out there.

http://www.geocities.com/CapitolHill/Senat...ke/private.html
There is a lot of interesting information out there concerning this. Some of you might enjoy it. I like anything that gives me information. The following is juat a bit more.
Protect your Internet Privacy


There has been much about the FBI and other law enforcement agencies ability to monitor e-mail. To help clarify things here is a link to their web site (above)

Canada passes Bill C-6 , an internet privacy law that goes a long way to improve Canada's internet privacy. It is awaiting Royal Assent.(above) :blus
There are too many things to study in this world!!!
BTW the previous post should have read Government OR private. Those things spell checkers won't catch....

Unfortunately, there is never a reasonable expectation of privacy on the internet. If anyone out there expects true privacy on the internet, I'd recommend you obtain a paid-in-cash dial-up internet account using falsified information, and that you only call that ISP from some sort of public phone.

As a good rule of thumb, everyone should assume everthing they do on the internet is tracked and monitored at multiple levels. You are tracked from the minute you log on to the minute you log off.

Do you use a dial-up? Your caller ID data is likely stored. Do you use a messenger service? Your chats have likely been logged. Have you posted at this site? Then your posts have likely been subject to monitoring.

I can tell you for a fact that within an hour of the adoption of the Homeland Security Act of 2002, we were visited anonymously by government and military computer systems. Now that is truly scary.

I personally have no problem discussing what I do with the information made available to me through running the site.

If I were to breach the trust granted to me by a member, I would quickly be labeled as a scumbag, and my site would suffer greatly. I have nothing to gain by breaking your trust.

What most people don't realize is that the government has been tracking us for years. Go to Google and do a search on Carnivore and Eschelon. You'll learn that one of the systems is designed to monitor email for keywords and key phrases, and you'll learn that the other one is a technology that allows the government to view what is on your computer monitor and to record your keystrokes by looking through the walls of your home.

Mike

I think this is pretty much in line with what I said on one of the homeland security threads. Not only is there no privacy,but any good hacker or anyone who wants to pay for the software can get anything they want. If they can hack the government nad large corp. what makes anyone think the same cannot be done to them?
Oh well, that is life in the modern world.

This interests me. How do you know it was a federal computer Mike? Many search engines use spiders, which go out and proactively scan the Internet and index websites for thier database. How do you know it wasn't one of those?

just curious.

--cheers

Guest accessing multiple pages in rapid succession whose IP addresses resolve through NIC.com back to .mil and .gov computers.

I receive webalizer stats for the site, which are fairly comprehensive. I also use several different statistic analysis suites to determine who accesses our site most, ie. com, net, org, gov, mil, uk, etc. It also tells me what spiders have visited, and one was resolved back to a DOD computer.

Mike

The only difference is that before even if they had all of this info they couldn't do anything with it (at least not legally) if you were innocent of anything other than stating your views.

Not so anymore.

That was quick. "Debate" must be a hot keyword to the DOD and/or DHS now. Unsurprising, but, you're right, pretty scary.