“Above
Top Secret” (ATS) is the largest conspiracy-related forum on the
Internet by number of members and traffic. People associated with
the website also do the Internet/radio program “ATS Live” which
appears on online streams.
Given
the US government's fascination with illegally spying on millions of
its own citizens using the NSA and other agencies, their fear of
whistle-blowers, and the FBI's considering of Americans who invoke
the Constitution or call themselves “constitutionalists” as
potential terrorists,1
it would not take a large leap of faith to assume that these same US
agencies would at least occasionally (and more likely automatically,
using software) monitor posts made on such conspiracy forums,
depending on their content. It has already been publicly reported,
for example, that government agencies, even local police agencies,
collect information from websites such as Facebook on individuals
they are interested in. Above Top Secret being the largest
conspiracy theory forum on the Internet, featuring posts government
conspiracies and many anti-government sentiments, it would be
reasonable to assume that, if any such monitoring was going on at any
forum, it would be at least as likely to occur on this particular web
forum as anywhere else.
Obvious Government Interest in Online Discussions
A wired.com article from 2008 entitled Military Report: Secretly ‘Recruit or Hire Bloggers’ describes a 2006 Joint Special Operations University report titled “Blogs and Military Information Strategy” which states that “Hiring a block of bloggers to verbally attack a specific person or promote a specific message may be worth considering.”2 The report authors stated that they received positive feedback for their work, but the Special Operations Command spokesman responded to inquiries that “The views expressed in the article publication are entirely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views, policy or position of the U.S. Government, Department of Defense, USSOCOM [Special Operations Command], or the Joint Special Operations University,” and added that the recommendations of the reports' authors were not “actionable.”
Similar
articles along this theme of military interest in Internet discussion
communities include a 2007 Tampa Bay Times article entitled Blogs
are CentCom's new target,3
and CENTCOM Team Engages 'Bloggers' from the DoD's own
website.4
A
muzzlewatch.com article regarding Israeli's handling of Internet
discussion is entitled That commenter on your blog may actually be
working for the Israeli government, where it is detailed that the
Israeli Foreign Ministry had created an “Internet Fighting Team”
to pay students and demobilized soldiers to post messages on behalf
of Israel's foreign policies on websites such as Facebook and
YouTube.
ATS: More Than Just Monitored
However,
many people who have been familiar with this forum for a number of
years (myself included, observing and participating for over ten
years) are not only of the opinion that it would be a prime target
for NSA monitoring, paid bloggers, etc., but that it was even created
and is actively run by some group of individuals involved with
US and/or British military intelligence agencies, such as a private
contractor for such a government entity (CIA, etc.), so that this a
forum (again, the largest of its kind on the Internet) could not only
be easily monitored but could also be easily censored if need be,
while providing a protected and very visible forum5
for paid disinformationists to antagonize anyone posting credible or
thought-provoking information on any of a range of topics. Not only
would this be a good idea for those interested in spreading
disinformation and controlling conspiracy-related discussions of the
Internet community, but it becomes evident after long observation of
staff and member activities and policies that this idea fits exactly
how the website already operates (more on this a little further on).
Along these lines, Kerry Cassidy of Project Camelot, John Lear6
and Jim Stone, among many lesser-known figures in conspiracy circles, also believe that ATS is a government-sponsored front.
Jim Stone7
apparently believes that both Above Top Secret and Godlike
Productions8
censor certain information posted on them, as he stated on his
Fukushima disaster page that the information he posted on these
websites would be deleted.
Links
posted on the ATS forum to certain conspiracy websites (such as
beforeitsnews.com) are automatically edited by the forum to prevent
the link from functioning either by removing the “www” from the
beginning of the URL or by censoring the entire URL. This is done because the ATS staff has stated
that they have determined that such websites are not credible or that
they perpetuate “hoaxes.” Also for a short period of time in
August 2014, any links to Russia Today without hyperlink text
provided by the poster were automatically labeled as “propaganda”
in the link text as it appeared on the forum. Staff stated that this
was being done because while US media may be only “biased,”
Russia Today is a state-owned company and so it is “propaganda”
and must be labeled as such. However, other state-run news sources
such as the BBC or CBC were exempt from this new rule. After a long
thread of member complaints, one of the moderators, “Skeptic
Overlord” finally removed this new feature.
A
forum specifically for “hoaxes” is also maintained, into which
moderators will move threads from sources or on certain subjects
which the staff has likewise considered to be hoaxes, such as
articles posted on ATS from any website that the staff has already
deemed to not be credible. Especially for a conspiracy theory
forum, this kind of heavy-handedness from staff in determining which
sources and subjects are credible enough to discuss and which are not
is at the very least an impingement upon the freedom of expression
which the staff itself claims that it honors from its members.
Rather, the staff asserts itself as more than an arbiter of fair and
open discussions, but also an authority bent on “saving the
Internet by exposing bullshit.”9
Suppressing Insider Knowledge
One
of the most interesting and well-known instances of ATS indicting
itself as a front for government agencies occurred in August of 2003
when a member seemed to have predicted a major political event in
Jakarta, the capital of Indonesia. This event was the bombing of
Jakarta on August 5, 2003 by alleged al-Qaeda terrorists, which
occurred only 16 hours after the warning post was made on ATS. This
predictably caused a flurry of activity on the ATS forums, and one
member alerted the FBI of the post. In response, staff member
“SkepticOverlord” stated that the member who posted this
prophetic warning had actually posted it after the bombing had taken
place, and then hacked the forums to edit the time of his post to
make it look like he had posted it before the bombing.
However,
at least three members continued to assert that they specifically
remembered seeing the thread before the bombing had taken place, the
member who originally posted the prophetic warning himself had his IP traced back to a DoD
network and he was apparently also aware that the FBI had been
contacted about his post before the ATS staff even became aware of
it. It was later revealed on DEBKAfile.com that the CIA also knew
of the Jakarta bomb plot 72 hours before it was carried out. This
event on the ATS forums is described in more detail in the form of a
satirical comic (complete with legitimate references) at the
Illuminati Rex website.10
From
long personal experience on the forum, I can also relate the
following observations.
There
are certain posters who focus primarily on particular areas of
conversation, such as ancient archaeological controversies,
geo-engineering or 9/11. These members, which I will refer to as suspected disinformants, invariably defend the conventional or
“official” positions on the various issues they focus on. This
in itself is not unusual since everyone can be expected to have
different interests in different subjects, and to have different
views on these subjects. Of course many people genuinely
believe the official positions on various issues, and even come to
defend them (for whatever reason) on conspiracy forums. However,
other aspects of the posting of these individuals make them stand out
from other members. These suspected disinformants, as far as I have
been able to estimate by myself, seem to be relatively few in number,
but with very prolific and prominent posting habits that make them
almost unavoidable to encounter in their “assigned” forums. On
forums where there is a substantial amount of high quality research
being gathered by members, there appear to be a greater number of
these types of posters, often with maybe two or three actively
participating on a given thread at once. These particular posters
are active very nearly every day, so it is easy to become familiar
with the nature of their posts and then attentively study them and
their behaviors for the things I am about to describe.
Manipulation of ATS's Star and Flag System
First
of all, there is an apparent manipulation of the systems of starring
and flagging posts. A member can give a star to any ATS post for
which he or she wants to show approval, while flagging is reserved
for the topic/thread as a whole to give it a relative level of
importance compared with other threads. I personally noticed when
talking to one of these people who constantly defends a particular
forum, that though we might post in succession fairly quickly until
we had often filled almost two whole pages of 20 posts each with
debate, the poster would typically have either one or zero stars on
each of their posts. After an elapsed period of time, maybe of two
hours or more, within a very small time frame of about 10 minutes,
all of that poster's posts would suddenly have 4 or 5 stars. This is
a generalized example of what I have witnessed, but it became so
apparent to me that I would actually monitor the posts in regular
intervals of about ten minutes to see how quickly the stars appeared,
and they would all suddenly appear together as if simultaneously, and
consistently in this way, regardless of the time of day or night.
After they all appeared together in this way, the number of stars
would usually remain the same. This led me to believe that either
multiple “dummy” accounts were being used to star the members'
posts to give them a greater appearance of popular support (and thus
an increased propaganda value) or else some automated feature or
software was doing it all at once after a certain amount of time had
passed. The chances of four or five independent posters coming along
consistently at the same time to star the same posts, within about a
ten-minute interval, hours after the original posts were made, time
after time, is considerably improbable. This would seem to indicate
that not only do certain posters augment the amount of popular
support they appear to be receiving for their posts, but it would
also indicate that the ATS staff is either too inept to notice the
behavior, does not care that it appears to be happening (as some past
posts by moderators and administrators have seemed to have indicated,
for example suggesting that they often turn a blind eye to multiple
accounts posting from the same IP address), or else is actively
supporting or is involved with it on some level.
Banning or Quietly Changing the Passwords of Members Who Are Too Troubling for Them
Secondly,
I have noticed many accounts of very reasonable and prolific posters
either banned or otherwise prevented from continuing to post on the
forum. One well-known example was the banning of the famous
government pilot and conspiracy theorist John Lear, one of the most
famous pilots in the world with many world records to his name, who
was at one time given the title of “Conspiracy Master” on ATS.
Lear's banning from ATS was never explained by site administrators,
but Lear stated in a video interview with Kerry Cassidy that he was
banned after refusing not to talk about being post banned11
on false pretenses.12
My
own ATS account was also effectively banned without appearing to be,
when another person logged into my account and simply changed the
password and email address so that I was not able to log into it and
was also not able to request my “forgotten” password to be sent
to my email account. My account was one of the most active accounts
on the forum and remains listed as one of the top posters by various
criteria on the website, although I have been unable to log into it
for a fairly long time. Another account I made subsequent to this also had its password changed after I began linking to this page in U2Us to various members, though neither of these accounts were actually banned.
ATS Is Primarily a Forum of "Skeptic Debunkers," Not Conspiracy Theorists
Lastly,
the content of the ATS forums in general does not primarily seem to
be pro-conspiracy or even conspiracy-friendly. The attitude and
content of the website overall is anti-conspiratorial and oppressive
to serious discussion of any conspiracy-related topics, or much of
any intelligent discussion at all. This is easy enough for anyone to
test for themselves by simply posting conspiracy-related
information on the forum and observing the general response.
When the general consensus of posters seems to narrow in on a government cover-up or false flag event and begins to dig up more valuable information as to who, how, why, etc. (as any valuable discussion forum on these subjects would), this is exactly when people appear who start petty arguments, make insults and distract from valuable discussion. This kind of "divide and conquer," or more like "divide and suppress discussion" tactic seems to be what ATS is all about.
When the general consensus of posters seems to narrow in on a government cover-up or false flag event and begins to dig up more valuable information as to who, how, why, etc. (as any valuable discussion forum on these subjects would), this is exactly when people appear who start petty arguments, make insults and distract from valuable discussion. This kind of "divide and conquer," or more like "divide and suppress discussion" tactic seems to be what ATS is all about.
1
See the FBI's own page here:
<http://www.fbi.gov/stats-services/publications/law-enforcement-bulletin/september-2011/sovereign-citizens>
5
ATS posts are often the first Google returns on certain
conspiracy-specific search terms.
6
Cassidy interviews John Lear about this in an interview here:
<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6mp9F-gijCM>.
7 “Jim Stone” is an anonymous blogger who claims to have worked for US intelligence agencies in the past and posts his views as an insider on contemporary events on his website, <http://www.jimstonefreelance.com/>.
8
Another popular conspiracy theory forum.
9
This is part of a message presented in an ad on the sides of the
website in August 2014, with the letters “sh” slightly blurred
in the word “bullshit.” This ad also features a snarling
personification of a bull, with prominent horns.
11
Post banning is when a member is banned from posting but their
account still appears to be active.
12
This interview (the same mentioned earlier) can be found here: <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6mp9F-gijCM>.
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