Legal consequences of the information in our signatures -- NONE

[whatisbrain]

ADMIN NOTE The concerns in this post are exaggerated beyond being realistic. If you haven't read this in our READ THIS FIRST forum, please read it now. Your privacy: How much should I post about myself? Will my screen name be recognized?

 

If you want individualized peer support from the staff for your particular situation, your drug and withdrawal history in your signature will be required. If you do not supply it, you will not get that individualized support from the staff. We need that history to counsel you properly.

 

No one need register on this site or post if they share @whatisbrain's level of concern about privacy. If you do share this concern, please seek community on Reddit, patientslikeme.com, or depressionforums.org

 

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I would like to bring something to everyone's attention, but especially you, Altostrata.

 

This may sound like paranoia, delusions of persecution, or delusions of grandeur, but unfortunately is based on a number of interactions and communications with professionals in politics and journalism over the last year, and if you go back and read my posts over the last two years, it will come as no surprise. Also, I may sound like I know a lot of computer science and security technicalities, but a lot of what I know is from friends and associates who actually have to work in these technical areas, or have actual professional political activity where they really do need to be aware of security concerns.

 

To summarize, the legal trend, which is at its worst in NYC and in California at the moment, still not too bad in Massachusetts, Connecticut, and Maryland, and is in place in all major English-speaking countries, including Canada, the UK, Australia, New Zealand, is ever increasing compulsion to comply with your prescriber's decisions for what is best for you. In legal proceedings, the kind of information that is in our signatures can be used against you in various ways, and can even be acquired via subpoena. Altostrata, I assume the servers, the actual metal and plastic boxes containing this data, are on US soil, and I also assume there are backups, so that even if a person changes or deletes their current information, it still exists as a backup copy somewhere, possibly somewhere obscure so that an information technology expert would have to figure out where the heck it is on the file system, and I assume those backups are also on servers within US jurisdiction.

 

Here is a possible scenario. Let's say you and your ex-spouse are in a custody battle over your children. Your ex is somehow aware of this website, and can claim that you are not a fit parent because you aren't complying with your prescriber, or you've shown a pattern of not complying with your prescriber in the past, therefore endangering your mental functioning, your capacity as a parent, and the safety of your children. The judge issues a subpoena, Altostrata complies with the subpoena, your signature that is either on display, or in a backup copy from years ago, is made available to the authorities, and you never see your kids again.

 

A less dire consequence is that I may want to share some of my political lobbying, activism, and writings that I carry out under my full legal name, and connect with forum members like Ariel outside of this message board, but that would impact my safety and the level of legal risk I am facing in ways that are not delusion, not paranoia, and have had life-changing consequences for other people I know. Similarly, I am reluctant to direct my activist friends from other projects to my activity here, not because I don't trust them, but because I know that once these things are clearly linked in more and more databases on more and more servers, it's pretty impossible to undo.

 

Less politically extreme folks on this forum, who just want to meet up for a cup of coffee, may have different concerns about their legal name and their signature information being correlated.

 

There are various ways to mitigate this problem, but even if the physical location of the servers is somewhere in Switzerland or Germany (like protonmail), Italy (like autistici), or something similar, they would have to comply with subpoenas issued in their country, which would impact mostly forum members in those countries. The server riseup.net has a clear policy of fighting subpoenas tooth and nail, and as a last resort, destroying the entire room of physical servers, the metal and plastic boxes of data, if circumstances are dire enough in their estimation.

 

Just to make it clear, I am not on US soil at the moment, and hope to not return there. As it stands, the actions I am recommending, whether for user to remove their individual signatures, or for Altostrata to look into where the current version is physically, as well as where any backups are physically, are one hundred percent legal. However in five or ten years from now, or a subpoena process filed in the present, doing this could be violating various statutes, ranging from obstructing a subpoena to tampering with evidence (if it is used to show that someone committed a crime at a time when they weren't complying with a prescriber) to something that seems like science fiction dystopia, but is actually only a few steps beyond the coercive helpfulness we already see in Covid vaccine policy and in sexually transmitted disease public health policy - destroying or moving an entire server full of these signatures could be seen as incompatible with best practices in public health, as policies to make us all comply with our prescriber, for our own good and for society's good, are on the rise.

Edited May 10, 2023 by Altostrata
added admin note & edited title

[Altostrata]

Yes, @whatisbrain, this is a vastly overblown worry. Your suggestion is not only unhelpful but destructive.

 

You are posting under a pseudonym. No one knows your real identity unless you tell them your pseudonym. They probably would need to know that you are using this pseudonym on this particular site. 

 

Even if they do not know your pseudonym and know only that you are a participant on this site, they would not be able to use search tools to look at the signatures because they are not searchable from external sources or from site search.

 

Given the vastness of words on the Internet and limits of Internet search, we should all remember: IT'S NOT ALL ABOUT YOU.

 

Information voluntarily posted under a pseudonym may be ethically used for research purposes, as is not traceable to the individual. It is legal under the European Union's General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). The servers, backups, and other digital records are secure by any measure, including GDPR. 

 

Therefore, if someone found your posts to use in some kind of legal or formal action, it would be from your own lack of discretion. You must decide yourself if you want to risk identification by telling people your pseudonym or that you are participating on a site like this. If you do disclose such information, any resulting privacy issues are your own fault, not the responsibility of anyone else, particularly me or the staff. We go to great lengths to inform people to use untraceable pseudonyms.

 

No subpoena such as you envision or any related legal action has occurred since this site was founded. We do not ask anyone's legal name, address, or other indentifying information and they are not contained in site records. The staff cannot identify anyone unless they make their real names public, so I don't know how we might comply with such a subpoena.

 

Your proposal that the members of this site "remove their individual signatures" would make individualized peer counseling here so difficult as to discourage anyone from doing it. If someone follows your advice, the staff would cease to provide peer support to that person.

 

Your imagination is running away with you. I see from your signature that you are ambivalent about your participation here:

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Due to things I recently learned in my volunteer work and activism with folks in the legislative, executive, judicial, lobbyist, and media specialties, I believe this information, even when posted here where we should all be feeling secure, carries quite a bit of liability, and it is up to each of you whether to keep posting it. Sorry Altostrata, I know this signature information is a key part of your wonderful work to help people, and I admire you so much for doing this work, but please hear me out. You, Mark Horowitz, Robert Whitaker, the late Loren Mosher, and so many other folks are heroes of mine and you changed my life for the better, so I know you mean well, but I just want you and others to be aware that it could lead to some problems later on. I will explain in a new post.

 

If you are so concerned about revealing personal information on this site, I invite you to stop posting. You might prefer to find community on Reddit or elsewhere, where nobody knows anything.

[whatisbrain]

Altostrata, thank you for pointing me to the already existing resource under the section titled "Your privacy...", that was exactly the kind of information I was searching for. I assume that since you make a lot of references to European legislation, that the servers are possibly inside of EU jurisdiction, but I don't have time to read further into the details of the law you refer to at the moment. Thanks for clarifying.

 

I really think this site is wonderful, and I respect your hard work and your courage. We can agree to disagree about the legal climate and potential liability, because like everyone in the world, you and I come from different backgrounds, have had different experiences, and it would be very unusual for us to agree a hundred percent on anything, even though both you and I hope to help people gain independence and autonomy in their interactions with psychoactive substances.

 

I am sorry I communicated in a way that sounded like I disapprove of anything you do here, or that I want to boss you around and tell you how to run your site. This is your site, and you work very hard both financially and in terms of time to help people. Of course you are the one to determine what you want to have available in what format to what viewers!

 

Earlier this morning, before reading your post, I was working on researching technical infrastructure for a site that I hope will have some of the same ideas as this one, but also more general philosophizing or ideological topics in Spanish with my friends here in Latin America, in Spanish, led by a local organizer in this city. Right now we do this mostly through WhatsApp and somewhat through facebook, which are both platforms with a lot of drawbacks.

 

In fact I came here to Latin America to collaborate and work on this project, and it was only in thinking of what we should do for our site that it occurred to me to point out these issues for your site. I hope you will have time in your busy schedule to point me to some resources that I can employ here, whether with my own level of technical skill, or by paying the going hourly rate to any webmasters that may be assisting you. Perhaps you already have this information written up, much like the already existing topic that you pointed out in your last post, and you will not need to take time out of your day to write it down.

 

As to my personal risk, my full legal name is already completely associated with my own history both in a letter to the editor in the New York Times that I wrote as part of a campaign for another activist, who was going for a large quantity of letters, and I never thought that mine might get selected. It is also visible to the public, along with my video testimony and written testimony in an easily searchable format, in the Maryland State Legislative archives. So, if you, Altostrata, aren't concerned, and neither is any other user here, then of course don't worry about me, I already chose to do enough risky things in a deliberate fashion.

[whatisbrain]

Altostrata, when I ask if you have time to point out some resources, I meant more information about the software and hardware that we might want to use in our site, since this one really has a lot of great features for us to learn from. If you are busy and usually that side of it is handled by a webmaster, then of course I don't expect the webmaster to work for free, but rather I propose to pay their going hourly rate, even to just explain technical options to me for an hour or two, so that I can then explain those options in Spanish to the organizers and participants here.

 

Also, I hope you realize that I am not just trying to be fake nice to you, or that I am apologizing in an insincere way. To that end, I quote from a communication I had a year or two ago with Robert Whitaker at Mad In America, in response to an email of his where he seemed to be losing hope in the face of overwhelming pro-pharmaceutical media forces:

 

However, your words about the political aspect of things give me the impression that you are becoming discouraged yourself. I hope you can regain strength and hope, as you have been such an inspiration to me and changed my life in a huge way. You, the late Loren Mosher, Adele Framer, Mark Horowitz - all of you are changing the world with every word you write, every audio and video that you guys record. I have recently started an amazing relationship with another person with lived experience, and maybe we will recover enough health, despite decades of drug damage, to have a family together. I hope that if we do, we can name our children for you, Loren, Adele, and Mark...of course, we will be lucky to have even one. Life is so short, every day of freedom is a huge blessing, and he and I have each other - in part because you guys have been struggling to research, write, inform, and fight this fight.

 

 

[Altostrata]

Thank you.

 

The servers for this site are in the United States. We conform to the GDPR in order to serve members who are in the EU. There is no need for alarm about the privacy of our content. You are protected by your pseudonym, and we collect almost no personal information that would identify you.