Reply #101: The paranoia in this thread is misplaced. [View All]

[Skinner]

This is a public message board. If you are uncomfortable with the idea of anyone reading your posts, you should not be posting here.

Everything posted here is public, and freely available to any stranger who wants to read. If the government wanted to snoop here they would just do it. The Department of Homeland Security would not send a form asking permission.

Nobody has asked for your personal information. Now or ever. If they did, I wouldn't give it to them.

Who knows why they chose that thread? Honestly, it doesn't really matter. The job of the Library of Congress is not to make liberals or DU look good or pro-Pope or anti-Pope or long-winded or cerebral or whatever. The job of the Library of Congress is to save things that are of historical significance. Apparently, they thought that thread was historically significant. Hell, if they had asked to archive a thread entitled "I just took a dump, ask me anything" I would have given them permission. Why? Because this is an important academic and historical project, and I think it is important to do what we can to help out with that type of thing. Considering the anti-intellectualism of the people in power, we should be glad that anyone in the federal government is doing academic work, and we should support it.

My guess is that they did not read *every* Pope thread on DU. Remember that they are collecting information from thousands of websites, so they're not going to spend a week reading everything on DU. They probably did a search and a spot-check and picked one that seemed interesting.

This is a cool thing. DU is now part of the permanent historical record of the United States. The paranoia about it is simply not justified.