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Politics : The Trump Presidency -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: combjelly who wrote (14808)	4/5/2017 3:30:18 PM
From: Intrepid1	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 356407

And do you know what 'unmasking' means? Yes I know what unmasking means. Here is an easy to understand illustration of the process

To: combjelly who wrote (14808)	4/5/2017 9:56:39 PM
From: Intrepid1	3 Recommendations Recommended By Bonefish Thehammer Woody_Nickels Read Replies (4) \| Respond to of 356407

Combjelly, you asked me if I knew what "unmasking" means. Let me tell you my personal experience with unmasking by the Federal Government here on Silicon Investor. This might help you understand why I recoil at any hint of government surveillance. Back during the early days of S.I. you may or may not be aware there was a huge boom in internet IPO's flooding the market. I was an active participant back then on the stock boards. One day I made a couple of posts on a Ray Dirks internet IPO and a few months later I received a call from a friend of mine who happened to work for the Ray Dirks brokerage firm in New York. He said the SEC was asking questions about me in relation to that stock thread on Silicon Investor. The SEC wanted to know if I was a client of Ray Dirks (which I wasn't) and also wanted to know if I had purchased shares through Dirks in the IPO(which I didn't). He also told me the SEC had a list of over 50 people who had participated on that thread and were asking the same questions about them as well. Well I went Ballistic because my true identity had been released by Silicon Investor to the SEC without my knowledge. I called the SEC and spoke with the Boston office which was handling the investigation and basically turned the phone line blue. All they could say was how did I get the information that I had been part of a subpoena. So 50 members of S.I. were unmasked by Silicon Investor management at the legal request of the SEC. I then called S.I. down in Seattle (owned by GNET at the time) and demanded to know why they turned my name over to the SEC on such a flimsy premise as posting on a stock message board. I demanded to know why I was not given the chance to fight the subpoena and they told me they received so many subpoenas from the SEC for member poster's true identities that they simply handed over the names without question. I huffed and puffed but realized that I had done nothing wrong so had nothing to worry about. Also I liked S.I. and decided not to take any legal action which at that time I was certainly prepared to do. S.I. was kind enough to give me a new identity. So 50 plus S.I. members were unmasked in that one instance and their true identities handed over to the SEC. To this day 49 of them do not know they were sucked into a huge Federal Government database. In total thousands of S.I. members over the years have unknowingly had their personal information handed over to the SEC. Just for posting on a stock message board. I was subsequently asked by a reporter from a well known Wall Street publication to go public with my story but I chose not to. Too scared to. cheers