dear coal aggie friend,
Your knowledge of encryption and hard drives is clearly awesome. Respect for that and your West Virginia computer classes. However, your knowledge of legal codes as it relates to privacy information and copyrighted material is clearly lacking. It is also quite clear that you skimmed over the user agreement you clearly signed rather than actually reading it. If you saved that statement on your hard drive, which, who am I kidding, of course you did, you can pull it up and read that any redistribution of online content which is copyrighted material, which even though it's a message board, posts do represent intellectual property (see First American Financial Corp. v. Edwards.) You need a signed affidavit from a site owner as well as the poster in question (or his/her power of attorney) for permission to record. Additionally, the Privacy Act of '74 states that any recording of conversations must be coordinated with all users who intend to use it as a forum, so as to prevent any individual from having private conversations released as blackmale. Unless you do actually have a notarized affidavit from an owner, you should know that you've committed at least a solid count of copyright infringement. So you've likely committed two federal crimes by saying you recorded threads, which are the copyrighted material of goEMAW incorporated (an establishment of intellectual property which you signed and agreed to IAW the user guidelines). Hope you can encrypt better than the FBI can. The good news is, since you have admitted all of this, the 5th amendment protects you from self-incrimination in criminal court. It's unlikely that you'd face the type of punishment that you see in FBI warnings in front of DVD menus. However, you could face civil charges should the owner(s) of this site wish to pursue civil litigation.
just a note, I have downloaded the majority of the threads involving WVU, and have them updating on a 10 minuet interval. They are encrypted on my HDD, and in the event they are needed I will turn them over in their entirety to the proper officials. Gotta love my WVU computer science classes.
Have fun!