I have no proof they read this board specifically, but i can't imagine why they wouldn't. They don't even need to pay for a membership and they can have software do the searching using Google and automatically spit out reports every day.

The FDA was monitoring drug-related internet posts six years ago so i'm sure that they, DEA, and Customs are all much better at it now. They probably have it automated to save labor. If they want to follow someone's posts or posts containing certain keywords, all they need to do is add some lines to a data file. The software to do it is trivial.

Go look up the 1998 posts on alt.drugs by "Samson" talking about how upset he was that an FDA Review Panel had an FDA staff report summarizing his and other internet poster's thoughts about the abuse potential of tramadol as part of the FDA's decisionmaking on whether to schedule it. Back in those days they had a GS-12 or so do the grunt work. Now it's gotta be computerized and i'm sure they have bots searching for new message boards to read and cache. Those old tramadol threads were archived by Dejanews and their entire USENET archive was bought by Google. Even back then, many posters were hiding their IPs with chained proxy servers or by using anonymizing newsgroup servers. The network tracing tools have improved dramatically since then.

If you want privacy, the only way is to use strong encryption. Get the $50 personal version of PGP and you can encrypt folders and volumes on your computer that would be practically impossible to decode. I'll bet we'll be seeing more and more small message boards that only have encrypted messages and the members share their public keys only amongst themselves. The 1st Amendment guarantees freedom of speech, even if it's encrypted. It's not a crime to talk in code unless you're using it for an illegal purpose. But if they don't know what you're talking about, they can't have probable cause to force you to turn over the decryption key. Try using encryption in China and they'll put you in prison.

Trampy

P.S. The reason bots can't index the VIP side is that it's password protected. If DB wanted to keep bots from indexing the free board, they could do it very easily.
http://www.nutch.org/docs/en/bot.html
http://www.robotstxt.org/wc/exclusion.html#robotstxt