Trillium,
I am having difficulty understanding how retaining copies of possibly
forged identification documents helps anyone with holding accountable any
rogue functionary or OTRS user. Can you explain that please? Surely someone
who intends to misuse the tools will be smart enough to forge an
identification document. Even in the United States, forging identification
documents is not impossible, and the police occasionally catch people
creating such documents.
Pine
On Fri, Jun 27, 2014 at 7:42 AM, Trillium Corsage <trillium2014(a)yandex.com>
wrote:
@Nathan
You said "so if you want to argue that such users should be positively
identified, then please make some practical suggestions (which you have
conspicuously avoided doing so far). How should identities be confirmed? In
what circumstances should the ID information be disclosed, and to whom?
What, fundamentally, is the usefulness in collecting this information to
begin with? What are the use cases in which it is necessary?"
It would be a good faith evaluation of the copy of the identification
document provided. There's no need to be quarrelsome about the practical
suggestions I've "conspicuously avoided." I did at least suggest a secure
filing cabinet and making use of a removable hard-drive. As to the precise
criteria by which an identification document is deemed "good enough," I'd
suppose those would be developed on a good faith basis by the action
officer. Nobody is depending on perfection by that individual. The
principle would be that the document appears genuine, has the minimum
elements settled on by the policy (name, age, address, possibly other
elements). If the document is in a foreign language, say Swahili, and the
WMF person can't read that, I would think it would be a "do the best you
can" and file it by respective Wikipedia and username. None of these are
insurmountable obstacles. The answer to "this is hard" is not "well,
let's
just stop doing it." The answer is "this is important, let's just do the
best we can."
I have called for a basic examination of the document, not any
verification process. I'd suppose if the document looked suspect in some
way, then a telephone call or follow-up could be done, and that would be a
"verification," but I would expect that to be the exception, not the rule.
Again, these details would be settled by the hands-on person, not by me
attempting to write a ten-page standard operating procedure while Nathan
zings me with "what are your specifics" on the mailing list.
"What is the usefulness in collecting this information to begin with?"
Well, I thought the premise here was obvious. It was obvious enough to
those that crafted the previous policy in the first place. It establishes
some level of accountability to those individuals accorded access to the
personally-identifying information of editors. Personal accountability
encourages acting with self-control and restraint. With apologies to the
other person that responded, anonymity encourages a care-free and
unrestricted handling of that data, and in fact to some of these people it
indeed yields a MMORPG (multimedia online roleplaying game) environment,
and they will do whatever they want, because they are free from
accountability.
The other key aspect of usefulness is to the rank and file editors. They
will feel better knowing that if some creepazoid or cyberbully starts going
over their IPs, and of course Googling and otherwise sleuthing for more on
them, that at least the WMF knows who they are, and the rank and file
editor potentially has some recourse if it finally comes to it. So I say
the usefulness there is treating editors right and furnishing a safer
environment for them, in which they are not so exposed to anonymous
administrators.
Thank you for your response.
Trillium Corsage (by the way although "Trillium" is a type of flower, I am
in fact a dude. So please use male pronouns if it occurs to you. It was
just an email address I picked sort of randomly and then I ran with it as
pseudonym).
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