Rob Halsell wrote:
I'll also agree that the following statement on the link I posted is a bit vague in terms of legal obligation.
Sysadmins will remove messages only for serious privacy reasons; the current policy is that all requests are rejected (unless there is a court order or equivalent legal obligation, of course).
In this case, the legal obligation from Ops standpoint is our legal department requested it. There may be actual legal standing for it, but I have no idea, I just trust our legal team to understand the details.
I strongly agree with what others have already noted in this thread: it's a very bad idea to tamper with the mailing list archives.
After one of the previous incidents, language was added to read that "all requests are rejected". There's a parenthetical for the cases in which we are forcibly compelled by a valid U.S. court order to remove content. This restriction was specifically implemented to avoid a repeat of "someone from within the Wikimedia Foundation asks for a favor" and suddenly every pipermail link is broken, again.
I'm not sure what else needs to be done to communicate that these requests to corrupt the mailing list archives should be rejected. I thought we had already settled this issue with very clear language ("all requests are rejected") after repeated past incidents. A Phabricator Maniphest task is not equivalent, legally or otherwise, to a court order.
MZMcBride