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