Following this...

As those of you on the Wikimedia-L list will have seen, I may have started a little self-perpetuating storm over there by asking what implications (moral, legal, technical) PRISM has for us.
I think it's been fairly well clarified that we have relatively minimal exposure in the legal/technical sense due to the limited amount of information we keep secretly anyway.
Of more potential interest, to me personally at least, is what moral implications this has for us.

As was mentioned over there, apparently the WMF is preparing a blogpost about this topic to publicly deny any association with the concept. I think, as was suggested, that it is important this IS drafted publicly on Meta to make sure that the wording doesn't smack of hiding behind carefully chosen phrases like "no 'direct' access" such as was used by other tech companies.

Moreover, there is now https://www.stopwatching.us/ that many of our 'close friends' like the EFF, Mozilla, Internet Archive, American Library Association... have signed up to. I do NOT think that this is an equivalent of SOPA in the sense that we should take protest action on our own sites, but I DO think it is worthwhile our joining this list of signatories. It would seem to me to be, literally, the least we could do to declare opposition to something that directly harms our mission of providing uncensored (directly, or by self-censorship for fear of gov't reprisal) access to knowledge to people.

-Liam / Wittylama

wittylama.com
Peace, love & metadata


On 12 June 2013 04:51, Stephen LaPorte <slaporte@wikimedia.org> wrote:
Hello advocacy advisors,

To follow up on Liam's note, the EFF has published two statements on PRISM and government surveillance.

"International Customers: It's Time to Call on US Internet Companies to Demand Accountability and Transparency" - https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2013/06/international-customers-its-time-call-us-internet-companies-demand-accountability

"86 Civil Liberties Groups and Internet Companies Demand an End to NSA Spying" - https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2013/06/86-civil-liberties-groups-and-internet-companies-demand-end-nsa-spying

--
Stephen LaPorte
Legal Counsel
Wikimedia Foundation

For legal reasons, I may only serve as an attorney for the Wikimedia Foundation. This means I may not give legal advice to or serve as a lawyer for community members, volunteers, or staff members in their personal capacity.

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