I love this thread. It points out just about everything that's wrong with the surreal, insular world of Wikipedia.
Information is classified because divulging it will place people in harm's way. In some cases, it will place millions of people in harm's way. There are politicized exceptions to this, but for the huge majority of classified items keeping the information secret will save lives, as will hindering its dissemination if it is somehow leaked.
The fact that any of you are considering anything other than immediately removing the information indicates that you care less about human life than your petty authority over a toy encyclopedia. It's sad and it's scary.
--Blair
Well, that or it says that some of us are more than a little skeptical about the motives and authority of the people doing the classification, and suspect that in many cases secrecy puts people in harms way too, it's just that those people are more politically desirable to endanger...
Tough to say, really.
-Snowspinner
On Apr 1, 2005, at 12:14 PM, Blair P. Houghton wrote:
I love this thread. It points out just about everything that's wrong with the surreal, insular world of Wikipedia.
Information is classified because divulging it will place people in harm's way. In some cases, it will place millions of people in harm's way. There are politicized exceptions to this, but for the huge majority of classified items keeping the information secret will save lives, as will hindering its dissemination if it is somehow leaked.
The fact that any of you are considering anything other than immediately removing the information indicates that you care less about human life than your petty authority over a toy encyclopedia. It's sad and it's scary.
--Blair _______________________________________________ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@Wikipedia.org http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Blair P. Houghton said:
There are politicized exceptions to this, but for the huge majority of classified items keeping the information secret will save lives, as will hindering its dissemination if it is somehow leaked.
This simply is not true of information that is routinely restricted in the UK. There is lots of quite harmless information that I can get legimitately from US archives via FOIA, but may not legally publish in the UK.
There are elements of a police state in the UK, and not all related to the IRA. Why that is so would be very hard to explain in a NPOV article. I have no problem with publishing most of that sort of stuff.
Fred
From: "Tony Sidaway" minorityreport@bluebottle.com Reply-To: minorityreport@bluebottle.com, English Wikipedia wikien-l@Wikipedia.org Date: Fri, 1 Apr 2005 19:20:08 +0100 (BST) To: wikien-l@Wikipedia.org Subject: Re: [WikiEN-l] Re: Classified information in Wikipedia
Blair P. Houghton said:
There are politicized exceptions to this, but for the huge majority of classified items keeping the information secret will save lives, as will hindering its dissemination if it is somehow leaked.
This simply is not true of information that is routinely restricted in the UK. There is lots of quite harmless information that I can get legimitately from US archives via FOIA, but may not legally publish in the UK.
WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@Wikipedia.org http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
That's part of the problem. It's not at all a toy, nor is an obscure corner that somehow will escape notice. It is one of the most influential sources of information on the web now. And this is just the beginning.
Again, those with power have responsiblity.
Fred
From: "Blair P. Houghton" blair@houghton.net Reply-To: English Wikipedia wikien-l@Wikipedia.org Date: Fri, 01 Apr 2005 11:14:41 -0700 To: wikien-l@Wikipedia.org Subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Classified information in Wikipedia
I love this thread. It points out just about everything that's wrong with the surreal, insular world of Wikipedia.
Information is classified because divulging it will place people in harm's way. In some cases, it will place millions of people in harm's way. There are politicized exceptions to this, but for the huge majority of classified items keeping the information secret will save lives, as will hindering its dissemination if it is somehow leaked.
The fact that any of you are considering anything other than immediately removing the information indicates that you care less about human life than your petty authority over a toy encyclopedia. It's sad and it's scary.
--Blair _______________________________________________ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@Wikipedia.org http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Blair P. Houghton wrote:
Information is classified because divulging it will place people in harm's way. In some cases, it will place millions of people in harm's way. There are politicized exceptions to this, but for the huge majority of classified items keeping the information secret will save lives, as will hindering its dissemination if it is somehow leaked.
Unless Wikipedians are personally leaking classified information from government agencies, I don't see how this is even remotely a consideration. If we can get our hands on the information through public sources, then so can anybody else who would want to use it for harmful purposes. They don't need to go through us to get it.
-Mark
Unless Wikipedians are personally leaking classified information from government agencies, I don't see how this is even remotely a consideration. If we can get our hands on the information through public sources, then so can anybody else who would want to use it for harmful purposes. They don't need to go through us to get it. -Mark
And even if any Wikipedians did leak it personally, it would be original research...
Wikipedia is a forum where anybody could contribute information, even anonymously. Let's say I was an employee at Vandenberg Air Force Base (my errors on a number of missile related pages ought to prove that I am not!) who decides that US nuclear secrecy is preventing adequate public debate on current US nuclear policies. I anonymously log in and upload a picture of a working W-88 warhead to the page on [[MIRV]]. Ha ha, says I, I have secretly subverted secrecy. You could replace this with "troop stations in Iraq" and "information that would be useful to insurgents" if you want something from a non-nuclear realm.
This is not at all implausible (wasn't [[Mordechai Vanunu]] our featured article not too long ago? See also: [[Daniel Ellsberg]]), and indeed a public and editable forum such as Wikipedia would be an easy way to do something like that. The question isn't whether Wikipedians "outside the wall of secrecy" would be getting secret information and putting it on here, it would be whether Wikipedians "behind the wall" would do it. It's entirely plausible, if probably unlikely.
FF
On Apr 1, 2005 3:33 PM, Delirium delirium@hackish.org wrote:
Unless Wikipedians are personally leaking classified information from government agencies, I don't see how this is even remotely a consideration. If we can get our hands on the information through public sources, then so can anybody else who would want to use it for harmful purposes. They don't need to go through us to get it.
-Mark
WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@Wikipedia.org http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Fastfission wrote:
Wikipedia is a forum where anybody could contribute information, even anonymously. Let's say I was an employee at Vandenberg Air Force Base (my errors on a number of missile related pages ought to prove that I am not!) who decides that US nuclear secrecy is preventing adequate public debate on current US nuclear policies. I anonymously log in and upload a picture of a working W-88 warhead to the page on [[MIRV]]. Ha ha, says I, I have secretly subverted secrecy.
You've also posted a classified image in a forum where your IP address is logged and widely available. You'd have to first find a proxy to do this through, and we block proxies so I don't know how easy that would be. You'd also be posting it on a single centralized server where it could be removed at any time by admins. Why not just post it to Usenet, a much less easily undone means of distribution?
Anyhoo, let's say you did it anyway, and now there's this photo that some anon uploaded. Someone else who knows this subject matter comes along and sees it and says "interesting, I've never seen that before. Hey, anon, where did you find this?" What can the anon possibly say in response that wouldn't violate either the "no original research" policy or our verifiability requirements? If this design is classified and there have been no leaks of it before, there's no way to determine whether this is for real or if it's just some movie prop that a guy built in his garage and took photos of. So it doesn't belong in Wikipedia, and it will probably wind up being removed by Wikipedia's existing processes.
How would having a policy specifically against classified information speed this up in any way? You'd still need to show that it _was_ classified, which amounts to the same sort of effort it would take to attempt to verify the photo (possibly moreso, since failing to verify it is enough to qualify it for removal whereas failing to determine if it's classified would leave the issue up in the air). And if we did have such a policy, and if I was an Evil Foreign Agent who for some reason thought Wikipedia was a good source of such information, I'd simply watchlist Votes for Classified Information Removal and copy everything as it came up for discussion there. Wikipedia would be doing half my work for me.
Bryan Derksen wrote:
Fastfission wrote:
Wikipedia is a forum where anybody could contribute information, even anonymously. Let's say I was an employee at Vandenberg Air Force Base (my errors on a number of missile related pages ought to prove that I am not!) who decides that US nuclear secrecy is preventing adequate public debate on current US nuclear policies. I anonymously log in and upload a picture of a working W-88 warhead to the page on [[MIRV]]. Ha ha, says I, I have secretly subverted secrecy.
You've also posted a classified image in a forum where your IP address is logged and widely available. You'd have to first find a proxy to do this through, and we block proxies so I don't know how easy that would be. You'd also be posting it on a single centralized server where it could be removed at any time by admins. Why not just post it to Usenet, a much less easily undone means of distribution?
Anyhoo, let's say you did it anyway, and now there's this photo that some anon uploaded. Someone else who knows this subject matter comes along and sees it and says "interesting, I've never seen that before. Hey, anon, where did you find this?" What can the anon possibly say in response that wouldn't violate either the "no original research" policy or our verifiability requirements? If this design is classified and there have been no leaks of it before, there's no way to determine whether this is for real or if it's just some movie prop that a guy built in his garage and took photos of. So it doesn't belong in Wikipedia, and it will probably wind up being removed by Wikipedia's existing processes.
How would having a policy specifically against classified information speed this up in any way? You'd still need to show that it _was_ classified, which amounts to the same sort of effort it would take to attempt to verify the photo (possibly moreso, since failing to verify it is enough to qualify it for removal whereas failing to determine if it's classified would leave the issue up in the air). And if we did have such a policy, and if I was an Evil Foreign Agent who for some reason thought Wikipedia was a good source of such information, I'd simply watchlist Votes for Classified Information Removal and copy everything as it came up for discussion there. Wikipedia would be doing half my work for me.
Images of classified information can't be public domain - if they were, they can't be classified. They can't be {{copyrightedusefwithpermission}} (or whatever it is) since the image has been *stolen* by the uploader, and is breaking the law. Not GFDL or CC either; possibly could be {{PDUSGovernment}} (or whatever it is, depending on where it came from), but in summary: Images of classified material would be removed by the Image Sleuthing team, because they lack source info.
No works produced by agencies of the US government are elligible for copyright. If they are declared classified, that is another matter separate from intellectual property issues. Which is why we can use de-classified photographs and texts from the DOE as public domain.
(I actually happen to be writing a history on this very question, actually, in regards to national secrecy and patent laws, which are not the same thing as copyright laws in this respect. The government CAN take out patents on things, but it cannot take out copyrights on most things)
FF
On Apr 7, 2005 11:52 AM, Alphax alphasigmax@gmail.com wrote:
Images of classified information can't be public domain - if they were, they can't be classified. They can't be {{copyrightedusefwithpermission}} (or whatever it is) since the image has been *stolen* by the uploader, and is breaking the law. Not GFDL or CC either; possibly could be {{PDUSGovernment}} (or whatever it is, depending on where it came from), but in summary: Images of classified material would be removed by the Image Sleuthing team, because they lack source info.
-- Alphax http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Alphax There are two kinds of people: those who say to God, 'Thy will be done,' and those to whom God says, 'All right, then, have it your way.' - C. S. Lewis
WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@Wikipedia.org http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
The question isn't whether it is likely (I don't know how to measure that, it would likely depend on the person in question -- if they were a Wikipedia user and not a Usenet user, they might prefer the former over the latter), but whether it is feasible. As for the IP address problem, there are plenty of ways to do a "one shot" approach that would be virtually untraceable (public library for example).
Anon could easily lie about the source. "Oh, I scanned it out of a book Los Alamos produced (and it is in the PD since LANL is a gov operated lab). Here's a citation." There are lots of obscure books which provide excellent public domain pictures (many of the images I've scanned in of Manhattan Project scientists come out of just such sources). Who will check them all?
The question of "will any of us know it is secret" is another difficult concern inherent in secrecy. Would you know a secret if you saw it? If it isn't advertised as being secret information, you might just assume it was speculation, or false. It's a very difficult epistemological problem in general, actually. (I happen to be investigating just this question in some of my academic work at the moment, to be honest with you. It has a rich history.)
So, I don't think the possibility of someone adding classified information to Wikipedia and us not knowing about it is infeasible. The legal question is: what happens if the US government says to remove it? The more I think about it, the more the answer is, "we probably just remove it anyway." I'm fairly sure Wikipedia, unless it is located in North Korea, is subject to some form of laws about respecting the US government's labeling of things as top secret (and if it was in the DPRK, we'd have some new free speech issues!). It would only have a chance in court if we were claiming, and adamantly maintaining (willing to go to court over it), that the information was *not* secret. Otherwise, that'd be that, legally. At least, that's my interpretation of the case law.
If we are thinking about policy, I would recommend: *Information that purports to be classified and leaked should probably not be on Wikipedia. There are other outlets to wage one's war on secrecy, we can afford to play it safe on this one and not feel we are really hurting the world in any great way. *If Wikipedia was told by a government that certain information on it was classified and was asked to remove it, we should consider it on a case-by-case basis. Safe option is to just capitulate, though I know some of the more idealistic people would disagree with this on principle. (I'm not very idealistic.)
FF
On Apr 7, 2005 12:22 PM, Bryan Derksen bryan.derksen@shaw.ca wrote:
You've also posted a classified image in a forum where your IP address is logged and widely available. You'd have to first find a proxy to do this through, and we block proxies so I don't know how easy that would be. You'd also be posting it on a single centralized server where it could be removed at any time by admins. Why not just post it to Usenet, a much less easily undone means of distribution?
Anyhoo, let's say you did it anyway, and now there's this photo that some anon uploaded. Someone else who knows this subject matter comes along and sees it and says "interesting, I've never seen that before. Hey, anon, where did you find this?" What can the anon possibly say in response that wouldn't violate either the "no original research" policy or our verifiability requirements? If this design is classified and there have been no leaks of it before, there's no way to determine whether this is for real or if it's just some movie prop that a guy built in his garage and took photos of. So it doesn't belong in Wikipedia, and it will probably wind up being removed by Wikipedia's existing processes.
How would having a policy specifically against classified information speed this up in any way? You'd still need to show that it _was_ classified, which amounts to the same sort of effort it would take to attempt to verify the photo (possibly moreso, since failing to verify it is enough to qualify it for removal whereas failing to determine if it's classified would leave the issue up in the air). And if we did have such a policy, and if I was an Evil Foreign Agent who for some reason thought Wikipedia was a good source of such information, I'd simply watchlist Votes for Classified Information Removal and copy everything as it came up for discussion there. Wikipedia would be doing half my work for me. _______________________________________________ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@Wikipedia.org http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Fastfission wrote:
If we are thinking about policy, I would recommend: *Information that purports to be classified and leaked should probably not be on Wikipedia. There are other outlets to wage one's war on secrecy, we can afford to play it safe on this one and not feel we are really hurting the world in any great way.
A person posting such information would be foolish to say that it is classified. That would only draw attention. Stating it would only serve to satisfy the poster's ego.
*If Wikipedia was told by a government that certain information on it was classified and was asked to remove it, we should consider it on a case-by-case basis. Safe option is to just capitulate, though I know some of the more idealistic people would disagree with this on principle. (I'm not very idealistic.)
For a government to say that something is classified would bring as much attention as if the user has said so. It would compromise their ability to neither confirm or deny the fact in question, and close their option for plausible deniability.
Ec
Classified information is often used as a way to stifle criticism and debate as well. One interesting take on this from someone who did quite a bit of work on this question is Daniel Moynihan's "Secrecy: The American Experience." Moynihan (a late, distinguished senator) basically concludes (after serving for many years on a Senate Committee on Secrecy or something along those lines) that there is much more classification in the US government than is needed to maintain national security, and indeed much of that classification in the past had been used to ill effect (which can mean a number of things; i.e. Moynihan believes that if the VENONA information had sooner been declassified then the whole McCarthy hysteria could have been avoided, as people would have seen that yes, there was a Communist espionage network, but that it was fairly small and manageable, avoiding the extremes of both the left and the right) and has lead to incorrect and insular thinking (Moynihan blames classification for the US not being able to predict the crash of the USSR long ahead of time). Other instances include the Pentagon Papers (Daniel Ellsberg, Vietnam), and the use of classification to restrict certain types of debate over the arms race, assessments of foreign intelligence, etc.
All I'm saying is that the practice of questioning secrecy laws and classification is NOT something restricted to any insular world of Wikipedia -- it has a long history with many quite mainstream and respectable advocates. It is not a fringe internet issue.
FF
On Apr 1, 2005 2:14 PM, Blair P. Houghton blair@houghton.net wrote:
I love this thread. It points out just about everything that's wrong with the surreal, insular world of Wikipedia.
Information is classified because divulging it will place people in harm's way. In some cases, it will place millions of people in harm's way. There are politicized exceptions to this, but for the huge majority of classified items keeping the information secret will save lives, as will hindering its dissemination if it is somehow leaked.
The fact that any of you are considering anything other than immediately removing the information indicates that you care less about human life than your petty authority over a toy encyclopedia. It's sad and it's scary.
--Blair _______________________________________________ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@Wikipedia.org http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l