Actually, Ombudsman Commission is not a secret police or Interpol. We have no any instrumentation of investigation, except access to checkuser logs and asking plaintiff and the checkuser for some details and then compare all this information. This is all we can do regarding investigation of cases of potential checkuser's abuses. We cannot force anybody to reveal information if he/she don't want to reveal. We can only ask.
This is also not our duty to answer the questions such as who performed a check on whom and why. This is also not our duty to punish checkusers who might abused their privileges, although this is our duty to report it to WMF if we find that it indeed happened.
As it is clearly defined:
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Ombudsman_commission
our duty is to investigate the cases of privacy policy violation and report it to the WMF if we find that it really happened or even if it might happened. So we did in this case, and the plaintiff was already informed about it. This is the end of the story from our POV.
You may argue that there is a kind of hole in the system - I mean we investigate and report to WMF - than WMF should decide what to do - but there is no clear mechanism what MWF can do without hurting the local communities which elect their checkusers. Maybe the Ombudsman Commision should be somehow empowered to not only investigate and report, but also be able to perform some actions - such as Stewards can do - but it could change the Commission into some sort of super-ArbCom which I am not sure if it is good idea... Anyway - if the Commision had such power - it should rather be elected on meta (just like Stewards) and not appointed by WMF as it is now...
2014-08-03 22:31 GMT+02:00 Lodewijk lodewijk@effeietsanders.org:
Contrary to an individual request for information (who did ABC) I guess that such a process question would be perfect for the ombuds committee (was this process correctly followed) or by extension the board.
Lodewijk
2014-08-03 21:45 GMT+02:00 Richard Farmbrough richard@farmbrough.co.uk:
I have to say that there is an unnecessary lack of transparency which seems to get worse. In or around May 2012 I emailed the audit committee on EN:WP to ask about checkuser run on my account and got a polite and informative reply. In or around May 2014 an identically worded query got a polite refusal.
Note, incidentally that those who run checkuser are often working from the UK, and are quite likely under a legal obligation make this information available.
On 3 August 2014 03:15, John Mark Vandenberg jayvdb@gmail.com wrote:
On Sun, Aug 3, 2014 at 11:31 AM, Nathan nawrich@gmail.com wrote:
..
I could be wrong, but it was my understanding that the logs are
maintained
indefinitely but the data is retained for only 3 months (i.e. the
results
of the check that is recorded in the log).
The checkuser log are kept indefinitely, but it only records what usernames/IPs that were checked (i.e. the query), and the reason given by the checkuser for the check.
It does not record the results of the query.
That said, the sequence of checks run by a CU often creates a permanent record in the private CU log of an persons likely IP addresses. e.g. the log may contain a check on an account, with a reason given, followed by checks on IPs, with the same reason logged.
-- John Vandenberg
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