Great question to think about for our long term sustainability. I think we
already have a universal "plan B" however? It's providing all content
under
free licenses and regularly distributing complete dumps of our content.
Many larger and more well-funded technology organizations (Google,
Facebook, etc.) regularly do disaster recovery scenarios that account for
not just governmental disruption or civil unrest but events such as a major
earthquake in the San Francisco Bay Area. The movement doesn't really have
the resources to do this effectively in the same manner.
It seems like decentralizing our ability to recover from a disruption is
the most effective defense we have, *especially *in the scenario involving
government intervention because the Foundation's infrastructural and legal
presence in the United States is actually one of the more brittle pieces
within our movement.
On Tue, Jan 8, 2019 at 9:18 AM Fæ <faewik(a)gmail.com> wrote:
Dear fellow Wikimedians, please sit back for a
moment and ponder the
following,
For those of us not resident in the US, it has been genuinely alarming
to see highly respected US government archives vanish overnight,
reference websites go down, and US legislation appear to drift to
whatever commercial interests have the loudest current political
voices. Sadly "populism" is happening now, and dominates American
politics, driving changes of all sorts in response to politically
inflated and vague rhetoric about "security" and "fakenews". It is
not
inconceivable that a popularist current or future US Government could
decide to introduce emergency controls over websites like Wikipedia,
virtually overnight.[1][2][3][4]
The question of whether the Wikimedia Foundation should have a hot
switch option, so that if a "disaster" strikes in America, we could
continue running Wikipedia and Wikimedia Commons from other countries
has been raised on this list several times over many years. The WMF
and its employees are heavily invested in staying in Silicon Valley,
and that will stay true unless external risks become extreme.
However, there has never been a rationale to avoid investing in a Plan
B. A robust plan, where the WMF can switch operations over to a
hosting country with a sufficiently welcoming with stable national
government and legislation, that our projects could continue to meet
our open knowledge goals virtually uninterrupted and without risk of
political control. A Plan B would ensure that if the US Government
started to discuss controlling Wikipedia, then at least that published
plan would be a realistic response. If they tried doing it, we could
simply power off our servers in the USA, rather than compromise our
content.
If anyone knows of committed investment in a practical WMF Plan B, it
would be reassuring to share it more widely at this time. If not, more
of us should be asking about it, politely, persistently but perhaps
less patiently than indefinitely. :-)
Links:
1.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-46739180
2.
http://www.lse.ac.uk/ideas/research/updates/populism
3.
https://www.cnet.com/news/obama-signs-order-outlining-emergency-internet-co…
"... this order was designed to empower certain governmental agencies
with control over telecommunications and the Web during natural
disasters and security emergencies."
4.
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2019/01/presidential-emergency…
"The president could seize control of U.S. internet traffic, impeding
access to certain websites and ensuring that internet searches return
pro-Trump content as the top results."
5. Bizarro, as used in the title of this email:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bizarro_World
Thanks,
Fae
--
faewik(a)gmail.com
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Fae
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