It's difficult to overstate how much people love us. We tell them everything about everything, and we're mostly right and try to stay neutral. But it's all written by just people! So it's cosy as well.
With SOPA, we discovered that: when Wikipedia says you suck, you *suck*.
So I'd expect that this will only look good for us. But I don't claim to have numbers to this effect.
On 10 March 2015 at 19:55, Johan Jönsson brevlistor@gmail.com wrote:
2015-03-10 8:53 GMT+01:00 Michelle Paulson mpaulson@wikimedia.org:
Hi All,
I’m writing to let you know that today the Wikimedia Foundation[1] is filing suit against the National Security Agency https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Security_Agency, the Department of Justice <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Department_of_Justice
,
and the U.S. Attorney General https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Attorney_General[2] in order to challenge certain mass surveillance practices carried out by the U.S. government. We believe these practices are impinging the freedom to learn, inquire, and explore on Wikimedia sites.
Since the 2013 mass surveillance disclosures, we’ve heard concerns from the community about privacy on Wikipedia. This lawsuit is a step towards addressing the community's justified concerns. We believe that the surveillance methods being employed by the NSA under the authority of the FISA Amendments Act < https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foreign_Intelligence_Surveillance_Act_of_1978_...
negatively impact our users' ability and willingness to participate in our projects. Today, we fight back.
An op-ed < http://www.nytimes.com/2015/03/10/opinion/stop-spying-on-wikipedia-users.htm...
by Lila and Jimmy about the lawsuit, and Wikimedia's stance on government surveillance, appeared in The New York Times this morning. Additionally, we just published a blog post https://blog.wikimedia.org/2015/03/10/wikimedia-v-nsa/ with more information about the suit. (The post will also up on Meta for translation).
Curious question, by the way: how controversial would you expect this move to be domestically? From e.g. a Swedish perspective, the NSA is an intelligence agency of a foreign power and the other mentioned organizations are either largely uncontroversial and seen in a positive light (Amnesty, PEN, HRW) or unknown, but will it affect how the WMF is seen in the US?
//Johan Jönsson
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