Ray Saintonge wrote:
Robert Scott Horning wrote:
You mean to tell me that if you are using the internet in China (or Saudi Arabia, Iran, Syria, or North Korea), that the government of those countries has no clue about not only what IP address you are using, but also what websites you are accessing?
Not North Korea; since it makes internet generally unavailable it doesn't need to worry about monitoring. :-)
Beyond that, it takes considerable manpower, resources and sophistication to sift through masses of internet material to winnow out whatever might be significant to these governments. A great deal of meaningless drivel is communicated on the internet, as any kid with an MSN account will easily prove. How much seriousness does one attach to the goofy plots that might be expressed there.
A friend who is currently teaching in Qatar recently had to seek medical help, and as a result commented that the doctors there are not as good as their equipment. I suspect that this situation is not limited to medicine.
I am not talking goofy communication here and impossible communications resoruces. I am instead talking about a specific person who has contributed to a project like zh.wikipedia, where their activities and writings have been clearly identified as potentially subversive by the government and are the specific target of a formal police investigation. The resources of even a small country can be devoted to tracking down and individual like this... or even a small-town police departpent. More below:
I am telling you that regardless of where you are from, the government is going to know not only the activities that you do within that country, but most major governments will be capable of monitoring their citizens that are living outside of their countries as well. It isn't that difficult of a task, and nothing that the Wikimedia Foundation could do, including deliberate deleting of all logs is going to change that. The checkuser information in particular is not going to stop any government (or even corporate monitoring... as in your immediate supervisor could do this as well)
from being able to find out what your on-line activites have been.
I fail to see how checkuser information falling into the wrong hands is going to cause a problem in this situation. Really. If a government entity wants to find out that User:Chinese_Protestor who has posted over 2000 edits in zh.wikipedia is actually using a certain internet cafe in downtown Beijing, they don't need to have access to the checkuser facilities to find that information out, nor to even identify exactly who that user is. I don't even need to do that if I really cared to find out who that person is. On top of that, how can you be absolutely sure that some user that is a "trusted user" by whatever standard you are discussing isn't already a steward, but also a government agent who is using the checkuser access to monitor dissidents? And won't be in the future?
To be effective any such CIA agent is not going too blow his cover by telling everyone. To the rest of us his behaviour will seem perfectly normal, and perhaps even better than average.
I have absolutely no idea where the CIA comes into this situation. We are not talking foriegn agents but rather domestic police surveilence. And they don't even need to "blow their cover" to get this information.
A polite letter to the Wikimedia Foundation is all that is really needed after the person has been identified. And every edit is clearly linked to a specific registered or unregistered user anyway, and that is up for public display and the scanning of page history logs is not logged other than as a simply page request. The exact legal process to force this information out of the Foundation is irrelevant, and I can think of several ways that even the Chinese government can get this sort of information even though official channels, and be considered "acceptable" by U.S. courts, assuming that users are trying to get some level of protection by having to go through international diplomatic channels to slow down the process. Fine, but the information can still be obtained by a government agency and the Foundation would be powerless to not give this information.
As far as trying to "build a level of trust" on-line, this is something that American police departments do all of the time for fighting some on-line crimes, and I even know personally a local law enforcement agent who has done this recently, and he works for a small-town police department with only 80 officers in the entire department. His goal is to catch would-be child predetors, and to catch them in the process of solicitation of a minor for sex acts. And it works, which is the surprising thing.
The argument as for why this information is kept so private is because some would-be Wikimedia user who posted something as totally innocent as a translation of something on fr.wikipedia or en.wikipedia, that clearly has been vetted for being NPOV, but is contrary to the local political orthodoxy and as a result the user could get arrested for doing that translation or even executed. Obviously this would happen in places where things like free speech rights common in the EU or USA are not respected, and has been expressed as a concern for Chinese speakers in part because of official government actions by the PRC to block all Wikimedia IP addresses for zh.wikipedia.
Assuming that individual citizens can get around web blocks like the great internet wall of China, there is no reason to not also believe that local police officers couldn't do the same thing. And China clearly has the manpower necessary to not only monitor its citizens using zh.wikipedia in all aspects, but this is also something they have a vested interest in looking at because it is a form of political expression, and a very public forum. Because of the way the MediaWiki software works, they don't even have to catch the specific IP packets, but only build a private list of pages to watch, and what users have certain political leanings that may or may not be acceptable to the Party. From this perspective, it would be incredibly stupd on the part of the Chinese government to not have a police officer of some sort or at least a loyal party member who is a current administrator on zh.wikipedia. And it would be impossible for anybody on the Foundation board to distinguish between ordinary Chinese citizens and this government representative, in terms of who gets checkuser privileges.
If in the process of doing legitimate checkuser scans fighting vandalism they also let it slip and do a couple of scans for a political dissident or two, how would anybody else know, even if the scans are logged? That wouldn't even blow the "cover" of the person you are talking about. And if it is uncovered that they work for the government, is that reason to get them de-sysoped? Legally that would really put the Wikimedia Foundation in a bind if they tried to revoke checkuser privileges to official government agents, once discovered, for any government. I'm not even sure if it could be stopped if an official request was made to allow somebody to have this option.