In the U.S., there is also a strong minority contingent of Libertarians,
who tend to be on the right-wing/conservative part of the political
spectrum. These are natural allies for both privacy & governmental
non-intrunsion. I think that they would welcome WMF joining this legal
action.
Yours,
Peaceray
On Tue, Mar 10, 2015 at 1:15 PM, David Gerard <dgerard(a)gmail.com> wrote:
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(a)gmail.com> wrote:
2015-03-10 8:53 GMT+01:00 Michelle Paulson
<mpaulson(a)wikimedia.org>rg>:
> 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.ht…
> >
> 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
--
_______________________________________________
Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at:
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines
<mailto:wikimedia-l-request@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe>
_______________________________________________
Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at:
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines
Wikimedia-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org
Unsubscribe:
https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l,
<mailto:wikimedia-l-request@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe>