Forwarded to legal at
wikimedia.org
Fred
I think the key here is not to keep more information
about users than
necessary.
Of course, there is the question of if the NSA asks for our checkuser
data.
I am relatively confident of WMF's honesty here. They have been pretty
concerned about user privacy in general (I am sure that there is some WMF
privacy mishap that happened at some point, but I am judging by my
overall
sense of the organization, make of it what you will.
I think it would be a good idea for the WMF legal department to make a
statement (which means I need to remember what mailing list legal is,
it's
not a burden but I am a lazy, lazy man)
We have occasionally made mistakes, but all checkuser requests are
logged; fishing expeditions are not allowed.
Fred