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 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.
And mind you, I'm not advocating that this tool be
available to any user
under any circumstances. I'm just pointing out that by any reasonable
definition of whom you call a trusted user for access to checkuser
privileges you are also likely to grant them bureaucratship as well, and
possibly adminship only. The only reason why somebody would have
checkuser privileges on a local project and not also bureaucratship is
because they don't want to deal with the hassles of being an
administrator and have repeatedly turned down the nomination when
offered to them. I fail to see under what higher standard you are
possibly using to justify why somebody should be a checkuser and not be
given full bureaucrat privileges, or the other way around. If they
can't be trusted with checkuser privileges, why are they given
bureaucrat privileges?
There are users with undoubted technical skills but poor social skills
who might be granted checkuser tools on an investigate and report
basis. If, however, they were in a position to enforce discipline they
would likely create a lot of dissension.
I'm also pointing out that the issue is scalable
as well, and that it is highly unlikely that the chinese protestor given
in the above example is going to be editing on the Maori language
Wikibooks. On these smaller projects, the potential to do damage is
going to be considerably less as well even from this more limited
perspective.
Agreed, but proportionally the checkuser skill is less likely to be needed.
Ec