Well that's one way of drawing attention to the site...
----- Original Message ----- From: "Tomasz W. Kozłowski" odder.wiki@gmail.com To: "Wikimedia Mailing List" wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Sent: Friday, April 05, 2013 7:41 PM Subject: [Wikimedia-l] French intelligency agency forces removal of aWikipedia article
Hi there, I guess you might be interested to hear that Direction Centrale du Renseignement Intérieur (Central Directorate of Interior Intelligence, DCRI), a French intelligence agency that reports directly to the Ministry of the Interior, has apparently forced a French Wikipedia administrator to delete an article that in their opinion—as I understand it—revelead classified information deemed very harmful to the French national defence ("compromission du secret de la Défense nationale").
Interestingly, they contacted the WMF legal team with a request to remove (delete? suppress?) this article a couple of weeks before that, but were refused after failing to provide further information on why the article should be removed (in the words of a Foundation legal counsel).
Undounted by that, they approached the said administrator — who operates under his real name, so I guess it was pretty easy to track him — and asked him to delete this article, a request which he obliged. (The article has since been restored by a different administrator). As far as I understand, the version of the article they wanted to have deleted was https://fr.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?oldid=81104004.
I guess that when an intelligence agency asks their citizen to remove information from Wikipedia citing the penal code (article 413-11 of the French penal code in this case), it is something worth sharing (no harm intended).
Further reading in English:
- https://fr.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?diff=prev&oldid=91703508
- https://fr.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?oldid=91705235
-- Tomasz W. Kozłowski a.k.a. [[user:odder]]
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