Re https://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/publicpolicy/2016-April/001335.html <snip> Are there any reasons that trying to do this might be a bad idea? ______

Yeah, what have DARPA ever done for us..?

Doesn't that mean that the Foundation has the legal standing to see all three of those projects published?

On further reflection, it would certainly be better to simply ask the DARPA Crowdsourced Formal Verification (CSVF) Program Manager Daniel Ragsdale, who has left DARPA and is now a Professor at Texas A&M University, about the extent to which enhancing games with logic puzzles produced crowdsourced assistance. I wonder whether they were using first person shooters, flying birds, modified tic-tac-toe, or what. Similarly for Rand Waltzman, who is now an Associate Director of Research at Carnegie Mellon's Software Engineering Institute, about the more interesting Social Media in Strategic Communication (SMISC) program and the extent to which it and related programs in other agencies have already involved Wikipedia. He might want to talk about that because the program was not intended to be covert. As an open program, it's very similar to multiple proposals from the community we've seen recently. As a covert program, it's likely discoverable and certainly referenceable in the lawsuit against the NSA as a means to measure the extent to which such programs across the government have resulted in law enforcement prosecutions from parallel construction affecting people because of the Wikipedia articles readers have chosen to access. The director of the Broad Operational Language Translation (BOLT) program, which was originally intended to be an open source and far more fully-featured alternative to Google Translate, is still at DARPA and the program is ongoing with software development partnerships at ten universities and three private companies: https://slator.com/technology/darpa-doles-out-millions-to-academia-and-vend… There is absolutely no question that the Foundation would directly benefit tremendously if the BOLT program were returned to unclassified free open source. Clearly that would not be in Google's interest at all. As far as I can tell from https://www.fbo.gov/utils/view?id=047042419d79fc12b8f6a12e41af570c the only reason the BOLT program requires Top Secret clearance is because the identities of wartime human translators are secret. I am no expert on classification and declassification, other to have noticed that even classification advocates say that there is far too much of it. Therefore I think it would be worth writing a letter asking that the BOLT, SMISC, and CSFV be returned to open source to the extent possible. This is the sort of thing that I imagine would take a few hours at most by the people working on the NSA lawsuit asking for a Mandatory Declassification Review per http://www.dtic.mil/whs/directives/corres/pdf/523030m.pdf If I am mistaken or if anyone thinks it is not a good idea to ask for this, please let me know. On Wed, Apr 13, 2016 at 7:53 AM, James Salsman &lt;jsalsman(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote: the other two being: "The Broad Operational Language Translation (BOLT) program is aimed at enabling communication with non-English-speaking populations and identifying important information in foreign-language sources by: 1) allowing English-speakers to understand foreign-language sources of all genres, including chat, messaging and informal conversation; 2) providing English-speakers the ability to quickly identify targeted information in foreign-language sources using natural-language queries; and 3) enabling multi-turn communication in text and speech with non-English speakers. If successful, BOLT would deliver all capabilities free from domain or genre limitations." and "The general goal of the Social Media in Strategic Communication (SMISC) program is to develop a new science of social networks built on an emerging technology base. Through the program, DARPA seeks to develop tools to support the efforts of human operators to counter misinformation or deception campaigns with truthful information." _______________________________________________ Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines New messages to: Wikimedia-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, <mailto:wikimedia-l-request@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe>