[Foundation-l] Stewards are ignoring requests for CheckUser information?

[Ray Saintonge]

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