[Foundation-l] Steward elections: summary, week one

[geni]

2009/2/9 Tomasz Ganicz <polimerek at gmail.com>:
> The "real danger" is that stewards have access to global checkuser, so
> they can theoretically be used to trace users when forced by secret
> police of an non-democratic country.  However, various special forces
> and secret services of democratic countries also use to force their
> citizens (and other countries citizens as well) to reveal various
> information, so we can use this argument against almost any country.
> Maybe global checkuser function should be given to Wikimedia Office?
> (Like Wikimedia Office actions function?)

For a western government the cost of the PR mess is unlikely to
outweigh any benefits. There are also various other issues that mean
that such interference is unlikely (the CIA legally can't touch
wikipedia since it is US based and I doubt any other intelligence
agency wants to annoy the US).

So any attack from western countries is going to have to come through
fairly open legal means. Court orders and the like. Court orders tend
to be public which gives us a chance to react before the problem
rather than after.

-- 
geni