On 4/8/06, Sean Barrett <sean(a)epoptic.org> wrote:
Except that the WP:V question is the crux of the
matter! Those Iranian
military secrets would either be entirely unverifiable, and thus
un-Wiki-able, or they would be verifiable, and so not secret.
"Secret" does not in a legal context mean "unknown," it means
"designated as information which publishing or otherwise passing to
other people or countries is against the law." Hence the legal
question of whether WP should publish them and a clear analog to the
other questions here: if textual content illegal in the U.S. is posted
on a foreign website, can we post it on Wikipedia? If it is truly
known to be illegal in the U.S. (it is only in rare cases that the
U.S. "confirms" that a secret has been released), then the answer is
clearly no, we shouldn't. If it is illegal in other countries, it
becomes a more complicated issue (esp. for WP reps in those countries,
I imagine) but not necessarily as pressing of one.
As for WP:V, people have discussed it well enough already here so I
didn't feel the need to comment on that specific point, but just to
mention what seemed to me to be the legal approach to it, which has to
do with jurisdictions more than anything else.
I just went through this loop a few times personally
-- I posted details
about the [[S8G reactor]] plant back in the days before WP:V was
enforced. Recently, a newbie popped up and accused me of endangering
the lives of his shipmates and threatening to have me arrested.
Hilarity ensued, until I added the sources I had omitted earlier.
Obviously a secret widely available on the Web (including, as I recall,
a Russian Web site) is not much of a secret.
Whether it is posted elsewhere does not mean it does not have a safe
legal status in the U.S. at all, as I understand it. There are some
categories of information that even if derived from entirely open
sources can still technically count as legally secret under U.S. laws
(see our WP article on [[born secret]]), though legal enforcement has
been rare and is constitutionally ambiguous, but are part of laws
which are still on the books and which the government has never
implied they would not try to enforce. Of course, without direct legal
confrontation from a government source in question we should not be
worried about this and certainly not be pre-emptively paranoid about
it, but it is not a legally irrelevant issue.
FF