On 4/8/06, Sean Barrett sean@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