[Wikimedia-l] CheckUser openness

[John]

I am not asking for full disclosure, what I am asking is that established
user have the right to be notified when and why they are being checkusered.
The evidence checkusers get do not need to be disclosed, Its as simple as:

 X performed a checkuser on you because Y at Z UTC

that provides clarity and openness while keeping the information checkusers
use confidential. A note like that would provide vandals with very little
information. And the second step of defining a threshold would eliminate
most of the vandal checks.

To me this screams of lets keep oversight of checkuser to a minimum. Right
now there is the ombudsman committee globally (to ask for review from them
we need evidence, realistically only other checkusers can provide that)
and on enwp there is the Audit Subcommittee, which 75% of are either arbcom
members (be defacto are granted CU ), former arbcom, or former CU. To me
that really reeks of lack of independent oversight. Notifying an
established user that they are subject to a CU doesnt harm the CU's ability
to do their job unless they themselves have something to hide. Its not like
I am asking for CU's to release IP addresses/user-agents or anything else
that could assist me in avoiding scrutiny.

On Thu, Jun 14, 2012 at 3:48 AM, Stephanie Daugherty
<sdaugherty at gmail.com>wrote:

> On Thu, Jun 14, 2012 at 3:36 AM, David Richfield
> <davidrichfield at gmail.com>wrote:
>
> > So User:mfgaowener should get an automated mail saying "because you
> > did a pagemove with edit summary "Haggggers!" you were checkusered.
> > Please be more subtle in your vandalism next time."
> >
> > I trust the current checks and balances, and I don't think the system
> > is getting significant levels of abuse.
> >
> > +1 on this. The methods that checkusers have are heavily constrained as
> it
> is by privacy concerns, and they are very fragile. They only work
> effectively within the tight privacy restrictions with a certain amount of
> security through obscurity. For one, a checkuser needs to be able to
> monitor a situation sometimes to be sure that they are casting a wide
> enough net for a block to be effective. For another, the standard of
> reasonable suspicion placed on the checkuser tool is high enough that with
> enough practice, vandals would learn to be careful to never justify a
> checkuser request within the privacy guidelines.
>
> We're between a rock and a hard place, because to give the transparency
> being asked for, we'd enter an arms race where we'd quickly have to relax
> the checkuser standards to the point where it becomes "anything goes so
> long as you don't disclose it".
>
> -Stephanie
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