[Wikimedia-l] French intelligency agency forces removal of a Wikipedia article

[Tomasz W. Kozłowski]

Hi there,
I guess you might be interested to hear that Direction Centrale du
Renseignement Intérieur (Central Directorate of Interior Intelligence,
DCRI), a French intelligence agency that reports directly to the
Ministry of the Interior, has apparently forced a French Wikipedia
administrator to delete an article that in their opinion—as I
understand it—revelead classified information deemed very harmful to
the French national defence ("compromission du secret de la Défense
nationale").

Interestingly, they contacted the WMF legal team with a request to
remove (delete? suppress?) this article a couple of weeks before that,
but were refused after failing to provide further information on why
the article should be removed (in the words of a Foundation legal
counsel).

Undounted by that, they approached the said administrator — who
operates under his real name, so I guess it was pretty easy to track
him — and asked him to delete this article, a request which he
obliged. (The article has since been restored by a different
administrator). As far as I understand, the version of the article
they wanted to have deleted was
<https://fr.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?oldid=81104004>.

I guess that when an intelligence agency asks their citizen to remove
information from Wikipedia citing the penal code (article 413-11 of
the French penal code in this case), it is something worth sharing (no
harm intended).

Further reading in English:
* <https://fr.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?diff=prev&oldid=91703508>
* <https://fr.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?oldid=91705235>

-- 
Tomasz W. Kozłowski
a.k.a. [[user:odder]]