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

[Fred Bauder]

Hard to know what was involved from the information you provide. The
problem is there is classified information that amounts to nothing and
then there is classified information release of which can cause serious
damage. Defiance will eventually result in serious trouble. Not that we
should knuckle under to nonsense.

Fred

> 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]]
>
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