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

[Peter Southwood]

Well that's one way of drawing attention to the site...

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Tomasz W. Kozłowski" <odder.wiki at gmail.com>
To: "Wikimedia Mailing List" <wikimedia-l at lists.wikimedia.org>
Sent: Friday, April 05, 2013 7:41 PM
Subject: [Wikimedia-l] French intelligency agency forces removal of 
aWikipedia article


> 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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