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

[Fred Bauder]

No, some information which is classified is also contained within
reliable published sources available to the public and we use that
information in our articles, along with occasional original research
which may due to good guesses also contain such information. There are
not two separate worlds of reliable classified information and reliable
unclassified information; they overlap.

For example, if Mongolia purchases MIG aircraft that will result in an
intelligence bulletin; but also there may be an AP story. The summary of
classified information about the planes Mongolia has may have an
inferior, but more or less accurate, Wikipedia counterpart article about
the Mongolian air force, which if copied to the Intelligence wiki looks
like it contains "secret" information, which, presumably the full file on
Mongolian armed forces probably is.

Fred

> In other words, the problem was people were uploading Wikipedia
> articles which the government thought included classified information?
> And because the pages were already public uploaders assumed they were
> unclassified, but because the government is nuts, they were wrong.
>
> On Mon, Apr 8, 2013 at 3:06 PM, George Herbert <george.herbert at gmail.com>
> wrote:
>> On Sun, Apr 7, 2013 at 3:32 PM, Romaine Wiki <romaine_wiki at yahoo.com>
>> wrote:
>>
>>>
>>> On Fri, 5 Apr 2013 12:31:29, Fred Bauder <fredbaud at fairpoint.net>
>>> wrote:
>>> > I can't see what would be sensitive in the article..
>>>
>>> I think that the existence of the article is considered too sensitive
>>> for
>>> them, not realizing that all information is already elsewhere on the
>>> internet.
>>
>>
>> A couple of years ago, the guy in charge of the CIA's internal
>> MediaWiki
>> (the Intelligence Wiki, which they added classification levels etc) did
>> a
>> talk at ... Usenix?  LISA?  One of their conferences.
>>
>> He was talking about challenges.  The code certification was
>> interesting.
>>  The Wiki project getting in trouble for having (US classified) Secret,
>> Top
>> Secret, or Top Secret SCI (Secure Compartmented Information) in the
>> "Open-unclassified" category *due to Wikipedia uploads/imports* was
>> apparently a major ongoing pain point for the whole organization.
>>
>> Fortunately not one that was being exposed to the public, other than
>> his
>> talk...
>>
>>
>> --
>> -george william herbert
>> george.herbert at gmail.com
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