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

George Herbert george.herbert at gmail.com
Mon Apr 8 20:51:41 UTC 2013


He didn't want to talk about which topic areas, but I have a pretty good
idea of a few of them.

I would hazard a guess that nuclear weapons design is one of them; there's
a diagram on-wiki that would have been Top Secret - Restricted Data -
Secure Compartmented Information - Sigma 16 until December 2000, when it
was rephrased a bit.


On Mon, Apr 8, 2013 at 1:26 PM, Thomas Dalton <thomas.dalton at gmail.com>wrote:

> I don't understand the "no"; you seem to be agreeing with Nathan...
>
> On 8 April 2013 21:19, Fred Bauder <fredbaud at fairpoint.net> wrote:
> > 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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> >>
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> >
> >
> >
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-- 
-george william herbert
george.herbert at gmail.com


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