[Wikimedia-l] NSA

[Ryan Lane]

On Wed, Jul 31, 2013 at 4:52 PM, Nathan <nawrich at gmail.com> wrote:

> On Wed, Jul 31, 2013 at 7:11 PM, Michael Snow <wikipedia at frontier.com>
> wrote:
> > On 7/31/2013 3:31 PM, Nathan wrote:
> >>
> >> And another thought - you know what unites most of the other companies
> >> represented by the logos in that image? Leaks have confirmed that most
> >> of them are the subject of secret orders to turn over huge amounts of
> >> raw data to the government. They are all bound to secrecy by law, so
> >> without permission none of them are permitted to describe or disclose
> >> the nature or extent of the data demands the U.S. government has made.
> >>
> >> Now if you imagine the puzzle globe on that slide implies that
> >> Wikipedia traffic is retained for intelligence analysis, it's a short
> >> hop to assume that the Wikimedia Foundation is also the subject of a
> >> blanket order transferring its server logs to the NSA.
> >
> > Facebook, Google, Yahoo, and Twitter, yes. But mail.ru? The shift from
> > "most" to "all" in the first paragraph may make it easy to assume the
> > similarity is universal, but it's ignoring the full context. That kind of
> > rhetorical shift is a favorite trick of conspiracy theorists, it's how
> they
> > get you to make those short hops to unwarranted conclusions.
> >
> > --Michael Snow
> >
> >
>
> It's hardly a conspiracy theory. Given the differences between mail.ru
> and Wikipedia, I should think it would be clear why one might be
> subject to a direct demand for transferring data while the other is
> not. If anything, I think it's more reasonable to assume that
> Wikipedia (which shares many features with Google, Yahoo, Twitter,
> Facebook and other social networks) has been the subject of this kind
> of demand than that it hasn't. No one with direct knowledge would be
> able to do anything other than deny it, but we can easily see why data
> held by Wikipedia (including partially anonymized e-mails, file
> uploads, talk page communication, etc.) would be of interest to
> intelligence agencies.
>
>
I would be fired and jailed before I knowingly let that occur. If this was
the case I'd very surely not be working for Wikimedia Foundation.

- Ryan