[Wikimedia-l] NSA

[Peter Southwood]

Thanks, This answers my question.
P
----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Luis Villa" <lvilla at wikimedia.org>
To: "Wikimedia Mailing List" <wikimedia-l at lists.wikimedia.org>
Sent: Thursday, August 01, 2013 2:13 AM
Subject: Re: [Wikimedia-l] NSA


> On Wed, Jul 31, 2013 at 4:11 PM, Michael Snow 
> <wikipedia at frontier.com>wrote:
>
>>
>>> 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.
>
>
> Thanks for the voice of reason, Michael.
>
> As a quick reminder here, before any conspiracy theories about orders and
> data retention get out of control:
>
> 1) We've flat-out denied any sort of involvement in this, and we continue
> to stand by that denial:
> https://blog.wikimedia.org/2013/06/14/prism-surveillance-wikimedia/
>
> 2) Take with a grain of salt, of course, but our understanding (based on
> the few gag orders that have been made public) is that we could be forced
> to not confirm having received a National Security Letter, but we can't
> actually be forced to lie about it. In other words, if we'd received one 
> we
> would not be allowed to say "we've received one", but we also could not be
> forced to deny it - we'd always have the option to remain silent instead.
>
> 3) We understand that the rules cause some people not to trust our denial,
> and can't entirely blame them! That is why we've asked the government to
> change the rules, so that you can have more trust in us next time we issue
> the same denial:
> https://blog.wikimedia.org/2013/07/18/wikimedia-foundation-letter-transparency-nsa-prism/
>
> This is not to say that the http/https issue isn't important; like
> Engineering, we think progress on that issue is important. But it is
> important to keep "we don't yet deploy https as widely as we'd like"
> separate from "there are secret orders to transfer all our logs to the 
> NSA."
>
> Thanks-
> Luis
>
> -- 
> Luis Villa
> Deputy General Counsel
> Wikimedia Foundation
> 415.839.6885 ext. 6810
>
> NOTICE: *This message may be confidential or legally privileged. If you
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