[Wikimedia-l] PRISM

[Anthony]

On Tue, Jun 11, 2013 at 5:52 AM, Mathieu Stumpf <
psychoslave at culture-libre.org> wrote:

> Le 2013-06-10 16:01, John Vandenberg a écrit :
>
>  It would be good *if* the WMF can provide assurances to editors that
>> they havent received any national security letters or other 'trawling'
>> requests from any U.S. agency.
>>
>
> I doubt they can. Even if they say so, how do you check? May be you can
> teach people what trusting mean, and what are logical limits of trusting.
> But, to my mind, your proposal would be misguiding people on what is trust.


Do the letters require people to lie?  If they did, is that something that
could be challenged in regular, non-secret court (perhaps with some parts
of the lawsuit "under seal" or something)?

On the other hand, the value of this is rather limited.  If the WMF can't
say it, it could mean that it once received a secret subpoena regarding the
IP addresses of someone they had probable cause to believe was involved
with some specific terrorist plot.  Or it could mean they got a letter
requiring all their logs all the time in perpetuity.

If you really need your web browsing to be anonymous, what can you do?
HTTPS plus an anonymizing proxy plus noscript gets you some level of
security.  If your browsing habits can reveal your courtroom defense
strategy, is this simple form of anonymization enough to trust the freedom
of your client?  Maybe it depends on how big of a target your client is.
If your client is Martin Luther King Jr., and J. Edgar Hoover is the
President, maybe you've gotta take a few steps beyond a simple anonymizing
proxy.