[Wikimedia-l] PRISM

Fred Bauder fredbaud at fairpoint.net
Wed Jun 12 10:24:05 UTC 2013


> Le 2013-06-11 14:09, Fred Bauder a écrit :
>> There will always be humans maintaining the system who must, in order
>> to
>> do their work, have potential access to everything.
>
> A "potential access to everything" is a so vast and vague assertion
> that it practicaly denote nothing.
>
> Also, one could come with the exact opposite assertion, full of
> always/never nothing/everything.

There are ways of monitoring actions by people with access to databases.
I'm sure NSA is looking into it. But a knowledgeable person with access
to an organization's databases can access nearly anything in it.
Obviously Snowden accessed a court order he had no right to view. I
suppose it could have been encrypted before being put in the data base,
but someone had to handle it in order to encrypt it.

At Wikimedia we stovepipe access as between language Wikipedias, Common,
oversighters, checkusers, stewards, etc. but our system developers have
practical access to nearly all that they do by directly accessing our
databases. Someone has the password; they have to in order to maintain
our software. Snowden had the password, and a habit of reading.

Fred

Fred





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