[Wikimedia-l] Wikimedia and the politics of encryption

[Matthew Flaschen]

On 09/02/2013 06:17 PM, Tim Starling wrote:
> It would allow WMF to monitor censorship and surveillance by being in
> the request loop.

There's no guarantee they would accept HTTPS, even if there were still 
user surveillance inside the data center.

 > It would be kind of like the cooperation we give to the US government
 > at the moment, except specific to readers in China instead of imposed
 > on everyone in the world.

This is apples and oranges, in my opinion.  Yes, the U.S. monitors 
Internet traffic in some circumstances.  And I assume they occasionally 
serve subpoenas and such to Wikimedia.

But as far as I know, the U.S. government has never blocked the general 
public from accessing a Wikipedia article, nor have they sent a takedown 
that was based on ideology/"social harmony"/etc.

> We would be able to deliver clear error messages in place of censored
> content, instead of a connection reset.

Not necessarily.  Google was delivering such censorship notes for a 
while 
(http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2013/jan/04/google-defeat-china-censorship-battle), 
but eventually conceded to China in a game of chicken.

As mentioned by other people, they also tried this approach of 
tolerating censorship in China for google.cn, but eventually pulled out. 
  google.cn is now just a picture of their home page that links to 
google.com.hk

I understand the goals of your hypothetical solution.  However, 
pragmatic matters aside, I think it's too far down the road of appeasing 
censorship.

Matt Flaschen