Hoi,
The fact that law suits like this actually happen is a wonderful
improvement in and of itself.
Our aim is to freely share in the sum of all knowledge. Free has many
meaning, one of them is free to share without consequences.It is not only
about free of cost.In the past we implemented https for the very reason
that we did not want eavesdropping on the content from our Wikis. I think
nobody ever suggested that we should not do this because of the cost. Now
we know that even with https organisations like the NSA have a capability
to listen in. There are many technical ways to make it more complicated to
eavesdrop including using a multitude of cache servers that serve our
content locally.
Organisations like the NSA are thought to be good for the status quo, for
the USA. They share their intel widely. In arguments it is always said that
US-Americans have nothing to fear. Our public is largely not in the US By
going to court, the Wikimedia Foundation make it clear that it cares for
the people who by definition are free game for the NSA. The argument "Why
is the WMF in the USA" has been made before. I am happy that because of the
WMF being in the USA it has standing to go to a US court. The least it does
is make it obvious that the NSA is not behaving in a way that is conducive
to propagating democracy and its associated values in our world. It shames
the current practices and the donkey may sing.
Thanks,
GerardM
On 11 March 2015 at 06:03, MZMcBride <z(a)mzmcbride.com> wrote:
Hi.
I'm of two minds here. I would love for mass surveillance to stop; the
revelations of the past few years are disgusting. However, this lawsuit
has the appearance of being the start of a completely un-winnable case
that's merely an expensive political stunt. Perhaps especially due to the
SOPA protests, I'm very wary of the Wikimedia Foundation engaging in
stunts like this. I have a few questions.
Has the Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees passed a resolution
authorizing the Wikimedia Foundation general counsel and executive
director to pursue this lawsuit? I understand that one board member
(Jimmy) is involved, of course, but something of this scale seems like it
would require explicit authorization.
What's the projected financial cost of this lawsuit for the Wikimedia
Foundation?
What's the projected length of time that this lawsuit will take to resolve?
What specifically is the Wikimedia Foundation hoping to accomplish with
this lawsuit? I read about "filing this suit [...] to end this mass
surveillance program in order to protect the rights of our users around
the world," but what's a best-case scenario here? What could a federal
judge do here?
How does the Wikimedia Foundation intend to protect the rights of users
around the world when it will have a nearly impossible time of protecting
Americans, much less non-Americans? U.S. courts and the U.S. Congress have
made it very clear that spying on non-Americans is completely acceptable,
so when I read that the aim is to protect users worldwide, I'm pretty
skeptical.
Is there any indication from prior court cases that this lawsuit will be
successful? Reading <https://www.eff.org/node/84572> about Jewel v. NSA
leads to me to think that we already know almost exactly what's likeliest
to happen here.
Aside from standing, U.S. government agencies (even outside of
intelligence agencies) have broad immunity from lawsuits. How does the
Wikimedia Foundation intend to penetrate immunity here? It seems very
unlikely that a single slide in a classified presentation, which honestly
references Wikipedia only in passing as an example of a site using HTTP,
will convince any judge that there's enough to establish standing and
penetrate immunity.
My concern is that this will be an expensive, decade-long lawsuit that
will eat donor money and ultimately accomplish nothing.
Nearly all of the "surveillance" that takes place on our projects comes
from our users. We're radically transparent and we make it trivial to
track and audit any user's actions. This is by design, as it allows us to
prevent vandalism and other harm to the projects. Given Wikimedia's
particular setup, including the fact that we, for example, willfully
expose IP addresses if a user chooses to not log in, it seems that the
Wikimedia Foundation would have an even higher bar to clear in order to
establish harm.
But more to the point: even if by some miracle, this case were resolved in
2015 with a very explicit federal court order instructing the National
Security Agency to cease mass surveillance, is there anyone who believes
that this will end mass surveillance?
Our mission is to try to bring free educational content to the world.
Wouldn't it be a much smarter investment of donor resources to focus on
building Wikimedia? Surely there's plenty to do in that arena without us
needing to fight a battle we can't win in the courtroom.
MZMcBride
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