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@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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