* Geoff Brigham wrote: >https://blog.wikimedia.org/2013/06/14/prism-surveillance-wikimedia/
You are not making a good case there as to what to do and why and how this community is affected and needs to act. An immediate question seems to be whether the Wikimedia Foundation should become signatory of the "Stop Watching Us" open letter. No, the letter puts too much emphasis on "people in the United States" and "domestic spying" and the Foundation should not give the impression that that is a special kind of bad. In the posting above you write: Freedom of speech and access to information are core Wikimedia values. These values can be compromised by surveillance: editors and readers understandably are less willing to write and inform themselves as honestly and freely. Should the U.S. stop gathering intelligence on people in Iran that con- tribute on the arabic Wikipedia in articles on nuclear physics? Should the U.S. carefully limit which signals going in and out of North Korea it intercepts to protect the privacy of the people there, or would it be okay if the U.S., say, simply intercepts all Internet traffic and phone calls and filters the data for anything interesting? Should there be a "special committee to investigate, report, and reveal to the public the extent of" all the foreign intelligence activity of the U.S.? And bad countries may do all the same things that good countries may do? I can see nothing obvious that the Foundation could say or do in this regard at this time, and would expect the community to develop answers to questions like mine above before calling for action. So, no, I don't think the Foundation should join those other organisations at this time. -- Björn Höhrmann · mailto:bjo...@hoehrmann.de · http://bjoern.hoehrmann.de Am Badedeich 7 · Telefon: +49(0)160/4415681 · http://www.bjoernsworld.de 25899 Dagebüll · PGP Pub. KeyID: 0xA4357E78 · http://www.websitedev.de/ _______________________________________________ Wikimedia-l mailing list Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l