[Advocacy Advisors] PRISM

Wed Jun 12 05:51:27 UTC 2013

Following this...

As those of you on the Wikimedia-L list will have seen, I may have started
a little self-perpetuating storm over there by asking what implications
(moral, legal, technical) PRISM has for us.
I think it's been fairly well clarified that we have relatively minimal
exposure in the legal/technical sense due to the limited amount of
information we keep secretly anyway.
Of more potential interest, to me personally at least, is what moral
implications this has for us.

As was mentioned over there, apparently the WMF is preparing a blogpost
about this topic to publicly deny any association with the concept. I
think, as was suggested, that it is important this IS drafted publicly on
Meta to make sure that the wording doesn't smack of hiding behind carefully
chosen phrases like "no 'direct' access" such as was used by other tech
companies.

Moreover, there is now https://www.stopwatching.us/ that many of our 'close
friends' like the EFF, Mozilla, Internet Archive, American Library
Association... have signed up to. I do NOT think that this is an equivalent
of SOPA in the sense that we should take protest action on our own sites,
but I DO think it is worthwhile our joining this list of signatories. It
would seem to me to be, literally, the least we could do to declare
opposition to something that directly harms our mission of providing
uncensored (directly, or by self-censorship for fear of gov't reprisal)
access to knowledge to people.

-Liam / Wittylama

wittylama.com
Peace, love & metadata

On 12 June 2013 04:51, Stephen LaPorte <slaporte at wikimedia.org> wrote:

> Hello advocacy advisors,
>
> To follow up on Liam's note, the EFF has published two statements on PRISM
> and government surveillance.
>
> "International Customers: It's Time to Call on US Internet Companies to
> Demand Accountability and Transparency" -
> https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2013/06/international-customers-its-time-call-us-internet-companies-demand-accountability
>
> "86 Civil Liberties Groups and Internet Companies Demand an End to NSA
> Spying" -
> https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2013/06/86-civil-liberties-groups-and-internet-companies-demand-end-nsa-spying
>
> --
> Stephen LaPorte
> Legal Counsel
> Wikimedia Foundation
>
> *For legal reasons, I may only serve as an attorney for the Wikimedia
> Foundation. This means I may not give legal advice to or serve as a lawyer
> for community members, volunteers, or staff members in their personal
> capacity.*
>
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>
>
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