[Advocacy Advisors] PRISM

Wed Jun 12 06:41:56 UTC 2013

Liam,

Given that 1/1000th sampling of article readers' access logs has
recently been increased to complete archival for 30 days, it seems
preposterous and misleading to suggest that "we have relatively
minimal exposure in the legal/technical sense." Would you please
elaborate?

I would prefer using banner space to urge a boycott of and individual
court actions against the companies who have been acquiescing to the
government's data access demands until Congress passes a law
abolishing and forbidding the practice of eavesdropping, because of
the high rate of incarceration in the US.  Do you believe there is a
direct causal relationship from the extent of surveillance and the
number of criminal convictions involving mandatory minimum sentences
in the US?

Sincerely,
James Salsman

On Wed, Jun 12, 2013 at 1:51 PM, Liam Wyatt <liamwyatt at gmail.com> wrote:
> 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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