[WikiEN-l] Re: Classified information in Wikipedia

Thu Apr 7 05:08:14 UTC 2005

Wikipedia is a forum where anybody could contribute information, even
anonymously. Let's say I was an employee at Vandenberg Air Force Base
(my errors on a number of missile related pages ought to prove that I
am not!) who decides that US nuclear secrecy is preventing adequate
public debate on current US nuclear policies. I anonymously log in and
upload a picture of a working W-88 warhead to the page on [[MIRV]]. Ha
ha, says I, I have secretly subverted secrecy. You could replace this
with "troop stations in Iraq" and "information that would be useful to
insurgents" if you want something from a non-nuclear realm.

This is not at all implausible (wasn't [[Mordechai Vanunu]] our
featured article not too long ago? See also: [[Daniel Ellsberg]]), and
indeed a public and editable forum such as Wikipedia would be an easy
way to do something like that. The question isn't whether Wikipedians
"outside the wall of secrecy" would be getting secret information and
putting it on here, it would be whether Wikipedians "behind the wall"
would do it. It's entirely plausible, if probably unlikely.

FF

On Apr 1, 2005 3:33 PM, Delirium <delirium at hackish.org> wrote:
> Unless Wikipedians are personally leaking classified information from
> government agencies, I don't see how this is even remotely a
> consideration.  If we can get our hands on the information through
> public sources, then so can anybody else who would want to use it for
> harmful purposes.  They don't need to go through us to get it.
> 
> -Mark
> 
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