[WikiEN-l] Re: Classified information in Wikipedia

Thu Apr 7 15:52:31 UTC 2005

Bryan Derksen wrote:

> Fastfission wrote:
>
>> 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've also posted a classified image in a forum where your IP address 
> is logged and widely available. You'd have to first find a proxy to do 
> this through, and we block proxies so I don't know how easy that would 
> be. You'd also be posting it on a single centralized server where it 
> could be removed at any time by admins. Why not just post it to 
> Usenet, a much less easily undone means of distribution?
>
> Anyhoo, let's say you did it anyway, and now there's this photo that 
> some anon uploaded. Someone else who knows this subject matter comes 
> along and sees it and says "interesting, I've never seen that before. 
> Hey, anon, where did you find this?" What can the anon possibly say in 
> response that wouldn't violate either the "no original research" 
> policy or our verifiability requirements? If this design is classified 
> and there have been no leaks of it before, there's no way to determine 
> whether this is for real or if it's just some movie prop that a guy 
> built in his garage and took photos of. So it doesn't belong in 
> Wikipedia, and it will probably wind up being removed by Wikipedia's 
> existing processes.
>
> How would having a policy specifically against classified information 
> speed this up in any way? You'd still need to show that it _was_ 
> classified, which amounts to the same sort of effort it would take to 
> attempt to verify the photo (possibly moreso, since failing to verify 
> it is enough to qualify it for removal whereas failing to determine if 
> it's classified would leave the issue up in the air). And if we did 
> have such a policy, and if I was an Evil Foreign Agent who for some 
> reason thought Wikipedia was a good source of such information, I'd 
> simply watchlist Votes for Classified Information Removal and copy 
> everything as it came up for discussion there. Wikipedia would be 
> doing half my work for me.

Images of classified information can't be public domain - if they were, 
they can't be classified. They can't be 
{{copyrightedusefwithpermission}} (or whatever it is) since the image 
has been *stolen* by the uploader, and is breaking the law. Not GFDL or 
CC either; possibly could be {{PDUSGovernment}} (or whatever it is, 
depending on where it came from), but in summary: Images of classified 
material would be removed by the Image Sleuthing team, because they lack 
source info.

-- 
Alphax
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Alphax
There are two kinds of people: those who say to God, 'Thy will be done,' and those to whom God says, 'All right, then, have it your way.' - C. S. Lewis