[WikiEN-l] Re: Classified information in Wikipedia

Thu Apr 7 16:35:56 UTC 2005

The question isn't whether it is likely (I don't know how to measure
that, it would likely depend on the person in question -- if they were
a Wikipedia user and not a Usenet user, they might prefer the former
over the latter), but whether it is feasible. As for the IP address
problem, there are plenty of ways to do a "one shot" approach that
would be virtually untraceable (public library for example).

Anon could easily lie about the source. "Oh, I scanned it out of a
book Los Alamos produced (and it is in the PD since LANL is a gov
operated lab). Here's a citation." There are lots of obscure books
which provide excellent public domain pictures (many of the images
I've scanned in of Manhattan Project scientists come out of just such
sources). Who will check them all?

The question of "will any of us know it is secret" is another
difficult concern inherent in secrecy. Would you know a secret if you
saw it? If it isn't advertised as being secret information, you might
just assume it was speculation, or false. It's a very difficult
epistemological problem in general, actually. (I happen to be
investigating just this question in some of my academic work at the
moment, to be honest with you. It has a rich history.)

So, I don't think the possibility of someone adding classified
information to Wikipedia and us not knowing about it is infeasible.
The legal question is: what happens if the US government says to
remove it? The more I think about it, the more the answer is, "we
probably just remove it anyway." I'm fairly sure Wikipedia, unless it
is located in North Korea, is subject to some form of laws about
respecting the US government's labeling of things as top secret (and
if it was in the DPRK, we'd have some new free speech issues!). It
would only have a chance in court if we were claiming, and adamantly
maintaining (willing to go to court over it), that the information was
*not* secret. Otherwise, that'd be that, legally. At least, that's my
interpretation of the case law.

If we are thinking about policy, I would recommend:
*Information that purports to be classified and leaked should probably
not be on Wikipedia. There are other outlets to wage one's war on
secrecy, we can afford to play it safe on this one and not feel we are
really hurting the world in any great way.
*If Wikipedia was told by a government that certain information on it
was classified and was asked to remove it, we should consider it on a
case-by-case basis. Safe option is to just capitulate, though I know
some of the more idealistic people would disagree with this on
principle. (I'm not very idealistic.)

FF

On Apr 7, 2005 12:22 PM, Bryan Derksen <bryan.derksen at shaw.ca> wrote:
 > 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.
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