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