Wikimedia Foundation v. NSA

Great article, thanks for doing what you do ;)

you mean making huge profits from donations?

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-intersect/wp/2015/12...

What do people have to hide with any 'public' metadata?

This argument you're using with Wikipedia is basically the same one US government is making that this metadata information is public so they should be free to vacuum all of it up, including Americans. Even though we would never allow the police, or basically anyone else, to tap this at will and this information only exists in private pipes that must be tapped.

The leaked documents have shown a lot of this metadata included data that was included in unsecured HTTP POST headers, such as the multitude of mobile apps that broadcast user information over clear text, such as the various examples in PowerPoint screens shots of real 'metadata' that showed GPS coordinates being pinged back to servers via HTTP along with email addresses.

We can pretend all we want that this is public data because these sites are access publicly but any basic level of analysis into what 'metadata' contains it's quite obvious this doesn't hold up. Especially considering it includes individual interactions with web servers with private data.

You may not care about your private interactions with Wikipedia being scanned and stored in databases forever, but it's hardly just Wikipedia and I'm happy that Wikimedia is standing up against this stuff for all people.

It's not too much to ask to hold security services to the same privacy standards we've held all government agencies for two centuries.

Did you read that article? Their reserve of 1.5 years of operational funding seems prudent.

That $MM donation stream is a pittance considering their scale - orders of magnitude larger than most VC-funded startups.

The mere threat of being surveilled already does a ton of damage to readers and editors. (although Wikipedia was in one of the NSA's leaked slides as a target [0]) It has a chilling effect [1] on users. A study even found that traffic to terrorism-related articles plunged after the Snowden leaks. [2] You might ask why this is a problem. The populace needs to be adequately informed about the facts about terrorism in order to deal with them rationally rather than stay perpetually afraid and let the government pass things like the Patriot Act that erodes their civil liberties. [3] (you hear the joke a lot that "this probably put me on a list", which is a pretty shocking demonstration of how normalized we've become to surveillance and being treated as bad guys for merely mentioning or looking at sensitive topics) Additionally, while non-registered editor locations are public (attached to a geolocatable IP address), those of registered users are not and I don't think any reader wants what they look at shared with other parties. While the specific case is against upstream surveillance by the NSA, I think the general idea is for Wikimedia to put their foot down against the encroachment of three-letter agencies on our domestic freedoms.

[0]: https://www.nytimes.com/2015/03/10/opinion/stop-spying-on-wi... [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chilling_effect [2]: http://www.reuters.com/article/us-wikipedia-usage-idUSKCN0XO... [3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patriot_Act