Wikimedia Foundation v. NSA

Who supervises the servers ? Who creates Wikipedia ? Who defends Wikipedia legally ?

Yes, but only the addressing as far as I know.

"In cyber, offense and defense become the same"

More details pls. Because it sounds like bs. It is a difference to secure a network and maybe find out who a attacker is - and then attack back - than to just hack everyone you can and build as much hidden botnets as possible. Which would be "offense"

"Gentlemen do not read each other's mail".

It is indeed a noble statemt. And I'd like to see claims, how that led to US disadvantage in WW2. Because when you have Nazis e.g. they are clearly not gentlemans anymore and can (and were afaik) be spied on. The statement means, that you only spy on enemys.

"We (USA) can impose restrictions on our NSA but not on anyone else's"

You are the still the superpower number one. And for once you lead by example. And you do indeed(or try to) impose restrictions on everyone else all the time.

If you would really stop to spy on everybody in the world and really only on your enemys ... this alone would make a huge impact. But you as a empire does not really want to. The more you know about the worlds secrets, the more you can controll it. And no, I am not saying that the smaller empires like china or russia are any better (not at all). But you are the power number on. You have the choice of leading by fear, violence and intimidating - or by sticking to your old values of respecting your peoples and others freedom(as long as it is mutual) and providing a base for a voluntary coorporation of any kind. If you do this, you stay in leadership. If you just become one more lame empire, using any means necessary to stay in power, you will just fall like any of those empires, as history and current trend shows.

I was trying to put a word on it too. It's irrational if minimization of harm is the goal. And it's totally blind to the externalities of pouring massive amounts of money into the surveillance industry and really the war industry more generally, as these two are highly interconnected.

The arguments are almost insidiously constructed.

> Vacuuming up packets is less alarming when you understand we've been vacuuming up radio and telephone signals for decades.

No.

> Seems like it's trendy to hate the NSA

Leading with an ad hominem.

> The US has tried going "NSA-less". It happened in 1929

Didn't something else happen in 1929 that impacted the overall stability and thereby war readiness of the US?

Speaking as a Wikipedia "volunteer" (or rather "editor"), I think it is in fact a very good idea that the Foundation takes no editorial responsibilities (except reacting to legal challenges via so-called "office actions"). It means that editors don't have to worry about legal, sysadmin, PR, etc.; and conversely WMF is not directly responsible for Wikipedia content. Believe me, it would be silly for WMF to be involved in all editorial disputes about what should or shouldn't be on Wikipedia, how things should be formatted, etc., in all languages.

Basically, the foundation is managing the playground where the editors can build an encyclopedia (along with other projects, e.g., Wikidata, Wikimedia Commons, etc.), and then mostly leaves the community alone (with some exceptions, not all of which were well-perceived). Given the scale of Wikimedia projects, I don't think 300 employees is excessive (it's very little when looking at other sites in the Alexa rankings except Reddit), and it's great that the expenses can be supported by donations so WMF doesn't have to depend on other people than readers.

I don't see why I would mind that WMF staff gets a salary and editors don't -- editing Wikipedia is not my full-time job, but running it is theirs. (In fact, to the extent that editing Wikipedia is part of my job as a public researcher, I already get a salary from my institution...) It's easier to manage Wikipedia content with volunteers (where most processes don't depend on one single person and where there are little firm deadlines) but to have paid staff to manage operations (if the website goes down you want someone to have a look immediately). OK, it would be conceivable that the foundation could offer grants to pay some full-time editors, or redistribute money as small gifts, or as a lottery, or something, but it raises a lot of complicated questions (I don't know whether the topic has been discussed before) and I'm not sure it would be worth the effort.

Another important point is that the WMF is not a company but a nonprofit, so it is reasonably transparent, and many people in the staff are chosen through elections. It's not like individuals are getting large dividends from donations to the WMF.

I my opinion, the most important point to keep in mind is that WMF asks for volunteer work, but the outcome of that work is shared on fair terms with the public. If I want, I can just grab their entire database https://dumps.wikimedia.org/ and software https://www.mediawiki.org/ and start hosting a mirror with the data, and I have both the technical possibility and the legal right to do it. So WMF is not like companies who ask for volunteer work and then keep it behind closed doors (e.g., the volunteer Google Maps editors, or the historical CDDB example https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CDDB#History).