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UK Judge Orders Wikipedia To Reveal User's Identity
BoxRec writes with this excerpt from The Daily Mail: "A mother trying to identify a blackmailer who posted 'sensitive' details about her child on Wikipedia has won the right to find out who edited her entry. In the first case of its kind, a High Court judge has ordered the online encyclopedia's parent company to disclose the IP address of one of its registered users."
Nothing.
Because I don't want you to know who I am.
What if he/she used Tor?
So, someone anonymously leaks information about shady financial dealing by a businesswoman, and then sends a letter indicating that the press was notified of these dealings. Apparently no request for payoff has been made. Sounds like a whistle blower not a blackmailer.
Is it wrong that I'm curious as to what the editor posted to get himself in trouble? Seems like the Streisand effect might backfire on the girl if the Internet is as cruel as I think it is.
Not by the court's order, but that the Daily Mail actually published a decent, non-sensationalistic article.
__ Someday, but not this morning, I'll finally learn to use the preview button.
No excuse. None.
I piss off bigots.
Why is this news? The victim showed a judge a blackmail letter. In that situation, of course a judge is going to sign documents forcing people with relevant information to disclose it to the police and/or DA.
Find free books.
whistleblowing is when you go to the press and release info of a criminal nature. blackmailing is when you send letters to the target with a threat to release the info, whether of a criminal nature or just a private, sensitive nature
please report to the nearest droid maintenance facility and have your moral circuitry checked out, thanks
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
USA - Florida From: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:General_disclaimer
In soviet russia the government regulates the companies.
How do people get tripped up on this stuff? If you are going to post something you KNOW you shouldn't post, use a proxy from a country like China or Russia. Then China gets the blame, and you stay hidden. Com'on. This isn't that hard.
Sadly, stuff you shouldn't post can include stuff you should post, but powerful people don't want you to post.
People need to know the limits of their freedom on the internet. I am all for freedom of the internets, expressing an idea, deploring stupid thoughts, but personal attacks and blackmail we need to have protections. Not because it causes social harm, people need to think before they act, but because it causes mental harm, long term mental harm. Mental harm our society will have to pay for in lost wages/taxes, mental assistance, and of course the sympathy/empathy we feel for these people. To become null to their pains is to become a person living in a warzone, not caring about those around us. We should not be that society.
Why wouldn't the Wikipedia comply/help even if they didn't legally have to? I don't think there's any compelling reason to protect the anonymity of someone who's blackmailing someone else from your website.
Don't take life so seriously. No one makes it out alive.
blackmail is blackmail is blackmail
whatever you think of your rights online, criminal activity renders some of your rights null and void
of course you have rights in a free society: as long as you also abide by your responsibilities. this is true of actual, flawed societies that are not entirely free, and also true of any hypothetical societies you can imagine that function perfectly: when you break your responsibilities you have in a free society, you have abdicated your rights. do you honestly think there is any way around that fact? a society of individuals who do not abide by their responsibilities is by direct consequence a society with few rights as well
the government is a side issue: most of your rights are violated in this world by your fellow citizens, not the government. of course the government also violates your rights. in a society trying to improve itself, this is revealed, discussed, and punished. just like individuals who violate your rights deserve to be punished. sorry, they don't deserve to be punished, they MUST be punished to show there is genuine consequences for abdication of responsibility in this world. without such enforcement, there's no reason to respect anyone's rights, whether by government, or a fellow citizen
to most of you, the previous paragraph is eye-glazingly obvious
however, i feel the need to say it, because underneath this story we will see a lot of howling of the government violating people's rights. when the fact is, if you blackmail someone, you HAVE to have your rights violated, for the sake of a functioning free society, actual or theoretical
we see a lot of complaints on these forums and in general about rights. what we don't see much discussion is one about responsibilities. please do your small part and keep that in mind: for every right you claim, you are also taking on an implied responsibility you must keep if you wish to maintain the rights you cherish
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
So they have the ip address. Big whoop. It doesn't reveal WHO posted, just the modem that was used.
Could have been a wifi user out at the street corner, a virus.. someone broke into the home and posted.. An IP in a vacuum isn't evidence.. its a suggestion..
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Wikipedia is run by the Wikimedia Foundation, which is based in the U.S, so I believe that they are bound by U.S law.
and the US probably has a mutual legal assistance treaty with the UK, including whatever local legal framework is necessary to give such treaties effect. Which means if wikipedia refused to comply then a letter can be sent over to a DA or somebody responsible for this stuff in the US with a copy of the court order and that would be obligated by the treaty to go to a US court and request a subpoena which the court would be obligated to enforce pursuant to the treaty. if wiki then refused to comply it would be found in contempt of the US court. (not to mention the UK court).
obviously it depends on the exact wording in the treaty but generally thats how MLATs work.
No one has a right to their *own* opinion. They have a right to the TRUTH.
I thought that this was way funnier without your disclaimer.
Do you think slave holders were not offended by being called murderers and inhuman? Do you think Catholics were not deeply disturbed by Protestants calling the Catholic hierarchy illegitimate and corrupt? The right to offend is an essential part of free speech rights.
In a democracy, you have a right to be protected form libel and criminal blackmail. You don't have a right to be protected from "mental harm" resulting from speech you find disturbing.
This news article was taken from the Daily Mail, a far-right tabloid newspaper which contains more foaming-at-the-mouth madness than a month of Fox News. This story was in all probability sandwiched between an article about how the eeevil not-quite-as-right-wing government are spending *your* taxes on a Christian Vegan Lesbian Holistic Nicaraguan Islamic Learning-impaired Whale-Yoga Ashram, and how the Fish-People really run the BBC which is why they showed eeeevil Nick Griffin and not an episode of Last of the Summer Wine.
Believe pretty much any article you read on Wikipedia before you believe the Daily Mail.
The order can't be enforced, as the Wiki Foundation is based in Florida. However, if you RTFA it says the Wiki Foundation has already caved in and agreed to reveal the IP address.
Which is great news for anyone in somewhere like China "anonymously" editing Wikipedia. Doing so could easily cost you your life if it's The Wiki Foundation's whim to expose you to your Government that day.
There's at least some possibility that this isn't a blackmailer but a whistleblower. Just another reason to question the practices of what goes on in the Wiki Foundation. Just another potential blow to truth at the hands of Wikipedia.
The servers are in Florida.
But that doesn't exclude the possibility that the Wikipedia or its managers may have a significant legal presence and exposure elsewhere.
The Wikipedia database is stored on a server in the State of Florida in the United States of America, and is maintained in reference to the protections afforded under local and federal law.
Jurisdiction and legality of content
Good article on this at the Register: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/12/03/wikipedia_blackmail_case_disclosure/
According to The Register article, Wikipedia WILL release the IP address when presented with an order by the court.
There appears to be some kind of business dispute behind all of this: "One of G's companies is in dispute with a person whom she believes is also behind a smear campaign against her. An anonymous letter she received appeared to be a threat to claim that her expenses claims amounted to theft. Another anonymous letter disclosed the information that was later published on the Wikipedia page."
Hic iacet Arthurus, rex quondam rexque futurus.
You missed 2.5) Judge looks at the post and all the other evidence offered by the plaintiff and decides if there is sufficient likelihood that the plaintiff would prevail to justify ordering the identity to be revealed.
It's always been the case that Wikimedia could reveal an IP address - just as Slashdot, or any other site could. When people leave comments on my blog, I get the IP addresses - if they annoyed me, or maybe for no reason at all, I could make their IP addresses public. No need for a court order.
I don't think it follows that just because Wikimedia reveals it in the case of a UK court order, for blackmail (something that is illegal in the US too, and is reasonably seen as illegal and unethical), not to mention vandalising Wikipedia, that they would also do so in the case of China for doing something that was entirely legal in the US, and where the edit was entirely reasonable.
Just because someone is not required by law to do something, doesn't mean they can't decide to do it anyway. Remember we're talking about someone vandalising the site - if I trolled some website, I could hardly go pleading sympathy if they revealed my IP address, whether or not a court was involved.
BLACKMAIL.
Repeat it with me, BLACKMAIL.
This isn't about "Oh! Johny said I was a lousy bint on Wikipedia!" it was about someone threatening someone and their child with public humiliation if they didn't give into whatever demands were made.If you can't say BLACKMAIL, then try EXTORTION, either way regardless of the medium being used, it's illegal.
A whistle blower is someone who alerts the media or authorities to wrong doing, by coming forward with evidence of this wrong doing.
A blackmailer is someone who alerts a victim that they have evidence of either wrong doing or simply humiliating facts and will go to the media or authorities if steps aren't taken by the victim.
Our "Mr. X" updated a Wikipedia article with possibly true information concerning our woman's expense reports and her child. They then sent two letters which implied they had more information they were going to share and had possibly already done so with part of it.
It really doesn't take a bright bulb to pick which slot Mr. X fits in here chief. Stop over reacting and realize that sometimes, just sometimes, the legal system is working.
# In reply, lawyers for the Respondent made a number of preliminary observations. First they addressed the request made on behalf of the Applicants that the amendment be deleted. They stated that the Respondent is not the publisher or writer of the article relating to the mother, or of the amendment. They said they would refer the request for the deletion of the archived version of the amendment to "the community of volunteer editors, one or more of whom may attempt to address your concerns". They referred to the immunity they claim under section 230 of the US Communications Decency Act (1996) from most civil liability for content they did not originate or develop. They stated that the Respondent does not conduct operations within the jurisdiction of this court. Nevertheless, they stated that they were happy to forward the Applicants' request to their volunteer community.
# The amendment was removed promptly following the request made on behalf of the Applicants.
# In their letter of 19 November lawyers for the Respondent next addressed the Applicants' request for the IP information. They stated that it is the policy of the Respondent that such data be released in response to a valid sub poena or equivalent compulsory legal process. They added:
"Without waiving our insistence that no court in the United Kingdom has proper jurisdiction over us as a foreign entity, we nevertheless are willing to comply with a properly issued court order narrowly limited to the material you ask for in your letter".
http://www.bailii.org/ew/cases/EWHC/QB/2009/3148.html
"Wikipedia should refuse to comply."
No, WP should act ethically as it did in this instance. I don't know about your ethics but mine says that I should not knowingly assist blackmailers and kidnappers.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
The WMF would be free to ignore such a ruling. Indeed it is free to ignore this one however has chosen not to because it thinks the court order is reasonable based on the facts they have available and the English courts do have a passing relationship with sanity (well some of the time anyway).
If you read the judgement:
http://www.bailii.org/ew/cases/EWHC/QB/2009/3148.html
the court accepts that it doesn't have jurisdiction but that the WMF has agreed to cooperate to an extent.
Yeah right, because exposing a blackmailer is the same as working for the ministry of truth.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
There really ought to be a "-1 Impossible to Read" mod.
When you're afraid to download music illegally in your own home, then the terrorists have won!
Agreed. In this case. Why in this case? Because a JUDGE has decided that this is a case of blackmail. And while I know no judge is infallible, they are human after all and the evidence presented may be incomplete or incorrect, I do generally trust their qualities. And if a judge says it's a case of blackmail then I would consider it a case of blackmail until proven otherwise.
So even though that judge may be in the UK and WP in the USA it would be nice for them to comply with the request and reveal the IP address from which the edit was done. After that it's again up to law enforcement to figure out who actually did it. Whether the information is enough is another matter, at least WP did what they could and should do.
It's funny that with all your impotent rage over this poor blackmailer's privacy being violated, you don't seem to give, as you say, 0.1 of 1% of a shit about how he violated the woman's right to privacy, and her son's right to privacy. Nosir, they have no such right to privacy. Only the internet is private, and you can say ANYTHING and threaten ANYTHING against ANYBODY and your right to hide is sacrosanct. But your address, your phone number, where you go to school, none of that shit is private, information wants to be free, we have a GOD GIVEN RIGHT TO KNOW ABSOLUTELY EVERYTHING (except, as you've established, IP addresses).
ASCII stupid question, get a stupid ANSI
If only I read followup headline that said 'wikipedia tell UK to blow it out their ass,' today would end as a good day. Then wikipedia gets removed from the UK and pissed-off protesters would show the government that they are sick of trading in protection for their freedoms. It would then be followed by a spectacular event of pink clouds precipitating candy and rainbows that we can use as space elevators. Finally, all UK politicians would simultaneously get a hearts attack, become resuscitated, then get another heart attack.
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that is one of the reasons blackmail is effective. Because taking action against it is likely result in the info being revealed.
Someone tried it on David Letterman not that long ago. They tried to extort money from Letterman based on knowledge of an extramarital affair Letterman was having. Letterman went to the cops, and the info about the affair came out, causing Letterman considerable hassle and embarassment. He had foreseen that and decided he was in a position to weather the storm (he is still a rich old dude no matter what) but others in the same situation could very well have just shut up and paid.
Depends. I once wrote to George Bush Sr a letter threatening to blow the whistle to the whole world that George Bush Jr is a good for nothing drunk, unless he sent me one million dollars. I never got a reply, though...
Nonsense. When the whistleblower is exposing incest or certain types of child abuse, the whistleblower automatically reveals the names of children involved by revealing the abuser. And sometimes a whistleblower or anonymously protected exposition is necessary because the guilty person cannot or will not be pursued by law enforcement, as occurred with the Catholic priests finally convicted of child harassment in the strange cases that led to Cardinal Bernard Law being taken off the short list for the next Pope.
That's why I love Wikileaks, at least so far. They actually protect their sources. And they do seem to show some discretion about what they publish, which helps prevent blackmail abuse. I was vastly amused when they published various manuals on operations at Guantanamo Bay.
if i shout fire in a crowded theatre, and this leads to someone's death, than i am criminally culpable
yet according to you, this is protected free speech
no: there genuinely exists in this world, simply as a result of clear logical consequence, that some speech must be disallowed for the sake of justice in this world. the "fire" in a crowded theatre example is merely one of a million such scenarios where free speech is genuinely and intractably incompatible with the concept of justice
your problem is that you are a free speech fundamentalist. a fundamentalist is someone who adheres to a concept WITHOUT EXCEPTION: free speech, the free market, the infallibility of the bible/ quran/ torah, whatever. there are millions of types of fundamentalists, each being someone who holds a concept to be without exception and utterly unquestionable, like you and free speech
the truth is that in this world, every concept, even the ones you hold most dear, have exceptions, and must be questioned. the concepts i hold most dear have exceptions and must be questioned. that's just the nature of this world: its complicated. fundamentalism therefore creates suffering in this world because it tries to impose a cookie cutter simplification of human nature onto a complicated world, such that all of the inevitable exceptions of real human behavior in the real world are not tolerated, and are punished... when such behavior isn't really wrong, and may in fact be what is right
your words speak of a young mind. you are probably 14 years old. give it time, you'll figure it out... and if you actually aren't 14, god save us all from the fools and the fundamentalists in this world: the simplistic way you think about your world is poisonous
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
there are exceptions to every concept
such as to free speech by shouting fire in a theatre resulting in death WHEN THERE ISN'T A FIRE
now that i've tacked on the braindead fucking obvious qualifier, without which you think you are allowed to smugly weasel out of examining your free speech fundamentalism, i suggest you finally examine how you have failed in creating a logically coherent set of "principles"
yes, you are "principled"
pfft
assholes who consciously defy self-examination of their own failures usually have a whole bunch of complementary adjectives to describe their supposed wholesomeness
morons who don't vaccinate their children are fighting for individual rights (at the expense of public health)
morons who don't allow their children blood transfusions are fighting for religious freedom (at the expense of their child's death)
morons who quote the constitution as if it were the fucking bible without actually THINKING about the concepts behind the document are defiling the very spirit the framers of the constitution committed to paper. if the founding fathers were reading this thread, they would point to your braindead zeal as the very enemy of the concepts they were describing
the constitution describes a trust between the people and its government. this is a living trust, meaning with changes in society and technology, its words should, rightfully, change over time to adhere to the PRINCIPLES it embodies. meanwhile, aping the fucking words and NOT THINKING ABOUT THE MEANING BEHIND THEM is merely making a trust with a dead, static long ago era. you sitting there spouting the words of the constitution in the same way a religious zealot shouts verses from the quran or the bible makes perfect sense in summarizing exactly what you are: a brain dead, zombified, unthinking fucking fundamentalist, an enemy of the PRINCIPLES the founding father held dear
now grow a fucking brain and THINK and QUESTION and therefore validate your sorry rotten mind
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Regardless of ethics they should not allow their platform to be used by people to intentionally spread (allegedly) false information or to allow information tainted by an obvious bias so it's in their best interest to allow investigation into its source.
If all else fails, immortality can always be assured by spectacular error.
Well, more to the point, why should privacy exist on wikipedia, especially when the page topic is another person.
Its not wikileaks after all.
How can reliability of information be achieved without accountability?
Yes, I fully understand the theory that crowd sourcing will eventually get it right, but when there is no crowd involved, and there are simply a couple of individuals talking trash there can be no expectation that the content will ever be believable.
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
someday, assuming a more nuanced social skillset, you might have a child
in which case, the irrational desire to protect that child from the various dangerous scenarios of adult life will be felt in your own mind. and it is an irrational desire. much like the irrational desire to feed. or the irrational desire to fornicate. in other words: not so rational from a point of view of principles and concepts, but very rational from the point of view of the preservation of and continuation of life: take care of your children
biological imperatives trump all high minded concepts. principles and concepts work only when they aren't interfering with biological imperatives. as an example: every right, freedom, and sense of decency you hold dear and valuable in your mind is just one food riot away from being completely violated without any recourse to justice. no police, court system, or government body can remain coherent when those police, judges, and government bureaucrats are more busy with trying to procure some food. so pay attention to those biological imperatives, they matter a hell of a whole lot. ignore them at the peril of losing all progress we've ever made in human society
so if you have kids, you will understand that this impulse isn't so irrational after all, as there is a very real biological rational reason to protect your offspring from the real world until they are able enough physically and mentally to protect themselves: for species that have a small set of children, such as homo sapiens, evolution favors the survival rate of organisms that actively protect their offspring
all i'm saying is that "think of the children!" might be the butt of every slashdot joke, but it is also a "hysteria" that you need to make peace with and accept, because it is simply never, ever going away. because it actually makes a hell of a lot of sense, but from a different point of view, a point of view that trumps all other points of view
without children, all the arguments you could ever have about rights and freedoms won't matter one bit if there's no one here to inherit the society and the government you tried to improve. the health and well being of the generation that comes after you is all you leave in this world, on an individual and a societal level. so it really is of the highest importance that you do your best to protect them until they can fend for themselves
this simple, brutal logic defeats and overrules all other arguments you can possibly make. "think of the children" reigns supreme. deal with it
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
That would be pseudonymous not anonymous.
Whenever someone is sending threatening letter with or without a child involved it is blackmail. And everybody does have the right to display the writer of such letter. So this has nothing to do with 'think of the children'.
Perhaps their image might be tarnished and people given the impression that they enjoy protecting blackmailers?
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it