Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2015-10-21/News and notes



Wikimedia lawsuit against NSA dismissed
As reported on October 23 by Ars Technica, The Guardian, TechDirt, The Baltimore Sun, Gizmodo and others, the case brought by the Wikimedia Foundation and others against the National Security Agency (see previous Signpost coverage) has been dismissed on standing grounds.

Judge T. S. Ellis III (misidentified in Wikipedia and by Ars Technica as Richard D. Bennett), who had also presided over the lawsuit's first hearing last month, said in his memorandum opinion (available here) that the suit relied on "the subjective fear of surveillance". He also critiqued various aspects of the plaintiffs' statistical analysis, which sought to demonstrate that Wikipedia traffic must have been caught up in NSA data collection. Ellis characterized said analysis as "mathematical gymnastics", "incomplete and riddled with assumptions":

Ellis' dismissal of the case was in large part based on the United States Supreme Court's 5–4 majority decision in Clapper v. Amnesty International USA:

In conclusion, Ellis asserted that any concern that the principles established in Clapper would immunize surveillance from scrutiny was misplaced: "no government surveillance program is immunized from judicial scrutiny", Ellis said, enumerating several ways in which such scrutiny can take place, for example through the non-public reviews performed by the United States Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, or when surveillance results are used in a criminal prosecution.

Ellis concluded by saying that

Responses
Commenting on Ellis' argument that government surveillance programs were subject to judicial scrutiny whenever the intelligence gleaned was used in criminal proceedings, Techdirt's Mike Masnick pointed out that the U.S. government has in the past failed to make the appropriate disclosures in such cases:

ACLU National Security Project staff attorney Patrick Toomey, who argued the case pro bono on behalf of the plaintiffs, said,

On its website, the ACLU said, in part,

The Wikimedia Foundation released a statement on its blog, saying in part:

Affiliates mailing list launched
An October 15 post on the Wikimedia-l mailing list announced the launch of the The announcement sparked a considerable amount of debate as to whether another mailing list was necessary or desirable. 

Brief notes

 * This year’s victorious monument photos from Germany are listed in a post on the Wikimedia blog.
 * Wikipedia wins Princess of Asturias Award: Wikipedia was the recipient of the 2015 Award for International Cooperation at the Princess of Asturias Awards. Other award winners included U.S. filmmaker Francis Ford Coppola, Cuban writer Leonardo Padura Fuentes, Spanish philosopher Emilio Lledo, French economist Esther Duflo and biochemists Emmanuelle Charpentier and Jennifer Doudna. For further details, see the related Wikimedia blog post and press coverage by the Latin American Herald Tribune and others.