[HN Gopher] Wikipedia admin jailed for 32 years after alleged Sa...
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Wikipedia admin jailed for 32 years after alleged Saudi
infiltration
Author : akolbe
Score : 155 points
Date : 2023-01-06 17:55 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (arstechnica.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (arstechnica.com)
| akolbe wrote:
| Not that it makes much difference, perhaps, but as far as I can
| tell from looking at archives of the Arabic Wikipedia sysop list,
| both the jailed Wikipedians (User:OsamaK and User:Ziad) had
| stopped being administrators around 2017, several years before
| their arrests:
|
| https://web.archive.org/web/20161008095137/https://ar.wikipe...
|
| https://web.archive.org/web/20171031110427/https://ar.wikipe...
|
| https://web.archive.org/web/20171031110427/https://ar.wikipe...
|
| https://web.archive.org/web/20180821114358/https://ar.wikipe...
|
| Edit: Desysop logs (stated reason in both cases was lack of local
| activity, not any wrongdoing):
|
| https://xtools.wmflabs.org/ec-rightschanges/ar.wikipedia.org...
|
| https://xtools.wmflabs.org/ec-rightschanges/ar.wikipedia.org...
| londons_explore wrote:
| Maybe the wheels of justice just took 5 years to track them
| down?
| notart666 wrote:
| It's a red herring from the Saudis to point at the fact that
| many Wikipedia entries are already heavily modified and
| controlled by interest groups like their own. Why they would
| announce it this way is another question.
| pvg wrote:
| Discussed yesterday:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34267223
| sn_master wrote:
| They were jailed IN Saudi Arabia, not FOR spying for Saudi
| Arabia. Please de-ambiguate the title.
| cge wrote:
| The title is confusing because it is poorly trying to mention
| the two potentially linked topics the article discusses:
|
| 1. Saudi Arabia jailed two Wikipedia administrators for their
| editing, arresting them in 2020.
|
| 2. The Wikimedia Foundation itself, in the last month, took
| significant action against editors in the MENA region [1],
| saying that they had inappropriate conflicts of interest in
| their editing and connections to external organizations, but
| also saying the "connections are a source of serious concern
| for the safety of our users that go beyond the capacity of the
| local language project communities targeted to address." The
| Foundation directly banned 16 users, which included a _quarter_
| of the Arabic Wikipedia administrators.
|
| While problems with conflicts of interest are common on
| Wikipedia, and I haven't been involved for some time, so my
| perspective might be out of date, these are generally discussed
| openly, through normal processes, even in major and acrimonious
| cases like Scientology. My understanding is that it's _very_
| unusual for the Foundation itself to take this sort of drastic
| action; they aren 't giving many details, as they say there are
| both legal and safety problems with doing so.
|
| So the question/disagreement in this article is to what extent
| these two events are linked, and in what way. The two rights
| groups want more information made public, and appear to be
| suggesting that the agents involved used their administrator
| status in order to pursue the jailed administrators. WMF is
| saying that it would be unsafe to reveal more information. It
| appears that WMF, however, is suggesting the safety risks are
| risks of retaliation against individual users, not necessarily
| information security risks.
|
| I would speculate that what isn't being mentioned directly is
| whether any of the users either had CheckUser permission [1],
| or were able to convince administrators with CheckUser
| permission to provide information to them. Normal Wikipedia
| administrators do not have the ability to access information
| about IP addresses and MediaWiki-sent emails of logged-in
| users; only a significantly smaller subset of administrators
| with "CheckUser" permission can see this. My guess is that when
| WMF disputes the "highest ranks" claim of the rights groups,
| they are interpreting that as a claim that CheckUser was
| involved, and users in Saudi Arabia were being unmasked by that
| access, while it's quite possible that the rights groups simply
| said "highest ranks" without intending it to have specific
| meaning, instead just trying to explain "administrator" in a
| somewhat overstated way for a non-Wikipedia audience.
|
| If data access was involved, then it would be very concerning.
| But I think it's quite likely that the banned administrators
| were administrators more to facilitate pushing views on pages
| and influencing decisions on banning users / etc, while their
| retaliation against users and administrators only really
| _needed_ their participation in conversations to identify
| target users, and research with openly-accessible user
| information and conversations, along with the resources of a
| state intelligence agency with wide-ranging powers, to identify
| the people behind those accounts. It might be easier to
| identify a users with access to IP address logs, but if you are
| targeting only a handful of individuals, and you can monitor
| all connections in the country, there are likely many other
| options, like looking at connection timings and publicly-
| viewable edit times over a long period of time. And even then,
| this assumes that you can 't simply identify the users by what
| they've said.
|
| [1]:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2...
| [2]: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/CheckUser_policy
| [deleted]
| akolbe wrote:
| I agree the title is terrible. Hacker News demands that
| original titles be used. :/
| aw1621107 wrote:
| Using original titles isn't a strict requirement. The
| guidelines allow editing titles if the original is misleading
| or clickbait, presumably as long as the edits are reasonable.
| akolbe wrote:
| I've edited the title. For reference, the actual article
| title is "Wikipedia admin jailed for 32 years after alleged
| Saudi spy infiltration" - which does indeed make it sound
| as though the Wikipedian was jailed for "alleged Saudi spy
| infiltration". That's not the case.
|
| Instead, what is meant by "infiltration" is that the Saudi
| government has allegedly infiltrated Wikipedia and that
| this is the reason why the Wikimedia Foundation recently
| banned all Saudi-based administrators from further
| involvement in Wikimedia websites.
|
| What two Saudi Wikipedians have reportedly been jailed for
| is "swaying public opinion" and "violating public morals."
| See https://dawnmena.org/saudi-arabia-government-agents-
| infiltra... and https://alqst.org/en/post/extreme-jail-
| terms-in-saudi-arabia...
| dang wrote:
| I think "Saudi Arabia jails Wikipedia admin for 32 years;
| alleged govt infiltration of WP" is still a bit
| confusing, plus we try to avoid abbreviations as a device
| for fitting the 80-char limit.
|
| I agree this is a tough one! I've reverted to the
| article's title but took out the word "spy" since it
| doesn't clarify anything.
|
| If someone suggests a better title, we can change it
| again. Better = "more accurate and neutral, preferably
| using representative language from the article".
| akolbe wrote:
| Okay.
| pvg wrote:
| Your edit doesn't make the title less confusing, just
| confusing in a different way. The original seems fine,
| it's neither misleading nor clickbait so there's not a
| particularly strong case for changing it.
| VWWHFSfQ wrote:
| What is a Wikipedia "admin"? Is this just a person that edits
| pages?
| akolbe wrote:
| A Wikipedia admin is an unpaid volunteer (not a staffer) with
| access to extra functions of the MediaWiki software Wikipedia
| uses. They typically get these rights through a community vote
| like this one:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Requests_for_adminsh...
|
| "Administrators, commonly known as admins or sysops (system
| operators), are Wikipedia editors who have been granted the
| technical ability to perform certain special actions on the
| English Wikipedia. These include the ability to block and
| unblock user accounts, IP addresses, and IP ranges from
| editing, edit fully protected pages, protect and unprotect
| pages from editing, delete and undelete pages, rename pages
| without restriction, and use certain other tools."
|
| For more info see:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Administrators
| codetrotter wrote:
| > perform certain special actions on the English Wikipedia
|
| What about other languages? Aren't there any admins for those
| too?
| bpeebles wrote:
| There are admins on all of the Wikipedias under the WMF
| umbrella--each one sets their own rules for how admins are
| picked and how long, if limited at all, their terms are. I
| do not know what the process is for the Arabic-language
| wiki in question.
| akolbe wrote:
| Also a community vote. (The above sysop logs state
| "according to vote result" and "successful nomination"
| for the entries logging admin rights being given.)
| formerly_proven wrote:
| Note that this is still just a role within the Mediawiki
| software. They aren't actual sysops with e.g. access to the
| servers running the software. Only WMF has that.
| akino_germany wrote:
| "Administrators, commonly known as admins or sysops (system
| operators), are Wikipedia editors who have been granted the
| technical ability to perform certain special actions on the
| English Wikipedia. These include the ability to block and
| unblock user accounts, IP addresses, and IP ranges from
| editing, edit fully protected pages, protect and unprotect
| pages from editing, delete and undelete pages, rename pages
| without restriction, and use certain other tools."
|
| from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Administrators
| zidad wrote:
| Maybe the US can set a nice example by dropping Julian Assange's
| charges first
| andirk wrote:
| Assange threatened the Military Industrial Complex, the most
| powerful arm of the US government which all other parts dare
| not impede on under any circumstances. Similarly but far more
| broadly, these admins mentioned things the Saudi Arabian
| government didn't like. While the two corrupt governments are
| best of friends, they seem to have no sway in what the other
| does. See: bone saw.
| LadyCailin wrote:
| Let's assume they do. Would that make a difference? Gay
| marriage is legal in the US, why is it not legal in Saudi
| Arabia?
|
| So your suggestion is completely irrelevant.
| nailer wrote:
| > Would that make a difference?
|
| Would it get this guy out of jail? No.
|
| Would it make a difference? Yes. It would give the US some
| moral high ground so that tin pot regimes don't have the 'US
| imprisoned a guy for reporting war crimes' defence.
| janalsncm wrote:
| I'm a complete idiot when it comes to geopolitics but I'll
| put my tongue in the hornets nest in lieu of coffee today.
|
| _I_ would like it if Assange were let out, and _I_ would
| like it if the US truly had a moral high ground. However
| there is little to no political capital in ideological
| consistency. If there was, the US would classify Saudi
| Arabia in the same camp as Iran: repressive and
| untouchable.
|
| I suspect the realpolitik of the situation is something
| more like: ally with one, shun the other. SA has more
| strategic value, so Iran gets the shaft.
|
| Anyways, the point of this is not to defend Iran. The point
| is that Assange isn't in trouble for ideological reasons,
| but for political ones. He crossed the wrong people. George
| Washington himself would be in the same position if he ran
| Wikileaks.
| curiousgal wrote:
| -\infty + 10000 = -\infty
| [deleted]
| nerdponx wrote:
| This article is somewhat confusingly written.
|
| This is the timeline that I could gather:
|
| 1. In 2020, Saudi Arabia arrested two Saudi nationals who at one
| point had Wikipedia admin privileges, for posting things that the
| Saudi state didn't like.
|
| 2. In 2022, Wikimedia did some kind of investigation and banned
| 16 users for a "conflict of interest", but didn't provide further
| details.
|
| 3. Now, whistleblowers are alleging that Saudi state agents had
| "infiltrated" the "highest ranks" of Wikipedia admins, that this
| infiltration is what enabled the arrest of the two Saudi admins,
| that the 16 banned users were those same Saudi state agents.
|
| There is a further implication that now Wikimedia is denying the
| whistleblowers' claims in order to keep from further upsetting
| anyone in the Saudi government.
| akolbe wrote:
| The Wikimedia Foundation has posted a statement on the
| Wikimedia mailing list:
|
| https://lists.wikimedia.org/hyperkitty/list/wikimedia-l@list...
|
| The Ars Technica article too now features an update from the
| DAWN director, responding to Wikimedia.
| akolbe wrote:
| The two Wikipedians' prison sentences were recently increased,
| substantially so.
|
| See https://dawnmena.org/saudi-arabia-government-agents-
| infiltra... and https://alqst.org/en/post/extreme-jail-terms-
| in-saudi-arabia... (September 2022)
|
| The Wikimedia investigation was reportedly going on from
| January 2022 to December 2022:
| https://lists.wikimedia.org/hyperkitty/list/wikimedia-l@list...
|
| So key parts of both stories happened concurrently.
| CoastalCoder wrote:
| > There is a further implication that now Wikimedia is denying
| the whistleblowers' claims in order to keep from further
| upsetting anyone in the Saudi government.
|
| Yikes, I hope this isn't true. It would certainly undermine the
| fundraising slogan of Help Keep Wikipedia Independent.
| hef19898 wrote:
| Honestly, Sadam was class A ahole. But all things considered,
| if the war on terror wouod have been about anything other than
| nations willingnes to sell oil to the West, NATO should have
| invaded Saudi.
| johnea wrote:
| Regardless of anything that did, or never, happened at
| wikipedia, NATO should have invaded Saudi years ago.
|
| And certainly once they started openly dismembering people in
| their embassy.
|
| As much as it's appealing to blame all of this on repressive,
| religiously extremist governments, the bulk of the blame is
| laid on the US for continuing to ingratiate our entire
| country to these assholes in the name of petro-profit.
|
| The US is after all, a major EXPORTER of oil, and doesn't
| need Saudi oil except for adding additional profit to the
| industry...
| FpUser wrote:
| >"Regardless of anything that did, or never, happened at
| wikipedia, NATO should have invaded Saudi years ago."
|
| The only reason for one country to go to war with another
| should be in response to other country starting a war. If
| you do not like what they do inside then do not deal with
| them. If you feel sorry about their people - accept their
| refugees. Nobody gives you a right to declare yourself a
| saint and start killing people under "high moral"
| pretenses. We have already completely fucked up whole bunch
| of other countries and killed their people just to "save"
| them from dictatorship with the end result of them ending
| up in even worst state.
|
| You are simply advocating crime.
| cassepipe wrote:
| Note that the US is a an oil exporter since j019 only and
| that's only thanks to intense fracking which is much more
| costly that getting saudian oil and has quite an impact on
| the environment and nearby populations.
| zzz345345 wrote:
| [flagged]
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(page generated 2023-01-06 23:02 UTC)