Wikipedia admin jailed for 32 years after alleged Saudi infiltration
arstechnica.com
arstechnica.com
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...
there must be something else going on
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.
Yikes, I hope this isn't true. It would certainly undermine the fundraising slogan of Help Keep Wikipedia Independent.
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...
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.
Really, that is your position?
Total non-involvement is questionable and impossible, but think twice before blatantly calling to fight fire with fire and death with more death. Rule out at least semi-peaceful options first
Really? I think it is quite possible. How actively the West was involved in preventing that horrible genocide / mass murder in Cambodia for example?
Fear of Red China and the Domino Theory cast a long shadow as the West's attempts to put the thumb on the scale in various geopolitical locations arguably did more harm than good.
Whether it "helped" to cause it is a totally different issue. I was not talking about that part. I was not even aware of that particular aspect.
You didn't bring an example where the West didn't get involved, you bought an example of an outcome arguably caused by the West (ie. involved from the get go).
This reinforces the earlier point that "not involvement" is not really possible - global events are interconnected and penduluums swing both ways .. not giving a toss about the outcome of events someone had a large role in getting rolling is not an example of distance, just a lack of moral backbone.
My bad. Sorry. I did not look at the sig. You are a different person.
Well there are whole bunch of countries ruined by your "enactment of a positive change" and millions of people killed. I do not see many opposite examples. As I already said you just advocate crime on a major scale.
> millions of people killed
This is not what we are discussing and you know it. Millions of people killed in waging war and mass murder is exactly what happens eventually if you let bad guys prosper.
Sorry, positive change has to be enacted whether you like it or not, there is simply no noninvolvement in a shared world so the only alternative is a kleptodictator enacts their version of change and it will be positive to a much smaller number of people. You can choose if you want to enact positive change by way of violence or not, but calling for not enacting it is worse than calling for war, you would be leaving uncountable people and potentially your own descendants in future to suffer
China is busy harassing their own but it was not China that had invaded and fucked up scores of countries.
>"This is not what we are discussing and you know it."
Yes it is. Cut the bullshit. The millions I was talking about are the result of the "enactment of positive change" you are so fond of.
Anyways I very much dislike your line of thinking an would prefer not to continue this lovely conversation.
Yes. Exactly. Because by trying to fix it you will inevitably kill more and ruin the country completely and leave it in the worse state. The examples are numerous. Nobody gave you such rights. I however will support your personal decision if you grab the rifle go there and join their resistance.
that is because of half measures. The US policy was attempting to not be British where the "King" took and replaced completely the governance of the land / nation aka Colonization. That is one extreme
The US took the other extreme were by we ripped out the government and replaced it with nothing leading to worse problems, or in the rare times we did attempt to replace it we replaced it with governance by committee, and not a Constitutional republic, more of a EU style parliament also leading to worse outcomes as parliamentary governance can only work with established societies not newly formed ones
If instead if we would have put in-place actual constitutional republics under the doctrine of federalism for these nations I think there would have been far far far more successes and American would be seen more as a savoir than a conquer on the world stage today or included them as US Territories like Puerto Rico
Sure, we all know how to fix the world problems. NOT.
But really the alternative is to let whomever controls where the camera is pointed decide who the US invades next. Which means the US makes sure it controls where the camera is pointed, because that generates carte blanche for invasion.
Now I will tell you a secret that will give you the powers to predict the future: you can tell when the US is preparing to attack another country by watching an increase in human rights complaints on Western media. It's like clockwork. Compare the media coverage of about human rights in Iran vis-a-vis Saudi Arabia. Why is that? Because we've decided to overthrow one of these governments but not the other. Soon, we will start hearing about human rights abuses in Turkey, as they are defying the US by allying themselves with Russia and making peace with Syria, and so they may be next in line for regime change. You can tell if they are next in line by looking for news reports about atrocities perpetrated by Turkey. We can't just stand by!
In the same way, you can tell when the US has decided to back a government by watching the human rights complaints in media disappear. A good example is Venezuela, which we are reconciling with in order to gain access to their oil now that OPEC+ is giving us the cold shoulder. Notice how the atrocities and torment of the people of Venezuela is no longer a regular mainstream news item.
When Yugoslavia fell apart, all the various ethnic groups began attacking each other and ethnically cleansing rival groups from areas they controlled. We picked one enemy -- Serbs -- as they were aligned with Russia, and accused them of genocide even though the Croatians, Muslims in Bosnia, and other groups were all doing the same thing. We pointed the camera in one direction, got people worked up, and then bombed hospitals, bridges, trains, power stations, water treatment plants in Serbian controlled areas until they agreed to give up a portion of their land so that we could redraw their borders, shrinking their territory. Those ethnic groups in the new lands proceeded to ethnically cleanse their land of serbs.
Mission Accomplished for the humanitarian superpower, who really had no interest in humanitarianism but wanted to punish a Russian ally, and knew the domestic population and media was filled with fools who could be convinced that invading another country was OK - even moral - as long as you had enough cameras pointed at the right atrocities.
Also, one consequence of this "invade the world" policy is that the US makes so many global enemies, and is forced into so many commitments, that we become overextended and sufficiently hated that we lose our Global Cop status. Our Navy must now police the Straights of Taiwan, the Persian Gulf, the Mediterranean, Pacific Islands, the Caribbean and Atlantic. But we have lost our ship-building industry. We have 850 military bases from Africa to Asia to Europe and the Middle East. But we can no longer mass produce ammunition and many soldiers depend on food stamps. We have an overcommitment crisis because we insist on the right to invade anyone, at any time, that we decide is violating our unwritten set of rules.
That's where this idea of humanitarian-based invasions gets you.
Your example is prime one, the US policy of "the enemy of my enemy is my friend" is a terrible one. We continue that style of foreign policy at our own peril
That said I do believe there are cases where the world should intervene and often does not because it is seen as an internal conflict, or there is no natural resource in that nation to exploit.
My point being that simply saying that all internal conflict is off limits, and all external conflict is within scope is far tooo simplistic, there may be some external conflict I would say the US has no business interfering with, and some that I think we should, and there are many internal conflict that I think we should and many I do not.
The world never intervenes. The US and some other countries / blocks do.
Until there is assured punishment for "wrong" interference your argument is empty. The only countries that get punished happen to be weak ones. And you probably aware about what the US thinks about ICC.
Make up your mind please? Or is your view just a standard anti-US position.
Did I hurt your feelings sailor? I see no contradiction in my statements if you bother to actually read. I said "Until there is assured punishment". We know this is not happening. I do not see it as advocating world government. It simple means if one does not suffer the consequences of their action the one would simply degenerate into doing what they feel like.
Also I am not "standard anti US". The US is my neighbor (I am in Canada), I've visited it many times and admire many things. However their governments do commit major crimes and I am absolutely not fond of this part.
That's not my position. My position is that historically nations wage wars for their own strategic interests. Interests that the nation needs in order to survive and maintain sovereignty. They do not wage wars for "humanitarian reasons". Wars cannot be humanitarian projects because every war is a humanitarian disaster.
Nations need to wisely and parsimoniously choose what their core strategic interests are -- for example maintaining access to some trade route they depend on, or maintaining access to mideast oil, or not having an enemy put an army on its border, etc. Nations have to pick these carefully and then they use military force to fight for those interests. That's how it's usually done by sane countries - those who are not trying to dominate the whole world.
Now, the number of wars that are waged for reasons of strategic self-interest is already a lot of wars. If you add to that "humanitarian reasons" as a legitimate casus belli, what you accomplish is creating even more wars, and that's the last thing you want to normalize.
Moreover, this new casus belli can be hijacked by an elite to wage war that undermines a nation's interests, because how do you really know that enemy X is such a terrible humanitarian disaster that you are justified in bombing their population into oblivion? This boils down to ideology, as the nation committing the atrocities does not believe it is committing atrocities, it believes its actions are justified. And the nation wanting to wage war on them also does not believe it will be committing atrocities but that this action (the war) is justified. So what you have is a war for ideological enforcement.
And as I said before, it has a secondary effect, in that by training a nation to wage wars purely for global ideology enforcement -- something that Europe last did in the crusader period -- you start down a road that always ends in disaster, because
1) a nation has only limited resources for war fighting, and if the resources it does have are expended in the name of global ideological enforcement, then it will not have the resources necessary to effectively defend its own strategic interests. The key blindspot of American interventionists is always that they never recognize limits. Go read some of the neocon journals - any article by the Kagan/Nuland/Bolton crowd will do -- you will search in vain for any description of limits. No realistic estimation of the forces required, and availability of these forces, availability of ammunition, sealift capacity, of how troops will be supplied and for how long. No discussion at all of limits -- only of ideology. It is just assumed that our power is limitless, because global ideological enforcement requires limitless power.
2) the number of wars waged will be huge. Think of all the nations that don't support gay marriage or our definition of "democracy", or the current preferred flavor of women's rights, for example, and so need to be invaded.
3) it will make enemies all across the globe that will, at some point, unite against us -- something that the US is beginning to painfully understand as it suffers a string of military and geopolitical defeats as well as increasing diplomatic isolation.
Is that what you would have told Jamal Khashoggi?
your comment is confusing, I can't quite grasp what you're trying to say, but just to clarify:
The first Iraq War was about Iraq invading Kuwait.
In the period leading up to the second Iraq War, there were sanctions on Iraq and Iraq was not allowed to sell oil. Iraq (and France) wanted to lift the sanctions. The war was not about getting Iraq's oil, Iraq was begging to deliver it.
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.
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.
"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
What about other languages? Aren’t there any admins for those too?
Sorted by the lowest hiearchy :
1. IP edits
2. Registered new user
3. Registered old user, with a mobs of fellow old user, that could enforce anything in the name of "community consensus".
4. Administrator. An ascended registered old user with a mobs of fellow old user "supporter" who vote for them during the election session. They actually wield power to ban user, permanently delete someone contribution, and lock the pages. Abuse of power is rampant so far. There's no balance of power at all to fix this problem except hoping the majority of "good" administrator (and public outcry) finally oust a "bad" administrator.
5. A mobs of administrator. Any infightings inside the administrator circle could be overpowered by the majority mobs of administrator, all again in the name of "community consensus".
Political battle inside Wikipedia is bloody and i've experienced it first hand.
Oh, regarding the level 5 user (a mobs of administator), here's an interesting story :
https://www.engadget.com/wikipedia-banned-seven-users-after-...
Why seven? Because you need to control a majority of administator to finally wield the ultimate political power across the whole wikipedia.
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...
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".
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
https://xtools.wmflabs.org/ec-rightschanges/ar.wikipedia.org...
https://xtools.wmflabs.org/ec-rightschanges/ar.wikipedia.org...
I don't know whether either of them used checkuser rights inappropriately, and I have seen no allegation that they did.
So your suggestion is completely irrelevant.
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.
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.