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News and notes

Wikimedia lawsuit against NSA dismissed; Affiliates mailing list launched

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.

This aerial photograph of the Westerheversand Lighthouse took first place among German entries to the 2015 Wiki Loves Monuments contest.