Re: Abuse resistant anonymous publishing - Proposed solution to the Wikipedia issue.

[Ben Burch <benburch@xxxxxxxxx>]

Paul & Jimbo, et al,

The biggest problem I see is that if moderation is commissive, rather  
than reactive, then if the original poster commits a crime (like  
violating the Official Secrets Act) then the moderator who approves  
the posting would likely be liable for the same crime.

This is not helped by putting the moderator in a different  
jurisdiction from the poster, because some government, like the  
United States, do not recognize that their jurisdiction ends at their  
national boundaries, and reserve the right to rendition (aka  
kidnapping) even where the national government that the moderator  
resides in would never agree to a formal extradition.

The only solution I can think of that would allow Tor and Wiki to  
interoperate would be to have a Tor-Wikipedia Moderation Team who  
would actively look for Wikipedia vandalism originating from Tor exit  
nodes, and revert out vandal's postings promptly.

The support we would need from Wikipedia would be minor;  Wiki would  
have to implement a Watch function for postings from Tor exit nodes  
that the Tor-Wikipedia moderation team would get email notifications  
on.  There already are exit node listings that would allow Wikipedia  
to create and refresh this list on a regular basis, and obviously  
they can already do that as they have implemented a block.  Wikipedia  
would have to agree that the Tor-Wikipedia Moderation Team would have  
the right to revert ANY change from a Tor exit node without  
discussion.  Once the vandals realize that they won't have any fun  
using Tor to vandalize Wikipedia, the job of the TWMT would get quite  
easy, as I don't imagine there would be more than a few dozen real  
edits on any given day from the Tor cloud.

Or am I barking up the wrong tree here?

-Ben Burch
White Rose Society Webmaster
http://www.WhiteRoseSociety.org/