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



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/