Wikipedia To Block NSA Spies - DigitalJournal

[WillyT]

Wikipedia to block NSA spies
By Eduardo Arrufat - DigitalJournal
Aug 5, 2013

<snip>

Founder Jimmy Wales announced that Wikipedia would be introducing security measures to protect site visitors, starting from August 21.

Following Snowden’s release of classified data from CIA and NSA, blowing the whistle on various government programs that spied on citizens; many big Internet firms have admitted that they were helping the intelligence agencies by providing personal data and private information regarding conversations and correspondence via email or even texting.

However, just a few days ago, Wikipedia, one of the most popular sites in the World Wide Web has released a statement declaring their allegiance to their users:

“<Wikipedia> believes strongly in protecting the privacy of its readers and editors. Recent leaks of the NSA’s XKeyscore program have prompted our community members to push for the use of HTTPS by default for the Wikimedia projects,”

HTTPS is the secure version of the most popular Internet exchange protocol, the Hypertext Transfer Protocol. Due to the large amount of work required by the site controlled by Wikimedia to transfer all the information to the new security environment, they have established August 21st as the last day the NSA spies will have unlimited and free access to Wikipedia users logs.

This comes as the Guardian revealed that NSA was also monitoring users who accessed ones of the most common web pages for referencing in the world. Founder of Wikimedia, Jimmy Wales’s response to this revelation was very quick announcing the introduction of tighter security measures to protect its users. Wales also made a call to other Internet companies to follow his example in increasing security to protect the privacy of their users...

<snip>

Link: http://www.digitaljournal.com/article/355940