The mere threat of being surveilled already does a ton of damage to readers and editors. (although Wikipedia was in one of the NSA's leaked slides as a target [

The mere threat of being surveilled already does a ton of damage to readers and editors. (although Wikipedia was in one of the NSA's leaked slides as a target [0]) It has a chilling effect [1] on users. A study even found that traffic to terrorism-related articles plunged after the Snowden leaks. [2] You might ask why this is a problem. The populace needs to be adequately informed about the facts about terrorism in order to deal with them rationally rather than stay perpetually afraid and let the government pass things like the Patriot Act that erodes their civil liberties. [3] (you hear the joke a lot that "this probably put me on a list", which is a pretty shocking demonstration of how normalized we've become to surveillance and being treated as bad guys for merely mentioning or looking at sensitive topics) Additionally, while non-registered editor locations are public (attached to a geolocatable IP address), those of registered users are not and I don't think any reader wants what they look at shared with other parties. While the specific case is against upstream surveillance by the NSA, I think the general idea is for Wikimedia to put their foot down against the encroachment of three-letter agencies on our domestic freedoms. [0]: https://www.nytimes.com/2015/03/10/opinion/stop-spying-on-wikipedia-users.html https://www.nytimes.com/2015/03/10/opinion/stop-spying-on-wi... [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chilling_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chilling_effect [2]: http://www.reuters.com/article/us-wikipedia-usage-idUSKCN0XO080 http://www.reuters.com/article/us-wikipedia-usage-idUSKCN0XO... [3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patriot_Act https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patriot_Act