9 ms·

Wikipedia admin jailed for 32 years after alleged Saudi infiltration

185 points by akolbe 4y ago

zzz345345 4y ago
[flagged]
akolbe 4y ago
Not that it makes much difference, perhaps, but as far as I can tell from looking at archives of the Arabic Wikipedia sysop list, both the jailed Wikipedians (User:OsamaK and User:Ziad) had stopped being administrators around 2017, several years before their arrests: https://web.archive.org/web/20161008095137/https://ar.wikipedia.org/wiki/خاص:عرض_المستخدمين/sysop https://web.archive.org/web/20161008095137/https://ar.wikipe... https://web.archive.org/web/20171031110427/https://ar.wikipedia.org/wiki/خاص:عرض_المستخدمين/sysop https://web.archive.org/web/20171031110427/https://ar.wikipe... https://web.archive.org/web/20171031110427/https://ar.wikipedia.org/wiki/خاص:عرض_المستخدمين/sysop https://web.archive.org/web/20171031110427/https://ar.wikipe... https://web.archive.org/web/20180821114358/https://ar.wikipedia.org/wiki/خاص:عرض_المستخدمين/sysop https://web.archive.org/web/20180821114358/https://ar.wikipe... Edit: Desysop logs (stated reason in both cases was lack of local activity, not any wrongdoing): https://xtools.wmflabs.org/ec-rightschanges/ar.wikipedia.org/OsamaK https://xtools.wmflabs.org/ec-rightschanges/ar.wikipedia.org... https://xtools.wmflabs.org/ec-rightschanges/ar.wikipedia.org/Ziad https://xtools.wmflabs.org/ec-rightschanges/ar.wikipedia.org...
- londons_explore 4y ago
  Maybe the wheels of justice just took 5 years to track them down?
  - notart666 4y ago
    It's a red herring from the Saudis to point at the fact that many Wikipedia entries are already heavily modified and controlled by interest groups like their own. Why they would announce it this way is another question.
  - slim 4y ago
    nope. justice against political prisoners in such regimes is very expeditive. there's no actual justice, no case building. they just arrest dissidents based on snitches reports and torture them till they sign confessions
- slim 4y ago
  Also not clear : the relationship between the infiltrated saudi admins and the arrest of the editors. it's not like the editors were anonymous and the infiltrated admins outed them, their profile and edit histories are right there on wikipedia for saudi gestapo to view. there must be something else going on
sn_master 4y ago
They were jailed IN Saudi Arabia, not FOR spying for Saudi Arabia. Please de-ambiguate the title.
- akolbe 4y ago
  I agree the title is terrible. Hacker News demands that original titles be used. :/
  - aw1621107 4y ago
    Using original titles isn't a strict requirement. The guidelines allow editing titles if the original is misleading or clickbait, presumably as long as the edits are reasonable.
    - akolbe 4y ago
      I've edited the title. For reference, the actual article title is "Wikipedia admin jailed for 32 years after alleged Saudi spy infiltration" – which does indeed make it sound as though the Wikipedian was jailed for "alleged Saudi spy infiltration". That's not the case. Instead, what is meant by "infiltration" is that the Saudi government has allegedly infiltrated Wikipedia and that this is the reason why the Wikimedia Foundation recently banned all Saudi-based administrators from further involvement in Wikimedia websites. What two Saudi Wikipedians have reportedly been jailed for is "swaying public opinion" and "violating public morals." See https://dawnmena.org/saudi-arabia-government-agents-infiltrate-wikipedia-sentence-independent-wikipedia-administrators-to-prison/ https://dawnmena.org/saudi-arabia-government-agents-infiltra... and https://alqst.org/en/post/extreme-jail-terms-in-saudi-arabia-signal-new-phase-of-repression https://alqst.org/en/post/extreme-jail-terms-in-saudi-arabia...
      - pvg 4y ago
        Your edit doesn't make the title less confusing, just confusing in a different way. The original seems fine, it's neither misleading nor clickbait so there's not a particularly strong case for changing it.
VWWHFSfQ 4y ago
What is a Wikipedia "admin"? Is this just a person that edits pages?
- akolbe 4y ago
  A Wikipedia admin is an unpaid volunteer (not a staffer) with access to extra functions of the MediaWiki software Wikipedia uses. They typically get these rights through a community vote like this one: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Requests_for_adminship/Extraordinary_Writ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Requests_for_adminsh... "Administrators, commonly known as admins or sysops (system operators), are Wikipedia editors who have been granted the technical ability to perform certain special actions on the English Wikipedia. These include the ability to block and unblock user accounts, IP addresses, and IP ranges from editing, edit fully protected pages, protect and unprotect pages from editing, delete and undelete pages, rename pages without restriction, and use certain other tools." For more info see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Administrators https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Administrators
  - codetrotter 4y ago
    > perform certain special actions on the English Wikipedia What about other languages? Aren’t there any admins for those too?
    - bpeebles 4y ago
      There are admins on all of the Wikipedias under the WMF umbrella--each one sets their own rules for how admins are picked and how long, if limited at all, their terms are. I do not know what the process is for the Arabic-language wiki in question.
      - akolbe 4y ago
        Also a community vote. (The above sysop logs state "according to vote result" and "successful nomination" for the entries logging admin rights being given.)
zidad 4y ago
Maybe the US can set a nice example by dropping Julian Assange's charges first
- LadyCailin 4y ago
  Let’s assume they do. Would that make a difference? Gay marriage is legal in the US, why is it not legal in Saudi Arabia? So your suggestion is completely irrelevant.
  - nailer 4y ago
    > Would that make a difference? Would it get this guy out of jail? No. Would it make a difference? Yes. It would give the US some moral high ground so that tin pot regimes don't have the 'US imprisoned a guy for reporting war crimes' defence.
    - curiousgal 4y ago
      -\infty + 10000 = -\infty
    - janalsncm 4y ago
      I’m a complete idiot when it comes to geopolitics but I’ll put my tongue in the hornets nest in lieu of coffee today. I would like it if Assange were let out, and I would like it if the US truly had a moral high ground. However there is little to no political capital in ideological consistency. If there was, the US would classify Saudi Arabia in the same camp as Iran: repressive and untouchable. I suspect the realpolitik of the situation is something more like: ally with one, shun the other. SA has more strategic value, so Iran gets the shaft. Anyways, the point of this is not to defend Iran. The point is that Assange isn’t in trouble for ideological reasons, but for political ones. He crossed the wrong people. George Washington himself would be in the same position if he ran Wikileaks.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- andirk 4y ago
nerdponx 4y ago
This article is somewhat confusingly written. This is the timeline that I could gather: 1. In 2020, Saudi Arabia arrested two Saudi nationals who at one point had Wikipedia admin privileges, for posting things that the Saudi state didn't like. 2. In 2022, Wikimedia did some kind of investigation and banned 16 users for a "conflict of interest", but didn't provide further details. 3. Now, whistleblowers are alleging that Saudi state agents had "infiltrated" the "highest ranks" of Wikipedia admins, that this infiltration is what enabled the arrest of the two Saudi admins, that the 16 banned users were those same Saudi state agents. There is a further implication that now Wikimedia is denying the whistleblowers' claims in order to keep from further upsetting anyone in the Saudi government.
- CoastalCoder 4y ago
  > There is a further implication that now Wikimedia is denying the whistleblowers' claims in order to keep from further upsetting anyone in the Saudi government. Yikes, I hope this isn't true. It would certainly undermine the fundraising slogan of Help Keep Wikipedia Independent.
- hef19898 4y ago
  Honestly, Sadam was class A ahole. But all things considered, if the war on terror wouod have been about anything other than nations willingnes to sell oil to the West, NATO should have invaded Saudi.
  - johnea 4y ago
    Regardless of anything that did, or never, happened at wikipedia, NATO should have invaded Saudi years ago. And certainly once they started openly dismembering people in their embassy. As much as it's appealing to blame all of this on repressive, religiously extremist governments, the bulk of the blame is laid on the US for continuing to ingratiate our entire country to these assholes in the name of petro-profit. The US is after all, a major EXPORTER of oil, and doesn't need Saudi oil except for adding additional profit to the industry...
    - 4y ago
pvg 4y ago
Discussed yesterday: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34267223 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34267223
aaron695 4y ago
[dead]
Vaslo 4y ago
Wikipedia just looks like a PR writeup for just about any celebrity.

185 points by akolbe 4y ago

[flagged]

Not that it makes much difference, perhaps, but as far as I can tell from looking at archives of the Arabic Wikipedia sysop list, both the jailed Wikipedians (User:OsamaK and User:Ziad) had stopped being administrators around 2017, several years before their arrests: https://web.archive.org/web/20161008095137/https://ar.wikipedia.org/wiki/خاص:عرض_المستخدمين/sysop https://web.archive.org/web/20161008095137/https://ar.wikipe... https://web.archive.org/web/20171031110427/https://ar.wikipedia.org/wiki/خاص:عرض_المستخدمين/sysop https://web.archive.org/web/20171031110427/https://ar.wikipe... https://web.archive.org/web/20171031110427/https://ar.wikipedia.org/wiki/خاص:عرض_المستخدمين/sysop https://web.archive.org/web/20171031110427/https://ar.wikipe... https://web.archive.org/web/20180821114358/https://ar.wikipedia.org/wiki/خاص:عرض_المستخدمين/sysop https://web.archive.org/web/20180821114358/https://ar.wikipe... Edit: Desysop logs (stated reason in both cases was lack of local activity, not any wrongdoing): https://xtools.wmflabs.org/ec-rightschanges/ar.wikipedia.org/OsamaK https://xtools.wmflabs.org/ec-rightschanges/ar.wikipedia.org... https://xtools.wmflabs.org/ec-rightschanges/ar.wikipedia.org/Ziad https://xtools.wmflabs.org/ec-rightschanges/ar.wikipedia.org...

londons_explore 4y ago
Maybe the wheels of justice just took 5 years to track them down?
- notart666 4y ago
  It's a red herring from the Saudis to point at the fact that many Wikipedia entries are already heavily modified and controlled by interest groups like their own. Why they would announce it this way is another question.
- slim 4y ago
  nope. justice against political prisoners in such regimes is very expeditive. there's no actual justice, no case building. they just arrest dissidents based on snitches reports and torture them till they sign confessions
slim 4y ago
Also not clear : the relationship between the infiltrated saudi admins and the arrest of the editors. it's not like the editors were anonymous and the infiltrated admins outed them, their profile and edit histories are right there on wikipedia for saudi gestapo to view. there must be something else going on

sn_master 4y ago

They were jailed IN Saudi Arabia, not FOR spying for Saudi Arabia. Please de-ambiguate the title.

akolbe 4y ago
I agree the title is terrible. Hacker News demands that original titles be used. :/
- aw1621107 4y ago
  Using original titles isn't a strict requirement. The guidelines allow editing titles if the original is misleading or clickbait, presumably as long as the edits are reasonable.
  - akolbe 4y ago
    I've edited the title. For reference, the actual article title is "Wikipedia admin jailed for 32 years after alleged Saudi spy infiltration" – which does indeed make it sound as though the Wikipedian was jailed for "alleged Saudi spy infiltration". That's not the case. Instead, what is meant by "infiltration" is that the Saudi government has allegedly infiltrated Wikipedia and that this is the reason why the Wikimedia Foundation recently banned all Saudi-based administrators from further involvement in Wikimedia websites. What two Saudi Wikipedians have reportedly been jailed for is "swaying public opinion" and "violating public morals." See https://dawnmena.org/saudi-arabia-government-agents-infiltrate-wikipedia-sentence-independent-wikipedia-administrators-to-prison/ https://dawnmena.org/saudi-arabia-government-agents-infiltra... and https://alqst.org/en/post/extreme-jail-terms-in-saudi-arabia-signal-new-phase-of-repression https://alqst.org/en/post/extreme-jail-terms-in-saudi-arabia...
    - pvg 4y ago
      Your edit doesn't make the title less confusing, just confusing in a different way. The original seems fine, it's neither misleading nor clickbait so there's not a particularly strong case for changing it.

VWWHFSfQ 4y ago

What is a Wikipedia "admin"? Is this just a person that edits pages?

akolbe 4y ago
A Wikipedia admin is an unpaid volunteer (not a staffer) with access to extra functions of the MediaWiki software Wikipedia uses. They typically get these rights through a community vote like this one: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Requests_for_adminship/Extraordinary_Writ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Requests_for_adminsh... "Administrators, commonly known as admins or sysops (system operators), are Wikipedia editors who have been granted the technical ability to perform certain special actions on the English Wikipedia. These include the ability to block and unblock user accounts, IP addresses, and IP ranges from editing, edit fully protected pages, protect and unprotect pages from editing, delete and undelete pages, rename pages without restriction, and use certain other tools." For more info see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Administrators https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Administrators
- codetrotter 4y ago
  > perform certain special actions on the English Wikipedia What about other languages? Aren’t there any admins for those too?
  - bpeebles 4y ago
    There are admins on all of the Wikipedias under the WMF umbrella--each one sets their own rules for how admins are picked and how long, if limited at all, their terms are. I do not know what the process is for the Arabic-language wiki in question.
    - akolbe 4y ago
      Also a community vote. (The above sysop logs state "according to vote result" and "successful nomination" for the entries logging admin rights being given.)

zidad 4y ago

Maybe the US can set a nice example by dropping Julian Assange's charges first

LadyCailin 4y ago
Let’s assume they do. Would that make a difference? Gay marriage is legal in the US, why is it not legal in Saudi Arabia? So your suggestion is completely irrelevant.
- nailer 4y ago
  > Would that make a difference? Would it get this guy out of jail? No. Would it make a difference? Yes. It would give the US some moral high ground so that tin pot regimes don't have the 'US imprisoned a guy for reporting war crimes' defence.
  - curiousgal 4y ago
    -\infty + 10000 = -\infty
  - janalsncm 4y ago
    I’m a complete idiot when it comes to geopolitics but I’ll put my tongue in the hornets nest in lieu of coffee today. I would like it if Assange were let out, and I would like it if the US truly had a moral high ground. However there is little to no political capital in ideological consistency. If there was, the US would classify Saudi Arabia in the same camp as Iran: repressive and untouchable. I suspect the realpolitik of the situation is something more like: ally with one, shun the other. SA has more strategic value, so Iran gets the shaft. Anyways, the point of this is not to defend Iran. The point is that Assange isn’t in trouble for ideological reasons, but for political ones. He crossed the wrong people. George Washington himself would be in the same position if he ran Wikileaks.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
andirk 4y ago

nerdponx 4y ago

This article is somewhat confusingly written. This is the timeline that I could gather: 1. In 2020, Saudi Arabia arrested two Saudi nationals who at one point had Wikipedia admin privileges, for posting things that the Saudi state didn't like. 2. In 2022, Wikimedia did some kind of investigation and banned 16 users for a "conflict of interest", but didn't provide further details. 3. Now, whistleblowers are alleging that Saudi state agents had "infiltrated" the "highest ranks" of Wikipedia admins, that this infiltration is what enabled the arrest of the two Saudi admins, that the 16 banned users were those same Saudi state agents. There is a further implication that now Wikimedia is denying the whistleblowers' claims in order to keep from further upsetting anyone in the Saudi government.

CoastalCoder 4y ago
> There is a further implication that now Wikimedia is denying the whistleblowers' claims in order to keep from further upsetting anyone in the Saudi government. Yikes, I hope this isn't true. It would certainly undermine the fundraising slogan of Help Keep Wikipedia Independent.
hef19898 4y ago
Honestly, Sadam was class A ahole. But all things considered, if the war on terror wouod have been about anything other than nations willingnes to sell oil to the West, NATO should have invaded Saudi.
- johnea 4y ago
  Regardless of anything that did, or never, happened at wikipedia, NATO should have invaded Saudi years ago. And certainly once they started openly dismembering people in their embassy. As much as it's appealing to blame all of this on repressive, religiously extremist governments, the bulk of the blame is laid on the US for continuing to ingratiate our entire country to these assholes in the name of petro-profit. The US is after all, a major EXPORTER of oil, and doesn't need Saudi oil except for adding additional profit to the industry...
  - 4y ago

pvg 4y ago

Discussed yesterday: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34267223 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34267223

aaron695 4y ago

[dead]

Vaslo 4y ago

Wikipedia just looks like a PR writeup for just about any celebrity.