[NYTr] Media Conspiracy: Wikipedia being edited by CIA, Diebold,
 
Date: Fri, 17 Aug 2007 15:15:16 -0400


Via NY Transfer News Collective  *  All the News that Doesn't Fit
 
Note: The Wikipedia Scanner is at: 
http://wikiscanner.virgil.gr/

BBC - Aug 15, 2007
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/technology/6947532.stm

Wikipedia 'shows CIA page edits'

By Jonathan Fildes
Science and technology reporter

An online tool that claims to reveal the identity of organisations
that edit Wikipedia pages has revealed that the CIA was involved
in editing entries.

Wikipedia Scanner allegedly shows that workers on the agency's
computers made edits to the page of Iran's president.

It also purportedly shows that the Vatican has edited entries about
Sinn Fein leader Gerry Adams.

The tool, developed by US researchers, trawls a list of 5.3m edits
and matches them to the net address of the editor.

Wikipedia is a free online encyclopaedia that can be created and
edited by anyone.

Most of the edits detected by the scanner correct spelling mistakes
or factual inaccuracies in profiles. However, others have been used
to remove potentially damaging material or to deface sites.

Mistaken identity

On the profile of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the tool
indicates that a worker on the CIA network reportedly added the
exclamation "Wahhhhhh!"

before a section on the leader's plans for his presidency.

A warning on the profile of the anonymous editor reads: "You have
recently vandalised a Wikipedia article, and you are now being asked
to stop this type of behaviour."

Other changes that have been made are more innocuous, and include
tweaks to the profile of former CIA chief Porter Goss and celebrities
such as Oprah Winfrey.

When asked whether it could confirm whether the changes had been
made by a person using a CIA computer, an agency spokesperson
responded: "I cannot confirm that the traffic you cite came from
agency computers.

"I'd like in any case to underscore a far larger and more significant
point that no one should doubt or forget: The CIA has a vital mission
in protecting the United States, and the focus of this agency is
there, on that decisive work."

Radio change

The site also indicates that a computer owned by the US Democratic
Party was used to make changes to the site of right-wing talk show
host Rush Limbaugh.

The changes brand Mr Limbaugh as "idiotic," a "racist", and a
"bigot". An entry about his audience now reads: "Most of them are
legally retarded."

We really value transparency and the scanner really takes this to
another level Wikipedia spokesperson

The IP address is registered in the name of the Democratic National
Headquarters.

A spokesperson for the Democratic Party said that the changes had
not been made on its computers. Instead, they said that the "IP
address is the same as the DCCC".

The DCCC, or Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, is the
"official campaign arm of the Democrats" in the House of Representatives
and shares a building with the party.

"We don't condone these sorts of activities and we take every
precaution to ensure that our network is used in a responsible
manner," Doug Thornell of the DCCC told the BBC News website.

Mr Thornell pointed out that the edit had been made "close to two
years ago"

and it was "impossible to know" who had done it.

Voting issue

The site also indicates that Vatican computers were used to remove
content from a page about the leader of the Irish republican party
Sinn Fein, Gerry Adams.

The edit removed links to newspaper stories written in 2006 that
alleged that Mr Adams' fingerprints and handprints were found on a
car used during a double murder in 1971.

The section, titled "Fresh murder question raised" is no longer
available through the online encyclopaedia.

Wikipedia Scanner also points the finger at commercial organisations
that have modified entries about the pages.

One in particular is Diebold, the company that supplied electronic
voting machines for the controversial US election in 2000.

In October 2005, a person using a Diebold computer removed paragraphs
about Walden O'Dell, chief executive of the company, which revealed
that he had been "a top fund-raiser" for George Bush.

A month later, other paragraphs and links to stories about the
alleged rigging of the 2000 election were also removed.

The paragraphs and links have since been reinstated.

Diebold officials have not responded to requests by the BBC for
information about the changes.

Web history

The Wikipedia Scanner results are not the first time that people
have been uncovered editing their own Wikipedia entries.

Wikipedia Scanner may prevent an organisation or individuals from
editing articles that they're really not supposed to Wikipedia
spokesperson

Earlier this year, Microsoft was revealed to have offered money to
experts to trawl through entries about the company and its products
to make corrections.

Staff at the US Congress have also previously been exposed for
editing and removing sensitive information about politicians.

An inquiry was launched after staff for Democratic representative
Marty Meehan admitted polishing his biography

The new tool was built by Virgil Griffith of the California Institute
of Technology.

It exploits the open nature of Wikipedia, which already collects
the net address or username of editors and tracks all changes to a
page. The information can be accessed in the "history" tab at the
top of a Wikipedia page.

By merging this information with a database of IP address owners,
Wikipedia Scanner is able to put a name to the organisation and
firms from which edits are made.

The scanner cannot identify the individuals editing articles, admits
Mr Griffith.

"Technically, we don't know whether it came from an agent of that
company, however, we do know that edit came from someone with access
to their network,"

he wrote on the Wikipedia Scanner site.

A spokesperson for Wikipedia said the tool helped prevent conflicts
of interest.

"We really value transparency and the scanner really takes this to
another level," they said.

"Wikipedia Scanner may prevent an organisation or individuals from
editing articles that they're really not supposed to."

                          ***

Wired - Aug 14, 2007
http://www.wired.com/politics/onlinerights/news/2007/08/wiki_tracker

See Who's Editing Wikipedia - Diebold, the CIA, a Campaign

By John Borland

On November 17th, 2005, an anonymous Wikipedia user deleted 15 paragraphs
from an article on e-voting machine-vendor Diebold, excising an entire
section critical of the company's machines. While anonymous, such changes
typically leave behind digital fingerprints offering hints about the
contributor, such as the location of the computer used to make the edits.

In this case, the changes came from an IP address reserved for the
corporate offices of Diebold itself. And it is far from an isolated case.
A new data-mining service launched Monday traces millions of Wikipedia
entries to their corporate sources, and for the first time puts
comprehensive data behind longstanding suspicions of manipulation, which
until now have surfaced only piecemeal in investigations of specific
allegations.

Wikipedia Scanner -- the brainchild of Cal Tech computation and
neural-systems graduate student Virgil Griffith -- offers users a
searchable database that ties millions of anonymous Wikipedia edits to
organizations where those edits apparently originated, by
cross-referencing the edits with data on who owns the associated block of
internet IP addresses.

Inspired by news last year that Congress members' offices had been editing
their own entries, Griffith says he got curious, and wanted to know
whether big companies and other organizations were doing things in a
similarly self-interested vein.

"Everything's better if you do it on a huge scale, and automate it," he
says with a grin.

This database is possible thanks to a combination of Wikipedia policies
and (mostly) publicly available information.

The online encyclopedia allows anyone to make edits, but keeps detailed
logs of all these changes. Users who are logged in are tracked only by
their user name, but anonymous changes leave a public record of their IP
address.

The organization also allows downloads of the complete Wikipedia,
including records of all these changes.

Griffith thus downloaded the entire encyclopedia, isolating the XML-based
records of anonymous changes and IP addresses. He then correlated those IP
addresses with public net-address lookup services such as ARIN, as well as
private domain-name data provided by IP2Location.com.

The result: A database of 34.4 million edits, performed by 2.6 million
organizations or individuals ranging from the CIA to Microsoft to
Congressional offices, now linked to the edits they or someone at their
organization's net address has made.

Some of this appears to be transparently self-interested, either adding
positive, press release-like material to entries, or deleting whole swaths
of critical material.

Voting-machine company Diebold provides a good example of the latter, with
someone at the company's IP address apparently deleting long paragraphs
detailing the security industry's concerns over the integrity of their
voting machines, and information about the company's CEO's fund-raising
for President Bush.

The text, deleted in November 2005, was quickly restored by another
Wikipedia contributor, who advised the anonymous editor, "Please stop
removing content from Wikipedia. It is considered vandalism."

A Diebold Election Systems spokesman said he'd look into the matter but
could not comment by press time.

Wal-Mart has a series of relatively small changes in 2005 that that
burnish the company's image on its own entry while often leaving criticism
in, changing a line that its wages are less than other retail stores to a
note that it pays nearly double the minimum wage, for example. Another
leaves activist criticism on community impact intact, while citing a
"definitive" study showing Wal-Mart raised the total number of jobs in a
community.

As has been previously reported, politician's offices are heavy users of
the system. Former Montana Sen. Conrad Burns' office, for example,
apparently changed one critical paragraph headed "A controversial voice"
to "A voice for farmers," with predictably image-friendly content
following it.

Perhaps interestingly, many of the most apparently self-interested changes
come from before 2006, when news of the Congressional offices' edits
reached the headlines. This may indicate a growing sophistication with the
workings of Wikipedia over time, or even the rise of corporate Wikipedia
policies.

Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales told Wired News he was aware of the new
service, but needed time to experiment with it before commenting.

The vast majority of changes are fairly innocuous, however. Employees at
the CIA's net address, for example, have been busy -- but with little that
would indicate their place of apparent employment, or a particular bias.

One entry on "Black September in Jordan" contains wholesale additions,
with specific details that read like a popular history book or an
eyewitness' memoir.

Many more are simple copy edits, or additions to local town entries or
school histories. One CIA entry deals with the details of lyrics sung in a
Buffy the Vampire Slayer episode.

Griffith says he launched the project hoping to find scandals,
particularly at obvious targets such as companies like Halliburton. But
there's a more practical goal, too: By exposing the anonymous edits that
companies such as drugs and big pharmaceutical companies make in entries
that affect their businesses, it could help experts check up on the
changes and make sure they're accurate, he says.

For now, he has just scratched the surface of the database of millions of
entries. But he's putting it online so others can look too.

The nonprofit Wikimedia Foundation, which runs Wikipedia, did not respond
to e-mail and telephone inquiries Monday.

Sidebar:

Share Your Sleuthing!

Cornered any companies polishing up their Wikipedia entries? Spotted any
government spooks rewriting history? Try Virgil Griffith's Wikipedia
Scanner yourself, then submit your finds and vote on other readers'
discoveries here.


 
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