Thursday, August 16, 2007

CIA accused of editing Wikipedia

The CIA has been accused of vandalising the page of Iran's president on the interactive encyclopedia Wikipedia.

A worker on the CIA network added "Wahhhhhh!" before a section on Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's plans for his presidency, according to reports.

It is one of many suspicious article changes revealed by a new online tool called WikiScanner, which displays the IP addresses of computers used to edit Wikipedia.

The Vatican has apparently edited entries about Sinn Fein leader Gerry Adams, removing a link to newspaper stories alleging his involvement in a double murder in 1971.

Other edits from computers owned by the Vatican have "massaged" articles on several Catholic saints.

The PCs of Scientology officials were used to remove criticism in the church's Wikipedia entry.

Despite the IP address link, the CIA has not admitted the "Wahhhhhh!" comment came from one of their computers.

“I cannot confirm that the traffic you cite came from agency computers," an agency spokesman said.

"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."

Wikipedia encourages participants to adopt online user names, but it also lets contributors be identified simply by their computers' numeric Internet addresses.

Virgil Griffith, a computer scientist about to enter grad school at CalTech, found a way to automate the process of locating the addresses and developed WikiScanner.

The free Scanner grabs the Internet Protocol addresses used in anonymous Wikipedia edits in the past five years. By combining that with public information about which IP addresses belong to whom, the Scanner reveals Wikipedia changes made from computers assigned to many organisations.

Griffith wrote on his site that he hopes "to create minor public relations disasters for companies and organisations I dislike."

Many examples are being tallied at http://wired.reddit.com/wikidgame - a page run by Wired News, which reported earlier on WikiScanner.

The program is located at http://wikiscanner.virgil.gr but intense attention has knocked it out of service many times this week.

Whatever comes of it, WikiScanner has a fan in Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales. "It is fabulous and I strongly support it," Wales told the AP.

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