CIA Rewriting Wikipedia?

Wikipedia tool finds US intelligence agency rewriting biographies of Nixon and Reagan.

CIA comes under the scanner

16 August 2007

London: The CIA has been re-writing the Wikipedia biographies of two former US presidents, Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan.

The Wikipedia Scanner, which trawls through the editing of entries, also discovered changes made to the background of the organisation and the invasion of Iraq.

An anonymous surfer at Labour Party’s Millbank headquarters was also found to have changed details on Wikipedia which is considered a breach of rules. And the Vatican worked on entries on its page about Catholic saints and Sinn Fein leader Gerry Adams.

But the worst offender was Diebold, a supplier of electronic voting machines in the US, which was caught up in the 2000 election in San Diego, California. It was accused of “vandalism” for deleting 15 paragraphs from its product two years ago.

The Scanner, invented by technology researcher Virgil Griffiths, compares 5.3 million edits made on Wikipedia against more than two million internet addresses.

It uses a publicly available list of IP addresses assigned to companies or individuals and then scours changes to Wikipedia pages to reveal all the anonymous edits made from those addresses.