I'm not a big fan of NSA surveillance, but given that you acknowledge this case is activism, it's concerning to me that the nonprofit built to sustain the allegedly unbiased encyclopedia Wikipedia is moving in the direction of political activism.
Poor stewardship of Wikipedia is a far greater threat to democracy than what the NSA is doing, in my opinion. Wikipedia is literally writing the history book of the modern age, and the amount of power their administrators have over public thought cannot be underestimated enough. Sure, it's largely written by the "users", but an insulated class of administrators and super users largely decide which characterizations get to stay and which get removed.
No doubt there are going to be abuses of power at Wikipedia, but activism like this makes it clear that Wikipedia has a bias, and the mandate is coming from the top down. Again, I don't think the activism itself is problematic but precisely who is doing it is the problem.
That "insulated class of administrators" is unfortunately not enough, Wikipedia is being constantly modified to spread a specific agenda. I've caught a few occurrences but Wikipedia doesn't really have enough moderators watching over edits.
Poor stewardship of Wikipedia is a far greater threat to democracy than what the NSA is doing, in my opinion. Wikipedia is literally writing the history book of the modern age, and the amount of power their administrators have over public thought cannot be underestimated enough. Sure, it's largely written by the "users", but an insulated class of administrators and super users largely decide which characterizations get to stay and which get removed.
No doubt there are going to be abuses of power at Wikipedia, but activism like this makes it clear that Wikipedia has a bias, and the mandate is coming from the top down. Again, I don't think the activism itself is problematic but precisely who is doing it is the problem.