CIA edits Wikipedia in 'information war'

  The United States government and its security agencies, including its central intelligence agency, the CIA, use Wikipedia as one of its tools to conduct "information warfare." This was revealed by the co-founder of the site, Larry Sanger. Sanger told American investigative journalist Glenn Greenwald that intelligence agencies have been controlling the online encyclopedia Wikipedia for more than a decade now. Sanger has said that Wikipedia has become a tool of thought control in the hands of American security agencies, especially the CIA and the FBI, as well as other intelligence agencies of the country. He said, "We have evidence that, starting in 2008, CIA and FBI computers were used to edit Wikipedia," and he continued by asking, "Do you think they stopped doing that then?" A computer programming student named Virgil Griffith first published CIA and FBI activity within Wikipedia in 2007.

Griffith developed software that could track the location of computers used to edit Wikipedia articles. He discovered that the CIA, FBI, and several other US government agencies were analyzing this online encyclopedia and removing information that was against the United States. It has been suggested that the CIA used its computers to remove the number of people who lost their lives in the Iraq War, while the FBI removed aerial and satellite images of the US military prison at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba. The CIA used its computers to edit hundreds of articles, including documents about former Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, China's nuclear program, and the Argentine navy. In addition, former CIA chief William Colby even edited his own entry to add to his list of accomplishments. Sanger told Greenwald that, "Intelligence agencies pay the most influential people to push their agendas. He also said that much of the intelligence and information warfare is conducted online on sites like Wikipedia.