I don’t like that when I read the Basecamp news and had a visceral reaction, my first thought was, “Will my commit access be revoked if I share what’s on my mind?” It’s incredibly unclear what mechanisms exist to remove commit access from someone against their will, and also unclear what recourse those people can take to get it re-instated.

But recent events have made me question the prudence of releasing this information, even for research purposes. The arrest and aggressive prosecution of Barrett Brown had a marked chilling effect on both journalists and security researchers.

At Brown’s sentencing, Judge Lindsay was quoted as saying “What took place is not going to chill any 1st Amendment expression by Journalists.” But he was so wrong. Brown’s arrest and prosecution had a substantial chilling effect on journalism. Some journalists have simply stopped reporting on hacks from fear of retribution and others who still do are forced to employ extraordinary measures to protect themselves from prosecution.

Having said all that, I think this is completely absurd that I have to write an entire article justifying the release of this data out of fear of prosecution or legal harassment. I had wanted to write an article about the data itself but I will have to do that later because I had to write this lame thing trying to convince the FBI not to raid me.

Edward Snowden disclosed in 2013 that the US government's Upstream program was collecting data people reading Wikipedia articles. This revelation had significant impact the self-censorship of the readers, as shown by the fact that there were substantially fewer views for articles related to terrorism and security.[12] The court case Wikimedia Foundation v. NSA has since followed.