Daniel Brandt
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Daniel Leslie Brandt is an American activist[1][2][3] on the World Wide Web, particularly in relation to Google Inc. and the Wikipedia encyclopedia project. He is also known for his decades of work indexing documents on influential people and intelligence matters.
Brandt's current activism centers on demands for accountability from organizations he believes are operating irresponsibly, or in an unnecessarily secretive manner.[4] In 1989, Brandt and Steve Badrich co-founded a non-profit organization called Public Information Research (PIR). Brandt launched Google Watch in 2002, a website stating his criticism of the Google search engine, and Wikipedia Watch in 2005, a similar site detailing his opinion that the Wikipedia encyclopedia lacks accountability and accuracy. Brandt also works as a book indexer based in San Antonio, Texas.[5]
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Political activism
Student activism
In his college years he was an anti–Vietnam War activist while at the University of Southern California (USC). According to the Daily Trojan,
Brandt was the editor and creator of Prevert, a monthly student activist newspaper, and the de facto leader of the student activist movement at this university in the late '60's.[6]
On October 4, 1968, he was one of three members of Students for a Democratic Society who burned what they said were their draft cards in front of television cameras following a speech by Senator Edmund Muskie at USC,[7] but Brandt was later able to benefit from a general draft amnesty given by US President Jimmy Carter[8].
Networking with other activists
Brandt states that during the 1980s, when living in Arlington, Virginia, he introduced a number of political activists and researchers to computing and how to work with databases, including former Central Intelligence Agency officers Philip Agee,[9] as well as John F. Kennedy assassination researchers Bernard Fensterwald and Mary Ferrell.[10]
Deep indexing
- "Broad indexing/classification covers only the "top" concepts -- the ones that cover many subconcepts, while "deep" indexing covers down to the most specific concepts."[11]
From the 1960s onwards, Brandt collected clippings and citations pertaining to influential people and intelligence matters. In the 1980s, through his company Micro Associates, he sold a database of citations of these clippings, books, government reports, and other publications. He told the New York Times that "many of these sources are fairly obscure so it's a very effective way to retrieve information on U.S. intelligence that no one else indexes."[12]
These prior efforts were the basis of his NameBase website,[13] started in 1995,[9] is a cross-indexed database of names focusing on various foreign policy and intelligence topics.[14] As of 2003, the deep indexing database contained over 100,000 names with over 260,000 citations.[15] The names are drawn from over 800 books, serials, and other publications.[16] The database is useful to journalists and researchers tracking down investigative reports or trying to discover connections between names.[15]
Split within the PIR
Between 1990 and 1992, three members of Brandt's Public Information Research (PIR) advisory board, including Chip Berlet, resigned over a dispute concerning another board member, L. Fletcher Prouty, and the republishing of Prouty's book The Secret Team.[17]
Online activism
Government cookies
In March 2002, Brandt was credited with finding persistent HTTP cookies on one of the Central Intelligence Agency's websites that could be used to track users for approximately 10 years, in contravention of federal government rules.[18][19] On December 25, 2005, Brandt found that the National Security Agency's website was using two HTTP cookies set to expire in 2035. Brandt contacted the NSA to remind them they were in violation of federal rules and the cookies were removed. The event gained international publicity.[2][3]
Criticism of Google and Yahoo!
In 2002, Brandt launched the website Google Watch through PIR, reportedly in response to Google's low ranking of deep content within NameBase.org, which is placed far below competing information.[20] He also argued that Google was so powerful by then, that it should be regulated like a public utility company.[21]
Google Watch documents Brandt's views on privacy, long-living HTTP cookies, and advertising policies within Google and Gmail. Brandt has also described the issue of "made for AdSense pages" — spam pages with content often scraped from other sites that sometimes enjoy high rankings in search engines due to optimization techniques. In addition, PIR has released Scroogle, a screen-scraping proxy that circumvents Google's tracking of user activity via HTTP cookies.
In addition to Brandt's PIR, other privacy and civil rights organisations including the Australian Privacy Foundation, Consumer Federation of America, and Katherine Albrecht's CASPIAN, have endorsed an open letter drafted by the Privacy Rights Clearinghouse and the World Privacy Forum requesting that Google suspend their Gmail service on account of privacy concerns, such as "the unlimited period for data retention that Google’s current policies allow."[22]
Brandt also maintains an anti-Yahoo! website, Yahoo! Watch. His principal complaint is that the Yahoo! feature Site Match embeds paid links into the main index and search results.
Criticism of Wikipedia
Brandt launched the Wikipedia Watch website through PIR on October 13, 2005,[23] in response to a biographical article on him within the English Wikipedia peer-edited online encyclopedia project. He has published some logs from Wikipedia Internet Relay Chat channels on Wikipedia Watch,[24] and he has listed dozens of examples of alleged plagiarism by Wikipedia editors on the English portal.[25]
On the Wikipedia Watch website, Brandt advances his view that a website whose content is copied as widely as that of Wikipedia should have higher standards of accountability, and that members of the public who contribute or edit articles should make their identities public for this reason; this includes the facilitation of article subjects bringing litigation against editors, although since this multiple wikis now have articles about him. Brandt considers Wikipedia to be a privacy risk, and stated, "It [Wikipedia] needs to be watched closely." Brandt's view is that the creation of biographical articles on Wikipedia is broadly unacceptable due to the inaccuracy of information included and a lack of accountability.[26]
In November 2006, the Associated Press reported Brandt's claim to have uncovered 142 "examples of suspected plagiarism" among the 12,000 Wikipedia articles he searched to illustrate the need for "Wikipedia to conduct a thorough review of all its articles." According to the report, "Wikipedia editors have been reviewing the 142 articles in question and have declared a handful to be OK because copied passages came from the public domain. Editors found others where Wikipedia appeared to be the one plagiarized. But editors found extensive problems in several cases, with many still not yet fully checked."[27]
Seigenthaler Wikipedia biography controversy
In May 2005, an anonymous editor added defamatory information to the John Seigenthaler Sr. Wikipedia biography. In December 2005, Seigenthaler criticized his Wikipedia biography in a USA Today column that generated considerable publicity.[28]
Brandt found that the IP address used by the editor was also used to host a website, with the text, "Welcome to Rush Delivery." Brandt contacted a company in Nashville, Tennessee, known by that name, and the IP address on the email they sent back to Brandt matched that in the edit history of the Seigenthaler article. Within the week, Brian Chase, a manager at Rush Delivery, resigned and personally confessed to Seigenthaler.[29]
Wikipedia credentials (Essjay) controversy
According to the Vancouver daily paper 24 Hours, Brandt uncovered the Essjay/Ryan Jordan connection, and reported this to The New Yorker.[30] Brandt has created a webpage regarding the controversy, which presents a timeline of the events.[31]
See also
References
- ^ Jesdanun, Anick (December 28, 2005). NSA Web Site Puts 'Cookies' on Computers. Associated Press
- ^ a b Goldenberg, Suzanne (December 30, 2005) US intelligence service bugged website visitors despite ban. The Guardian
- ^ a b Velshi, Ali (December 29, 2005). "New Information About NSA Domestic Spying Program Emerges", The Situation Room, CNN
- ^ Thatcher, Gary (July 31, 1989). Cloak-and-Dagger Database: Software Sniffs Out Secret Agents. The Christian Science Monitor p. 8.
- ^ Seelye, Katharine Q. (December 11, 2005) A Little Sleuthing Unmasks Writer of Wikipedia Prank. New York Times
- ^ Daily Trojan, January 12, 1971.
- ^ Kneeland, Douglas E. (October 5, 1968). Muskie Urged Raid Halt; Muskie Confirms He Appealed To Johnson to Halt the Bombing. The New York Times
- ^ United States Federal Register, President Jimmy Carter: Proclamation 4483, Granting pardon for violations of the Selective Service Act, August 4, 1964, to March 28, 1973.
- ^ a b Hand, Mark (January 3, 2003). Searching for Daniel Brandt. CounterPunch. Retrieved on April 15, 2006.
- ^ McCarthy, Jerry (January-March 1994). Mary Ferrell Profile. NameBase NewsLine, cited on Spartacus Educational
- ^ Quote from Barbara Kwasnik. Also see Enhanced Searching through Deep Indexing of Scholarly Article
- ^ Gerth, Jeff (October 6, 1987). Washington Talk: The Study of Intelligence; Only Spies Can Find These Sources. New York Times
- ^ Fenster, Mark (2001). Conspiracy Theories: Secrecy and Power in American Culture. University of Minnesota Press, 59. ISBN 081663243X.
- ^ Dedman, Bill (ed.). Power Reporting: Beat by beat: Military. via PowerReporting.com, accessed 19 April 2006.
- ^ a b Perrault, Anna H.; Ron Blazek. United States history: a multicultural, interdisciplinary guide to information sources. Westport, Connecticut; London: Libraries Unlimited, 35. ISBN 1563088746.
- ^ PIR website, "Why is namebase unique?", retrieved 15 April 2006
- ^ Dan Brandt, "An Incorrect Political Memoir," Lobster, No. 24 (December 1992); Chip Berlet, "Right Woos Left: Populist Party, LaRouchite, and Other Neo-fascist Overtures To Progressives, And Why They Must Be Rejected", Cambridge, Massachusetts: Political Research Associates, 1991. See Berlet's version of events at Political Research Associates' The Public Eye article Other Right-Wing Groups and the Gulf War (no by-line and no publication date) and Brandt's version of events at the Wikipedia Review website.
- ^ Associated Press (March 20, 2002). CIA Caught Sneaking Cookies via CBS News
- ^ Aftergood, Steven (March 19, 2002). CIA cookies exposed and eliminated. Secrecy News
- ^ Manjoo, Farhad (2002-08-29). Meet Mr. Anti-Google. Salon.com. Archived from the original on 2005-03-09. See Brandt's response
- ^ Burkeman, Oliver (2002-09-05). Engine trouble. Guardian Unlimited. Retrieved on February 28, 2007.
- ^ Privacy Rights Clearinghouse (April 19, 2004). Thirty-One Privacy and Civil Liberties Organizations Urge Google to Suspend Gmail. via privacyrights.org
- ^ Related Info for: wikipedia-watch.org. Alexa.
- ^ Wikipedia-Watch: The Wikipedia Hive Mind Chat Room
- ^ Wikipedia-Watch: Plagiarism by Wikipedia Editors
- ^ Public Information Research. Wikipedia Watch, Retrieved on April 2006
- ^ Jesdanun, Anick (November 3, 2006). Wikipedia Critic Finds Copied Passages. Associated Press. Retrieved on April 5, 2007. Alternate link, Sydney Morning Herald, [1], retrieved April 5, 2007.
- ^ Seigenthaler, John Sr. (2005-11-29). A False Wikipedia 'biography'. USA Today.
- ^ Terdiman, Daniel (2005-12-15). In search of the Wikipedia prankster. CNET News.com.
- ^ King, Ian (March 2, 2007). A Wiki web they've woven. King’s Corner. 24 Hours. Retrieved on March 6, 2007. “Veteran Wikipedia critic Daniel Brandt of wikipedia-watch.org first dug up details of Jordan's bamboozling of both Wikipedians and the New Yorker, leading to the magazine running a correction this week, admitting it had been had.”
- ^ Fuzzy, Essjay and Miss Piggy. Accessed March 29, 2007.
Bibliography
- "Google Libraries and Privacy" by Daniel Brandt, Web Pro News, 1 December 2005
- "Mind Control and the Secret State" by Daniel Brandt, New Dawn Magazine, New Dawn No. 35, March-April 1996
- "An Incorrect Political Memoir" by Daniel Brandt, Lobster, December 1992
External links
- NameBase — a site run by Brandt
- Wikipedia Watch — a site run by Brandt
- Yahoo! Watch — a site run by Brandt
| Persondata | |
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| NAME | Brandt, Daniel Leslie |
| ALTERNATIVE NAMES | |
| SHORT DESCRIPTION | Activist |
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| DATE OF DEATH | |
| PLACE OF DEATH | |
