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Daniel Leslie Brandt (born circa 1948 to missionary parents in China) is an American activist on the World Wide Web, particularly in relation to Google Inc. and the Wikipedia encyclopedia project.

Brandt's current activism centers on demands for accountability from organizations he believes are operating irresponsibly, or in an unnecessarily secretive manner. 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.

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."

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.

When Brandt's student deferment classification was withdrawn by the local Selective Service System in December 1968 due to his public non-cooperation with his draft board, Brandt was convicted of failure to report for a pre-induction physical exam and refusal to submit to induction. Brandt appealed and his convictions were reversed on the grounds that he was entitled to student status as an undergraduate at USC. Since President Carter granted amnesty to all draft resisters in 1977, this would have the effect of overturning this conviction even if it had not already been reversed, with the further implication that all civil rights have been restored despite the conviction.

Political activism

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 and Ralph McGehee, as well as John F. Kennedy assassination researchers Bernard Fensterwald and Mary Ferrell.

Deep indexing and its discontents

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."

These prior efforts were the basis of his NameBase (namebase.org) website, described as "a quirky index of names cross-indexed," focusing on "foreign policy, spy, conspiracy, media, etc." Currently the names are drawn from over 800 books, serials, and other publications. On October 10, 2006, the NameBase site was blacklisted as spam by the Wikimedia Foundation, preventing linkage to Brandt's non-commercial, research-oriented index pages from within Wikipedia articles, and causing existing hyperlinks to be deactivated. The administrators cite redirects from Brandt's site to the Wikipedia Review site as the reason behind the blockage. As of early 2007, the redirects are no longer operative,Template:Fact but the blocks are maintained as a hedge to concerns that they might be reinstated.

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.

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. 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.

Criticism of Google and Yahoo!

Main article: Google Watch

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.

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."

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, in response to a user authoring a biographical article on him within the Wikipedia peer-edited online encyclopedia project. He has published some logs from Wikipedia Internet Relay Chat channels on Wikipedia Watch, and has listed dozens of examples of plagiarism by Wikipedia editors on the English portal. Several PIR domains have been placed on Wikipedia's spam blacklist.

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.

Since November 19, 2005, the Wikipedia Watch site has included a page stating alleged personal details that he claims pertain to individual Wikipedia editors and administrators who have supposedly edited Brandt's biography or responded to his complaints in a way he does not like, and to:

discourage irresponsible editors from applying for adminship, and encourage others to be more considerate of those who would rather not have an article about themselves.

Brandt states that his reasoning for maintaining the list is that, "if I ever decide that I have cause to sue, I'm not sure who should be sued." This is, according to Brandt, due to a lack of any party within the project claiming content responsibility.

Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales responded to Brandt in a letter to Editor & Publisher, stating:

I don't regard him as a valid source about anything at all, based on my interactions with him. I tried very hard to help him, and he misrepresented nearly everything about our conversation in his very strange rant. He considers the very existence of a Wikipedia article about him to be a privacy violation, despite being a public person. I find it hard to take him very seriously at all. He misrepresents everything about our procedures, claiming that we have a 'secret police' and so on.

A sidebar on Brandt's site contradicts this letter: "Wales never tried to help Brandt at all, and he and Brandt have never had a conversation."

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."

Seigenthaler Wikipedia biography controversy

Template:Main 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.

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.

Bibliography

• "Google Libraries and Privacy" by Daniel Brandt, Web Pro News, 1 December 2005
• "An Incorrect Political Memoir" by Daniel Brandt, Lobster, December 1992

External links

Sites run by Daniel Brandt

• http://www.cia-on-campus.org - CIA on Campus
• http://www.google-watch.org - Google Watch
• http://www.namebase.org - NameBase
• http://www.scroogle.org - Scroogle
• http://www.wikipedia-watch.org - Wikipedia Watch

Media coverage

• "Conspiracy Researcher says Google's no good" by Farhad Manjoo, Salon.com, 30 August 2002 with http://www.google-watch.org/gaming.html#case3 Brandt's response (down the bottom)
• "Paranoid or Prescient? Daniel Brandt is concerned about Google Print" by Jim Hedger, Concept, 2003
• "Scraping Google to see what happens" by John Battelle, Searchblog, 11 January 2005
• "Anti-Google campaign by Lenz?" by Nathan Weinberg, Blog news Channel, 15 May 2005
• "What's in a Wiki?" by Philipp Lenssen, Blog News Channel, 30 October 2005
• "Who owns your Wikipedia bio?" by Andrew Orlowski, The Register, 6 December 2005
• "Caught red handed" Sydney Morning Herald, 12 December 2005

References

• Adapted from the Wikipedia article, "Daniel_Brandt" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_Brandt, used under the GNU Free Documentation License, update February 24, 2007