CIA-exposer Daniel Brandt's websites-Gone, blocked, no cache

[psynapz]

Google really must hate him. Encyclopedia Dramatica is now the first result for his name, and nobody would want that.

On Google hating Brandt:

I think at the top, they absolutely don't give a fuck about him at all. Like, irrelevant waste of mental bandwidth that could be spent better organizing the world's information. They're like that about everything.

Second, I personally know the ex-EnEssAy dude that works at Google who forms the basis of arguments about Google having intel operatives on staff. Now I'm sure they do, at least since they bought Keyhole from the CIA cutout that developed it and turned it into Google Earth, but if this particular guy is one of them, he's a master spy with a well-practiced dorky-friendly persona. I once talked to him at length about privacy one night at a party like 6 or 7 years ago, and he was quick and clear and authentic and did not protest too much in telling me any of the following, FWIW:

- His EnEssAy history consisted of an internship during college wherein he decided he didn't want to work for them after it ended, and he claims they have not since leaned on or otherwise requested anything of him at Google ever, nor have any other mil/intel types.

- He proudly penned the letter to the DOJ wherein Google refused in the name of privacy to hand over their visitor search history as demanded.

- He felt Brandt's work was important and wouldn't have wanted Google to get in his way.

- He was of the opinion that Google can never block access from proxies or TOR due to the overwhelming importance of anonymous access to their service for the purposes of promoting social justice work wherever it's dangerous to do so.

I went into the conversation with paranoid skepticism, scanning his NWO-tool/browncoat/spook ass intently for signs of disingenuousness, nervousness, evasiveness or defensiveness, but instead came away from the conversation feeling like there was at least one person at Google with some influence who genuinely cared about privacy and used his influence to safeguard it wherever possible. It was trippy and counterintuitive for a person who expects every attempt at confirming the existence and reach of the Great Conspiracy As Advertised will be met with bone-chilling success. For whatever any of that subjective bullshit is worth, I suppose...

Also, alphabet soup agencies can set themselves up in the same data centers as Google (since it's shared rented space almost everywhere), or at the upstream bandwidth providers that interconnect the data centers, and tap the whole goddamn stream, scanning samples of it for keywords or identities, without having to pay people on the inside and hope they don't spill the beans. But who knows, they probably do both, just in case.


On ED being the top result:

It's actually result #10 on page 1 for me. As for your assertion that Google must hate him -> ED ranks for his name, I can only tell you that they bend over backwards not to manually screw with anybody's results for anything, because their driving philosophy is that the code has to be smart enough on its own or they make it smarter, not hand-edit a result. Not saying they wouldn't ever, but in this case it's hard to imagine they would do that on purpose. I think it's just that ED uses MediaWiki which seems to do everything right for Google ranking (my first page results for his name turn up mostly wikis), hence Wikipedia showing up for every damn search for every damn thing.

[Wombaticus Rex]

^^Ed Zachary -- there are no more "google results" due to recent changes, just a personalized hall of mirrors.

Still, this whole phenomenon with Brandt is quite curious. It would appear he's done this to himself, based on my reading of the past page...curious as to why, though. Probably some rather dinosaur notions of privacy, information and power.

[psynapz]

^^Ed Zachary -- there are no more "google results" due to recent changes, just a personalized hall of mirrors.

[Edited bcs I forgot to respond to this after I wrote the second part below...]
True. Even if you're logged out, the result set is modified based on the stated geolocation of the organization of record who owns the IP address you're coming from, just in case that helps.

I was going to make a case that the architectural patterns for developing a search engine would be such that you would need to have an intermediary state of "real google results" before applying personalizations to them, in case that involves removing results and you come up short, but if they don't expose that state (and they don't), it doesn't fuckin matter, so never mind.

Still, this whole phenomenon with Brandt is quite curious. It would appear he's done this to himself, based on my reading of the past page...curious as to why, though. Probably some rather dinosaur notions of privacy, information and power.

The evidence is consistent with Brandt going psycho-paranoid and shutting everything down himself, but also consistent technically although less consistent by M.O that it was some federal action, which they usually like to redirect to a public notice featuring their awesome agency seal.

If it was deeper/darker than that, it could go down this way too. Either by threatening Brandt or by leaning on or hacking his DNS provider. Really, the situation conveys no information relating the origin or motivations at all, but ole occham might slice it that he did it himself because he got all pissed off in his head with no help from anybody with anything to hold over him. So somewhere between that and being Gary Webbed lies the truth.

[D.R.]

The tech issues being bantered about are over my head.

But I did meet Brandt at Ace Hayes's house while we were publishing The Portland Free Press.
Ace was one of his first subscribers to NameBase.

I know someone that may know how to contact Brandt and will fwd this to them.

[wordspeak2]

Wait, but what about Barracuda's post, which Brandt apparently wrote just a week ago? Am I missing something? Brandt suggests one Ryan Cleary is to blame. Who is Ryan Cleary? Some 19-year-old hacker, I see. ? http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/20 ... ec-hacking

Thanks for the google anecdote, btw, psynapz.

[sunny]

Who did Cleary hack?

"His arrest was linked to a series of cyber-attacks by a group called LulzSec, which investigators believe had targeted websites including ones belonging to the US Central Intelligence Agency, the US Senate and the electronics giant Sony."

Maybe Ryan Cleary is code in the same way 'that whole Bay of Pigs thing' was code.

[compared2what?]

???

This seems like a total non-mystery to me.

While DB (or at least "a person who writes like he does, posting under that name") was being VERY irresponsible (and also an asshole, imo) to suggest that Ryan Cleary had violated the terms of a court order without any proof that he had, I'd say that he was almost certainly looking in the right general direction.

I mean, It's difficult to verify with his sites down, but he certainly appears to have been on a fucking-with-and/or-outing-various-anons crusade for quite some time, including accused lulzsec hackers. Furthermore -- whether rightly or wrongly, I couldn't say -- the people who run ED definitely do blame him both for DMCA'ing their .com incarnation out of business permanently and (more recently) for being the complaining party who was responsible for a temporary take-down of the current site. Because, according to their archived copies of his forum:

Daniel Brandt
Sat 25th June 2011, 10:58am

I was disappointed when the Encyclopedia Dramatica thread was moved to Biographies of Living People, where it is invisible to search engines.

It was the right thing to do while Ryan Cleary was on the loose, because he could have DDoSed WR easily, and WR would fold like a cheap suit. I know, because Scroogle was DDoSed by him. He had a hair trigger on his very own botnet. But Mr. Cleary has now been contained. Even if he makes bail (there's a hearing in a couple of days), it will be on the condition that he stays off the Internet.

There are problems with that thread. The premise of MZMcBride, who started that thread, was inaccurate and irrelevant. The thread needs some editing. My contributions to that thread are fairly informative, if I don't say so myself, but I don't care who starts the thread.

This Encyclopedia Dramatica situation is a hot issue and it's going to continue. Even though Mr. Cleary is out of the picture, there is still Joepie91 (Sven Slootweg) and one "Garrett" (we are getting close to identifying him) who are running the unauthorized encyclopediadramatica.ch. Both of them have strong connections with Anonymous. Slootweg is in the Netherlands, and he could get questioned by Dutch authorities sooner rather than later since his name is already in the tabloids. In any case, his technical skills appear to be minimal, and I don't think he could keep ED going by himself.

Garrett has networking know-how, and he's somewhere in the U.S. He could keep ED going by himself. Zaiger is very enthusiastic to keep ED going, but he completely lacks the networking and sysadmin skills needed to do this.

Because this is such a hot issue, and Mr. Cleary's botnet is no longer a threat, and WR does well in the search engines, I recommend extracting the posts from that thread that offer some useful information, and moving it back to General Discussion. I don't care who starts off the thread. You can start with my first post if you can't find anything more subtle. The point is to make the best posts available for web searching.

There is a lot of web searching happening. The title of the thread could be something like, "Encyclopedia Dramatica, Anonymous, and Lulzsec." That would do very nicely. Maybe the first post could be a moderator, who explains that the original thread was edited and reposted because many of the original posts were overtaken by fast-moving events.

[LINK]

___________________

^^Just in case it needs saying, Anonymous really doesn't have a very high tolerance threshold for people who think they personally should be the ones who get to decide what should and shouldn't be on the internet.

So, you know. I think I can see the broad outlines of a pretty plausible hypothesis there.

[compared2what?]

Wait, but what about Barracuda's post, which Brandt apparently wrote just a week ago? Am I missing something? Brandt suggests one Ryan Cleary is to blame. Who is Ryan Cleary? Some 19-year-old hacker, I see. ? http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/20 ... ec-hacking

Thanks for the google anecdote, btw, psynapz.

He's alleged lulzsec.

[compared2what?]

And apparently, it's not like they think he's a self-important, humorless cyberbully with a long history of subjecting perfectly ordinary, defenseless and 100-%-non-CIA-affiliated netizens to some pretty fucking serious acts of persecution and harassment for no reason at all. For example:

U. Florida cops ask fiction writer for fingerprints, DNA

By Cory Doctorow at 7:48 am Monday, May 22
The university police at Gainesville's University of Florida have targeted a graduate student in the English program over his publication of a piece of horror fiction on his LiveJournal. The police have repeatedly visited the student and demanded that he submit his fingerprints and DNA to them so that they can compare the fictional murder he described in his story to evidence from any similar unsolved murders.

Philip Sandifer is a graduate student in U. Fla's English program, and keeps a personal creative writing journal called "Pulp Decameron," where he posts very short stories in the styles of various pulp genres. The stories are released under a Creative Commons license. One story, I am Ready to Serve My Country, is a first-person account of a murderer who executes two victims before applying to the military.

On May 12, detective Sanders of the University of Florida police left him a voicemail asking him to contact her. This began a series of meetings and calls with the University Police in which detectives repeatedly pressured him to allow them to fingerprint him, so that they could compare his prints to evidence from unsolved murders. They cited his publication of the horror fiction as the reason.

I spotted the story on Sandifer's LiveJournal last week and rang the university police. I spoke to Detective Sanders, but she declined to give any comment on the case, referring me to Lt. Sharkey, the Department's press-relations officer. I left several messages for Lt. Sharkey, without receiving a call back.

However, on May 18, Sandifer posted an update to his LiveJournal, stating that the police had met with him and his faculty advisors, Kenneth Kidd and Sid Dobrin, and the police had told him that "a journalist from the UK" was asking about his story. They advised him that he'd better turn over his DNA and fingerprints before the story broke. They also questioned Sandifer's advisors as to whether their students should be writing material like Sandifer's.

I called the University's PR department and spoke with Steve Orlando, who said that he'd spoken with Detective Sergeant Eptel, who had denied asking for fingerprints, and denied questioning the academic merit of Sandifer's work. Orlando admitted that it was untoward that the police would refuse to speak to me.

He also understood my concern that the police were using the fact that I was calling to lean on Sandifer.

He noted that five students were murdered off-campus ten years before, making murder a touchy subject around the university, and stated that the police had to do their job to keep the students safe.

I subsequently spoke with Sandifer and his advisor, Professor Dobrin, both of whom affirmed that the police -- in the person of Dt. Sgt Eptel -- had repeatedly asked for fingerprints and had questioned the appropriateness of student fiction dealing with murder.

Professor Dobrin was spirited in his condemnation of the police story: "That's bullshit. They certainly did ask him for his fingerprints. They wanted to force him into giving his fingerprints and even DNA evidence and repeatedly told him how inappropriate his story was. They threatened him, they said if he didn't give them fingerprints, they'd go through his garbage until they found his DNA.

"The Dean of Students' explanation was that the police needed to look into it, but they looked into it inappropriately. Sure, investigate a complaint, but the university police shouldn't try to play FBI."

The university police are under the direction of the university with the powers of a municipal police force. They act on behalf of the university.

"I told them flat out, if you pursue this any further, I will guarantee you more than 200 other stories written by students and faculty that are a lot more violent than this, starting with mine."

Sandifer is also an avid Wikipedia editor and has had spirited disputes with other Wikipedians over the proper editing of pieces. On a message board for disgruntled Wikipedians, his opponents discussed sending the story to the University administration or police, noting "it wouldn't take much to put him in a position where he either decides to leave Wikipedia or decides that he doesn't need a Ph.D. after all."

More, plus embeds, at LINK.

But if you don't feel like going to the trouble, the disguntled Wikipedian who said that shortly before someone narced Sandifer out to the cops -- thus almost certainly permanently putting him on their list of suspects for all future murders that roughly resemble the ones in his short story -- was none other than:



LINK
__________________

That's pretty ugly behavior, imo, as well as totally unjustified by any real activist aim. I mean, I can easily understand why Brandt didn't want to have a personal Wiki entry. But when there was one, it wasn't inaccurate and therefore couldn't have exposed him to police harassment on utterly false and specious grounds. So we're talking about considerably more than quid-pro-quo here.

And it doesn't take much looking to see that's not an isolated instance, either.
________________

I'm neither strongly pro- nor strongly anti-Brandt, btw. He has his good points. But he does have his flaws, too. Like everybody.

[compared2what?]

Although....

On balance, assuming that he has been taken down by anons, I'd say that they have the moral high ground in this one particular instance. I mean, look at that quote from my first post. He's talking about maximizing search results for the names of people whom the state very much wants to -- and REALLY CAN, as well as PROBABLY WILL -- put in prison for exposing both their own secrets and those of their corporate backers/controllers.

And why? Because he doesn't like it that his ED entry is mean and satiric:

I'm trying to collect real-world info on Encyclopedia Dramatica — the cabal, their webhosting, bandwidth limits, overage fees, T-shirt income, etc. I'm logging their IRC channels in order to collect hostmasks, but many of those aren't all that useful. The discussions on those channels are even less useful.

I'm aiming to get my ED bio taken down. They frequently use real names on articles about living people, and Google tends to rank these at number one. Bing, on the other hand, seems to skip such articles entirely, and so should Google (and Yahoo).

The reason I'm posting this research notice in the 300 Club is because otherwise I'd end up with a pile of bogus info ("in lulz we trust"). I got some of that with wikipedia-watch in the early days, but with ED that's all they know how to do.

LINK.

_________________

Again, it's difficult to verify the validity of that quote.

But if it is valid, I don't really see how he's not just being a completely hypocritical, vengeful and speech-repressing jerk, and for purely personal reasons, personally.

But I'm open to other views. Does anyone else have a different read on it?

[justdrew]

what is DB's source of income?

[Hugh Manatee Wins]

Although....

On balance, ..
...
I don't really see how he's not just being a completely hypocritical, vengeful and speech-repressing jerk, and for purely personal reasons, personally.

But I'm open to other views. Does anyone else have a different read on it?

YEAH. The whistle-blowing information on many many FASCISTS in Brandt's Namebase.org website ALONE...
blows your puffed-up-bandwith-consuming-twisted-syntax-psyops-denying-CIA-defending posts out of the water.

Since you asked.

[compared2what?]

[AhabsOtherLeg]

- He felt Brandt's work was important and wouldn't have wanted Google to get in his way.

That whole post was great psynapz, and informative, but I wanted to emphasize this one bit. Because the truth is, obviously, that Brandt's work is important - whatever his qualities as an individual (and let's be honest, none of us really know what they are, or aren't, because, well, this is the internet) he exposed one of the CIA's websites as placing persistent cookies on every visitors' computer that could track them for ten years (and a similar finding with the En Ess Ay). Obviously, anyone visitting those websites should be wary anyway, but many won't be - he brought the issue into the national news.

That matters. A lot. His internet feuds don't, or not much, except to him and those he's feuding with at any given time. He might have a taste for flamewars and doxing (or, I suppose, he might be getting badjacketted by someone who's hijacked his name - but I don't think he's ever denied that the posts C2W? has included, and many other questionable ones besides, are really from him).

The important thing is his work. Why does he seem to be sidetracking onto anons and lulzsec from the important stuff he was doing before? And where is he?

As for your assertion that Google must hate him -> ED ranks for his name, I can only tell you that they bend over backwards not to manually screw with anybody's results for anything.

I was being a bit lighthearted with that point. Just saying - no one on earth wants their ED article to be the first result for their name.

I hate the results shaping that Google do though. What if I want to find something that I don't already care about, or something that isn't slanted towards what they've decided I like, in the infinite wisdom of their code?

what is DB's source of income?

If you find out, probably best not to post it up. He might come in here doing a rager, like Derek Smart on a games forum.

[Wombaticus Rex]

I hate the results shaping that Google do though. What if I want to find something that I don't already care about, or something that isn't slanted towards what they've decided I like, in the infinite wisdom of their code?

The only way out is interacting with other, different filter bubbles.