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

[gnosticheresy_2]

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.

Derek Smart, Derek Smart,
Dum dum dum the night.
Derek Smart, Derek Smart,
Dum de dum dum plight.
He steals dum dum dum
And dum dum dum dum dum deeee
Dennis dum
Dennis dee
Dum dum dum...

[AhabsOtherLeg]

.

Oh God, what have you done? Between us, we have said his name five times. That means he'll appear.

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

...Yahoo?

Ask Jeeves?

I suppose I could try Scroogle, but...

[Stephen Morgan]

DuckDuckGo.

[compared2what?]

- 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.

Those were righteous actions, I agree. And it's probably also worth noting that he's put practically a whole lifetime of dedicated effort into the research and indexing out of which he built namebase, since that's both his primary pursuit and -- in its own quiet way -- his most important contribution to the larger cause of the righteous.

That matters. A lot.

Sure.

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).

Oh, wait, wait, wait just a second there, AOL.

There's internet feuding, which is petty. And then there's intentionally implicating an innocent person for murder so that he'll be forced to abandon the pursuit of his chosen occupation, and doing that for your own petty personal reasons.


I'm sure you can appreciate the distinction, right? They both involve pettiness. But only one of them doesn't matter much. The other one is a bad act with very serious consequences. At best. Because if Sandifer had been arrested and convicted -- which wasn't fucking out of the question, btw, that shit can and does happen -- it could have been something much worse.

^^

That's why most activists for political freedom don't hand off the ball to the Florida cops and just let them run with it, in case you were wondering.

The important thing is his work.

You know what? If you don't care about his qualities as an individual, that doesn't make him a heroic figure. Which means that there's actually room for more than one!

Why does he seem to be sidetracking onto anons and lulzsec from the important stuff he was doing before?

I don't know. However, fwiw: Generally speaking, the line between passionate dedication to a righteous cause and boundless zealotry is not only pretty thin to begin with, but also tends to get thinner over time, in my experience and observation.

So none of his (apparent) actions really seem even the least little bit anomalous to me. Sadly. I mean, it's certainly both exceptionally extreme and exceptionally notable that Brandt (apparently) derives so much unconflicted pleasure and satisfaction from knowing that Ryan Cleary isn't on the loose. Because, you know:

The reason that he isn't is that he was busted by the FBI for (among other things) hacking the U.S. Senate and the CIA. Furthermore, he doesn't exactly appear to be a model of emotional stability or resilience; he's only 19 years old; and the only way he could possibly avoid extradition to these shores and ten years in prison would be if he were in a position to rat out -- let's say -- the people who hacked Stratfor and/or Aaron Barr and/or perform some kind o[f valuable organizational service for the Occupy movement and/or [any one of probably hundreds of other dissident acts that are more important to the FBI than DDOS'sing the CIA is because they're more important].

I imagine that's why they arrested him in the first place, frankly. Well....That and all-around speech-and-freedom-chilling, of course. And since I'm quite sure that you, AOL, would never say that doesn't matter much or isn't important, I also imagine we don't really have any serious disagreements here.

DISCLAIMER: None of the foregoing is intended as a statement about what does or doesn't mean much to Brandt. Obviously, I have no way of knowing that. However, it's not a very important issue to me. I don't really care who the guy is. And why should I? I don't know him.

It's just what he does that matters to me.

[compared2what?]

A sad and grievous outcome:

Scroogle, Privacy-First Search Engine, Shuts Down for Good
Couldn't take the DDoS.

By Adrianne Jeffries 2/21 8:52am

Scroogle, the search engine operated by privacy militant and self-appointed Wikipedia watchdog Daniel Brandt, has folded for real. After enduring DDOS attacks “around the clock” that sent a flood of unsustainable traffic to his servers, Mr. Brandt took down the search engine along with his other four domains, namebase.org, google-watch.org, cia-on-campus.org, and book-grab.com. His theory is that he was being attacked by hackers with a personal vendetta.

“These four domains had also been on the web for a long time — NameBase first went online in 1997, and before that had been available on telnet since 1995. I spent 27 years developing NameBase,” he said in an email, and referred to the Wikipedia page.

“I no longer have any domains online,” Mr. Brandt wrote. “I also took all my domains out of DNS because I want to signal to the criminal element that I have no more servers to trash. This hopefully will ward off further attacks on my previous providers.”

Scroogle was a basic search engine that takes users to their Google results through a circuitous route that masks much of the data Google normally harvests. Google tolerated the site, which had its own nonprofit, and a Google engineer even helped Mr. Brandt get Scroogle whitelisted a few times. But recently, Google started punishing Scroogle severely for queries, choking off access for 90 minutes at a time. Google says it was not targeting Scroogle but that the search engine may have tripped a spam control mechanism.

“Scroogle.org is gone forever,” Mr. Brandt wrote. “Even if all my DDoS problems had never started in December, Scroogle was already getting squeezed from Google’s throttling, and was already dying. It might have lasted another six months if I hadn’t lost seven servers from DDoS, but that’s about all.”

The search engine had some die-hard fans. But if privacy friendliness is what you seek, there are other options.

Scroogle.com, formerly a porn site and the cause of some embarrassing NSFW confusion, has also gone off the air.

Scroogle, the search engine operated by privacy militant and self-appointed Wikipedia watchdog Daniel Brandt, has folded for real. After enduring DDOS attacks “around the clock” that sent a flood of unsustainable traffic to his servers, Mr. Brandt took down the search engine along with his other four domains, namebase.org, google-watch.org, cia-on-campus.org, and book-grab.com. His theory is that he was being attacked by hackers with a personal vendetta.

“These four domains had also been on the web for a long time — NameBase first went online in 1997, and before that had been available on telnet since 1995. I spent 27 years developing NameBase,” he said in an email, and referred to the Wikipedia page.

“I no longer have any domains online,” Mr. Brandt wrote. “I also took all my domains out of DNS because I want to signal to the criminal element that I have no more servers to trash. This hopefully will ward off further attacks on my previous providers.”

Scroogle was a basic search engine that takes users to their Google results through a circuitous route that masks much of the data Google normally harvests. Google tolerated the site, which had its own nonprofit, and a Google engineer even helped Mr. Brandt get Scroogle whitelisted a few times. But recently, Google started punishing Scroogle severely for queries, choking off access for 90 minutes at a time. Google says it was not targeting Scroogle but that the search engine may have tripped a spam control mechanism.

“Scroogle.org is gone forever,” Mr. Brandt wrote. “Even if all my DDoS problems had never started in December, Scroogle was already getting squeezed from Google’s throttling, and was already dying. It might have lasted another six months if I hadn’t lost seven servers from DDoS, but that’s about all.”

The search engine had some die-hard fans. But if privacy friendliness is what you seek, there are other options.

Scroogle.com, formerly a porn site and the cause of some embarrassing NSFW confusion, has also gone off the air.

LINK

I hope he goes on to flourish anew, if that's what he wants to do.

[Simulist]

His theory is that he was being attacked by hackers with a personal vendetta.

It sounds more to me as though he was being made an example of — and not necessarily by garden variety "hackers."

He was exposing the fact that the "emperor" remains fully-clothed while the privacy of the rest of us is being made increasingly naked.

[AhabsOtherLeg]

C2W? I expected to be called on what I said, but, typically enough, have no real defence to offer. You are right that we mostly do not disagree on this. The actions you attribute to Brandt are serious, they do matter, and I was wrong to say otherwise. In the case of Cleary it does seem like Brandt has acted in an irresponsible/assholeish manner to get an internet feud target (a young guy with mental problems and some very heavy enemies at that) into serious trouble, like you said.

The case of Snowspinner/Sandifer is less clear cut though...

There's internet feuding, which is petty. And then there's intentionally implicating an innocent person for murder so that he'll be forced to abandon the pursuit of his chosen occupation, and doing that for your own petty personal reasons.

You see, there is no conclusive evidence that Daniel Brandt did that. He might have done. He might not. Having read the rest of the thread you posted (http://wikipediareview.com/index.php?sh ... 116&st=140) it seems more likely it was a poster called HushThis who actually took the step of contacting the University head/Florida police, an action that Brandt may have hinted at (though he later says that wasn't what he meant at all) but can't be said to have done with any degree of certainty. The other poster, HushThis, has since had most of their posts in the thread removed, making it easy to (IMO mistakenly) see Brandt as the only person/main person hinting at doing something that would screw with Sandifer in real life. But the others seem by far the more likely suspects to take it further than just a dark hint, from their personal attitudes and aggression towards Snowspinner/Sandifer on the thread itself.

Brandt also denies contacting the police over the short story - something that the poster HushThis, when asked by someone called hades, apparently would not or could not do.

hades - I get that anyone could have done it. I admit the possibility. I don't think it's likely, because Hushthis proposed that someone ought to do it, and when I've asked him if he did, he hasn't denied it.

Daniel Brandt - For the record (this was brought up on that locked thread today), I did not edit the comment that BoingBoing quoted. I stand by what I said. However, BoingBoing quoted only part of the comment. The first part was, "If I know anything about grad school..."

The context of my comment was that we had just confirmed that Phil was a grad student at UF. The intent of my comment was more along the lines of my experience with three years in grad school at two different places. If a couple of people in the department don't like you, or feel that you are insufficiently supportive toward their worldview, they can and will sabotage your Ph.D. plans. After years of "all but dissertation," you finally get wise and decide that you don't need a Ph.D. after all.

If someone is going to quote me, I wish they would be faithful to the context in which my comments were made. At that time I didn't have an axe to grind against Sandifer. I just felt he lacked basic good judgment about his real-world political situation in grad school, after making so many enemies on Wikipedia. Now if Sanidfer had been active in playing with my biography, then I would have been more aggressive. But he's never touched it, as far as I know.

I believe that events subsequent to my comment show that I was correct. It didn't take much to raise eyebrows and start questioning what Sandifer was up to. An email from somewhere (it wasn't me) to the UF president, and it was a done deal.

The fact that Sandifer is pumping this issue to get his bio on Wikipedia (why the hell would anyone want their own bio on Wikipedia?) means that his judgment is still very immature. My guess is that the support he thinks he has from his department is temporary. What will count in those "all but dissertation" days ahead is the fact that the UF president had to be bothered. The next time the English department asks for a budget increase, the UF president could decide that he shouldn't have been bothered.

That's how it works at grad school, and that was my main point.

....

blissvu2 - I wrote an e-mail to Jack Stripling, who wrote the article for the Gainesville Sun ( http://www.gainesville.com/apps/pbcs.dl ... /1078/news ) that is the only source that claims to have evidence of a police inquiry. As part of that e-mail, I pointed out that indeed Daniel Brandt does not have an "ongoing dispute with Snowspinner", indeed that the two have never met and that Snowspinner is not mentioned on the Wikipedia Watch hivemind page (but is listed in his list of administrators). In the thread itself, Daniel Brandt was not the only person to suggest that there was a valid reason for the police to be called

.....

Daniel Brandt - I did not edit my post. Yesterday I read where someone on this forum said they had searched for the BoingBoing quote and couldn't find it. I knew they were referring to my quote, but until then I wasn't aware that it wasn't turning up in a search. Sure enough, it was gone. I then found it on MSN cache.

Good grief, let's be upfront. Someone deleted some stuff once the Sandifer thing became a big story. It wasn't me.

I don't object to this. On the contrary, I believe the forum owners/admins have the right to clean up a thread once it becomes clear that it is being unfairly exploited by enemies of the forum. But at least let's admit that this is policy, and it might happen again, and if you don't like it then go find what you want on some search engine's cache copy.

Why keep this a secret? It just feeds the controversy.

.....

Ben - It's pretty clear, to me at least, what your underlying motivations are Hushthis. Very passive-aggressive of you to call the cops on him. I bet he loved the attention, and his favorite part was telling his friends how he got to stick it to the man and say "I refuse to give you my fingerprints." You just handed him an ego-boost....

Lir - Huh, what? Did Hushthis say he called the cops?

Ben - I thought he said he did somewhere. He certainly implied it a trillion times.

It's a long-ish thread, and a long-ish series of quotes there, but I've tried to show Daniel Brandt in context like he says he wants, in order to show that, yes, he is an asshole, his mind works wrong, and he doesn't seem to realise how stupid it is for someone to take a short story on LiveJournal as possible evidence of murder and contact the police over it - but also to show that he denies having contacted the university or the police himself (which HushThis didn't deny).

Brandt could be lying here, of course. Maybe it was him who set the cops on Sandifer. But then again, maybe it wasn't. The accusation of being a grass is a serious one (though not as serious as the accusation of being a possible double-murderer that poor Sandifer had to put up with). When the accusation of being a grass is levelled at an activist with enemies as powerful as Brandt's (and I don't mean Wikipedia editors here ) there has to be strong, if not incontrivertible, proof, which I don't think is present in that thread. Because isn't that what badjacketting was all about? Convincing activists that other activists were (are) grasses, or in too close with the authorities?

One thing I'm sure of - all those people take Wikipedia too seriously.

Brandt might have an internet reputation as an asshole, bully, hypocritical censor when it comes to his own details/reputation etc. after exposing those of others - a bit like Assange or John Young - but that doesn't necessarily mean he tried to frame a guy for murder over a Wikipedia edit-war. I hope to God he didn't. If he did then, yes, he would be a terrible person, and it would matter. I was wrong to say it didn't.

Generally speaking, the line between passionate dedication to a righteous cause and boundless zealotry is not only pretty thin to begin with, but also tends to get thinner over time, in my experience and observation.

Agreed. John Young... Assange... others too. it takes complicated people to do great things, and sometimes they do terrible things as well.

So none of his (apparent) actions really seem even the least little bit anomalous to me. Sadly. I mean, it's certainly both exceptionally extreme and exceptionally notable that Brandt (apparently) derives so much unconflicted pleasure and satisfaction from knowing that Ryan Cleary isn't on the loose.

Well, despite my saying it's the work that matters, not the personality, and despite not wanting to mount any kind of personal defence of Brandt, I would say it's pretty clear that he's jealous of the young up-and-comers who are getting all the press, perhaps jealous beyond the bounds of reason. So jealous, in fact, that even their home confinement and possible jail time isn't enough to make him think twice about wanting to take their place, and their notoriety.

Brandt is a guy who doxes people that use their real names online, yet he still uses his own real name online, presumably because he wouldn't get the same satisfaction from being anonymous and known only by a handle. It seems to me like he wishes he was Cleary. But that's just my internet psychologizing of Brandt, who we all don't really know (apart from maybe D.R. who has met him).

The reason that he isn't is that he was busted by the FBI for (among other things) hacking the U.S. Senate and the CIA. Furthermore, he doesn't exactly appear to be a model of emotional stability or resilience; he's only 19 years old; and the only way he could possibly avoid extradition to these shores and ten years in prison...

I agree that Brandt's blogpost suggesting Cleary had breached his bail conditions was disgraceful - especially disgraceful coming from a guy who is over twice Cleary's age and who has faced police and FBI interviews himself over the years regarding his online activities. And that does matter, contra what I said earlier.

[AhabsOtherLeg]

DuckDuckGo.

It's pretty good! A bit slower, but at least it doesn't know everything about me.

[justdrew]

just as a point of interest, there have been two cases I know of where convicted murderers wrote and got published a book of fiction based on their crime. IIRC, in one case the author was already a suspect, but in the other, an investigator found the book by chance, recognized a real life case, and then found the author to be connected. This was written up 5 or so years ago in a small Fortean Times piece.

[compared2what?]

C2W? I expected to be called on what I said, but, typically enough, have no real defence to offer. You are right that we mostly do not disagree on this. The actions you attribute to Brandt are serious, they do matter, and I was wrong to say otherwise. In the case of Cleary it does seem like Brandt has acted in an irresponsible/assholeish manner to get an internet feud target (a young guy with mental problems and some very heavy enemies at that) into serious trouble, like you said.


The case of Snowspinner/Sandifer is less clear cut though...

Thank you for the whole of your thoughtful, soulful, and gracious post. But you're too kind. Because it sure appears not to be so much "less clear-cut" as it does "not at all as I represented it to be."

I regret the error, and wish all parties to the more current events (except the bad guys) a happier resolution than they seem to have at present.

Also, if I might just take a moment to grouse for grousing's sake: It's SO UNFAIR and yet SO PREDICTABLE that the one stupid time (or maybe one of the few dozen stupid times, whatever) that I decided to just rely on someone else's account of something without reporting/researching any of the details through myself, it turned out to be WRONG.

Because it always does. It's terrible how little one can trust what one reads, isn't it?

Anyway. I'm very grateful to you for doing the work that I was too heedless to do myself, honey. Correction much appreciated.

[AhabsOtherLeg]

It's SO UNFAIR and yet SO PREDICTABLE that the one stupid time (or maybe one of the few dozen stupid times, whatever) that I decided to just rely on someone else's account of something without reporting/researching any of the details through myself, it turned out to be WRONG.

Happens to the best of us! (but especially me, unfortunately - like, on every second post).

It's terrible how little one can trust what one reads, isn't it?

I used to read the Daily Record so I'm inured to it now.

just as a point of interest, there have been two cases I know of where convicted murderers wrote and got published a book of fiction based on their crime. IIRC, in one case the author was already a suspect, but in the other, an investigator found the book by chance, recognized a real life case, and then found the author to be connected. This was written up 5 or so years ago in a small Fortean Times piece.

I was thinking that might have been Jack Unterweger, the Austrian journalist/writer/celebrity/penal reform advocate and serial killer (there was a documentary on about him quite recently) but I'm not certain. I think he was partly identified through something he'd written while in prison for a previous crime.

It's obvious that whoever reported Sandifer had no real concern that he might be a killer, though, and just wanted to cause him harassment. Somebody even posted a list of edits and reversions that he had made while an admin at Wikipedia underneath his short story, in an attempt to show why he deserved to have the cops set on him. Some folk just have no sense of proportion - and a lot of them seem to hang out on Wikipedia for some reason.