Daniel Brandt and the CIA

[John Simkin]

Daniel Brandt has played a very important role in exposing the role that the CIA has played in controlling the media. See for example these websites:

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

He has been banned from editing the Wikipedia entry on himself:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_Brandt

We should give him as much help as possible in this fight.

[Steven Phillips]

Exelent work John I think its a really important task making people aware of the insidious nature of these intelligence agencies and the real reasons they are penetrating all aspects of public life. The sad fact is though John, this is an uphill battle that requires hard work to stay on top of with so few people persuing as a purposful activity, the danger is that most people will ignore it or worse accept it as normal. The intelligence licence has now expanded to include the private secter, the police and law enforcement generally, and other more secretive sub divisions of sub divisions to the point where half the population is spying and informing on the other half and with each passing generation being watched, recorded, catalogued, indexed and filed this whole intelligence society thing is set to become a way of life if it hasnt already. Its already difficult to know if events happening at home and around the the world are contrived by this monster to direct the thinking and mood of the people, or are real happenings being reported to inform: its very difficult to tell unless you are knowlegable or skilled in recognizing the hallmarks of the deception machine.

There is a growing minority of people working hard to expose the workings and machinations of the deception agents, educating and opening peoples eyes, offering sound advise on how to protect oneself and so forth. Some are even penetrating the mainstream, but there is a danger of becoming a target of the destructive forces you are trying to expose as Scott Ritter will no doubt testify.

As powerful and technologically advanced as they are, the deception agencies do have a weakness. The fact that it has been so easy to spy and decieve has lulled them into a false sense of security and they are becoming more blatant; some of their more recent work has been obvious to the casual observer; the more flagrant and obvious they become, the more people will recognise what they are dealing with and take action to overcome.

The agencies defend the interests of a tiny minority who get their power from a deeply flawed and corrupt system. In the long run flawed systems break down, agents defect, and ultimately all things in the phenomenal world turn into their opposites as one day the surveylance system will no longer work for a corrupt minority but will turn into a force for good defending the majority. At least this is my hope.

[Duane Daman]

John .... Very interesting and informative links you posted here ... I have always suspected that the Wikipedia sites and information was a main stream program of misleading propaganda and nonsense .... And as the article said , most people are gullable enough to fall for everything posted on these sites and accept it as the ultimate truth , when in fact it is far from it .

Steve .... Great post ! .... And all I can say is .... Yeah , what he said ! LOL

[Daniel Brandt]

Thanks for the kind words.

There's a debate brewing about the extent to which Google is in bed with the CIA. I've been interested in this at Google Watch for years now.

Google has a market cap of $148 billion. It's conceivable that Google could be streaming user data to the feds. It would be much more efficient than the data that NSA gets from AT&T and other big telecom companies, because the search terms you put into a search engine are super-efficient for determining the searcher's intentions, interests, and state of mind. Your IP address provides geolocation data. The combination of these two are perfect for data mining and social network analysis. Add Google's cookie with the unique ID in it, and frequently Google knows who you are. If you surf the web with JavaScript on (most people do), every time you land on a page that uses AdSense, your IP address goes to Google so that they can serve you the ad. So Google also knows which pages you're surfing.

Google has admitted that they can call up cookie IDs or IP addresses to retrieve user data. I don't think they are using their ads to trace your surfing behavior, but it would be technically feasible. If your IP address changes, that's where the unique cookie ID is needed to tie the various IP addresses together. Google has no data retention policies. They save everything they can get, and they keep it indefinitely. Their privacy policy is a joke.

If some insider had smoking-gun, undeniable proof that Google was deeply involved with the feds, it would probably crash their stock price. Ninety-nine percent of Google's revenue is from ads (AdWords and AdSense). Google must maintain the trust of its users to keep ad revenue at its current revenue.

Here's an even more interesting scenario for conspiracy buffs: There's a lot of corruption unfolding on Wall Street. "Naked short selling" is a term you can use to find out what's freaking out some market watchers these days. The Securities and Exchange Commission seems to be coddling some big market manipulators. Now remember back to the 1980s -- an entire book was written about CIA involvement in the huge Savings and Loan scandal. Rogue spooks like to play insider games that make money for themselves.

What if a group of intelligence-community insiders, who had the smoking gun on Google and the feds, decided to short Google's stock, and then do the whistleblower thing? They could get rich. Bubble 2.0 will crash also, if Google's stock crashes.

Edited December 11, 2006 by Daniel Brandt

[Dave Greer]

The moral of the story is, don't use wikipedia as the last word on autobiographical information. I think it has it's uses in terms of definitions, and as a basis for historical research. Always pays off to cross-check information from different sources.

Didn't know about the Google tracking information, interesting stuff.

[John Simkin]

Google has a market cap of $148 billion. It's conceivable that Google could be streaming user data to the feds. It would be much more efficient than the data that NSA gets from AT&T and other big telecom companies, because the search terms you put into a search engine are super-efficient for determining the searcher's intentions, interests, and state of mind. Your IP address provides geolocation data. The combination of these two are perfect for data mining and social network analysis. Add Google's cookie with the unique ID in it, and frequently Google knows who you are. If you surf the web with JavaScript on (most people do), every time you land on a page that uses AdSense, your IP address goes to Google so that they can serve you the ad. So Google also knows which pages you're surfing.

Google has admitted that they can call up cookie IDs or IP addresses to retrieve user data. I don't think they are using their ads to trace your surfing behavior, but it would be technically feasible. If your IP address changes, that's where the unique cookie ID is needed to tie the various IP addresses together. Google has no data retention policies. They save everything they can get, and they keep it indefinitely. Their privacy policy is a joke.

If some insider had smoking-gun, undeniable proof that Google was deeply involved with the feds, it would probably crash their stock price. Ninety-nine percent of Google's revenue is from ads (AdWords and AdSense). Google must maintain the trust of its users to keep ad revenue at its current revenue.

Here's an even more interesting scenario for conspiracy buffs: There's a lot of corruption unfolding on Wall Street. "Naked short selling" is a term you can use to find out what's freaking out some market watchers these days. The Securities and Exchange Commission seems to be coddling some big market manipulators. Now remember back to the 1980s -- an entire book was written about CIA involvement in the huge Savings and Loan scandal. Rogue spooks like to play insider games that make money for themselves.

What if a group of intelligence-community insiders, who had the smoking gun on Google and the feds, decided to short Google's stock, and then do the whistleblower thing? They could get rich. Bubble 2.0 will crash also, if Google's stock crashes.

Google poses a serious threat to those seeking freedom of information about the activities of the CIA. For example, Google deleted my pages on Bernardo De Torres and John McCone from their database. However, after coming under pressure, they reinstated them.

Google is very concerned about public perceptions. If people believed that their search-ranking system was being influenced by the CIA, they would begin to lose public confidence in the objectivity of Google.

Therefore I suggest we continue to apply pressure on Google to keep the CIA out of their search-technology.

[Daniel Brandt]

A very strange thing happened to my Wikipedia-watch.org site just ten days ago. I had been trying for 14 months to get it ranked in Google, using every optimization trick I knew. It was not an obscure site by any other standard. It was doing fine in Yahoo, MSN, and Ask.com for the entire period. But for 9 months it wasn't even indexed in Google. I complained on Danny Sullivan's forum in July. Sullivan is a prominent search engine guru, and Google follows everything he says. Even Sullivan admitted that it was strange that Google was treating Wikipedia-watch.org this way. Three days later, the pages showed up in the index, but they still ranked very, very poorly.

Then on November 30 I put up this page to complain about my rankings. The issue was picked up by Seth Finkelstein, a prominent cyber activist, and then by Philipp Lenssen, who is a pro-Google blogger who gets a lot of traffic and is well-regarded at Google. Both Danny Sullivan and and Philipp Lenssen can get anything they want carried by Google News, just by putting it on a special section of their site. In other words, by now I had Google's attention. You don't get Google's attention by sending them an email. Only robots read email at Google.

Three days after this happened, all of the pages at Wikipedia-watch.org skyrockted to the positions in Google where they should have been for the previous year. I already had over 1,000 backlinks to my home page according to Yahoo, the site had been mentioned in the New York Times because of a role I played in the John Seigenthaler scandal last December, and it was getting a decent amount of traffic without Google.

Now I'm happy with my Google rankings, but I'm still sore about the traffic that the site lost because it took me a year to get them. Naturally, Google won't explain why the site was treated this way. It's none of my business. My theory is that Google loves Wikipedia, and did it as a favor for Jimmy Wales until things got to the point where their treatment of my site might attract publicity. I was getting mad enough to try to make an issue out of it. So they turned off the filter on my site and all my pages soared to their natural positions.

Wikipedia would be nothing without Google's extremely generous rankings of Wikipedia articles. And Google's ad revenue would decline if Wikipedia didn't allow all those "scraper" sites to steal Wikipedia's content so that the mirrored pages can carry Google ads. Google and Wikipedia are almost symbiotic. Jimmy Wales, the founder of Wikipedia, has mentioned on chat rooms that he has had meetings with Sergey Brin, co-founder of Google, but of course he never says what the meetings were about.

There's crap going on behind the scenes with Google, and it is a bad omen. The U.S. intelligence community would love to be able to play God with Google's rankings. If they can do this without getting caught, it would come close to the "mighty Wurlitzer" that Frank Wisner bragged about.