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CounterPunch
January
3, 2003
Searching for Daniel Brandt
by MARK HAND
If Ralph Nader had won the presidential election
in 2000, Daniel Brandt today would occupy a suite of offices
on the seventh floor of CIA headquarters in Langley. Perhaps
that scenario exaggerates Nader's abilities to scout the best
talent. Brandt certainly is a wonderfully qualified candidate
for director of central intelligence. Yet, would Nader have selected
a presidential transition team possessing enough unconventional
widsom to track down someone with Brandt's type of experience
in intelligence gathering?
Some of the more astute members of the
intelligence transition team would have shied away from recommending
Brandt over fears he would have streamlined the agency's operations
and kept many of them out of jobs. With Brandt as director, the
CIA could have slashed its budget by 90 percent and still not
have missed a beat. The U.S. establishment also may have worried
about a Brandt-led CIA turning its attention inward, unveiling
years of establishment crimes against the American public.
For almost 30 years, Brandt has operated
a one-man intelligence operation, creating the one-of-its-kind
NameBase database, which includes about 125,000 names and 280,000
citations. The names are drawn from hundreds of books and serials,
plus documents recovered using the Freedom of Information Act.
Brandt first came to my attention in
the pages of Philip Agee's On The Run, a thrilling account of
how the U.S. government went to extremes to prevent Agee from
detailing the covert operations of the CIA. Agee described how
Brandt had contacted him in the 1980s to offer Agee help in computerizing
published data on the CIA. Brandt even traveled to Agee's home
in Germany to teach him the ABCs of computers and software.
Today, Brandt continues his research
unabated, providing serious journalists and researchers with
an indispensable tool for digging up information on the intelligence
community and political and business elite.
He sometimes serves as one-man check
on the CIA, helping to ensure that the agency doesn't violate
laws against electronic surveillance of Americans. As someone
who has spent almost his entire adult life culling information,
Brandt now is campaigning to make searching the web as fair as
possible. Lately, Brandt has been leading an opposition against
what he calls the "hegemony" of the Google search engine.
On his Google Watch website, Brandt says his struggle against
the search engine's ranking system "feels like the right
thing to do. It's the cyber equivalent of my draft resistance
days."
Here's my interview with Daniel Brandt.
Mark Hand:
How has the development and marketing of your NameBase product
evolved with the rise of the Internet over the past five to 10
years?
Daniel Brandt:
We went online with NameBase in January 1995. Only recently has
it begun to attract some traffic. This is mostly due to the fact
that I spent two years studying Google and optimizing the site
for search engine crawlers.
Most of the traffic comes from people
putting a name into Google. If there isn't much competition for
that name, our link for the name may end up on the first or second
page of search results. That's how they discover our site. We
have tens of thousands of these pages indexed in Google. If you
don't spend time understanding how the search engines work, you
can forget about attracting any serious traffic to your site.
The dominance of the search engines--and here I mean Google,
which has some 75 percent of all the external traffic referrals
for most websites these days--is something that became pronounced
only in the last two years.
It's always a moving target, and the
game isn't always fair. But it's the only game on the Internet
these days. Many webmasters who follow the situation are hopeful
that Yahoo's recent acquisition of Inktomi will mean that Google
may see some competition in 2003. Presently Inktomi provides
results for the MSN network, and that may change as well.
To give you an idea of the scale involved
with respect to search engines, from 1995 to 2000 we averaged
about 300 page accesses, or name searches, per day. Recently
we've been doing over 15,000 per day.
Hand:
Has interest in your 30-plus years of research picked up since
9/11?
Brandt:
Not yet, but that could change if Bush invades Iraq. There's
more interest in issues of globalization, which began with the
Seattle demonstration, and in big business since the stock market
crash. Much of my earlier research, from the 1960s through Iran-contra
during the 1980s, was oriented toward cold-war issues. Many young
people today can't find Vietnam on a map, and don't know what
the cold war was. Access to information is much better than it
ever was, thanks in part to the Internet. But at the same time,
our culture and mass media are getting better at dumbing down
the U.S. population. I've felt for years that nothing would improve
for websites like NameBase until the dot-com gold rush was over.
Now that it's over, things are finally looking up in that respect.
The 1990s were years of distraction,
day-traders, and irrelevant political punditry. Now everyone
has lost their retirement funds, and the chickens are coming
home to roost. When I started a "CIA
on Campus" site in February 2001, I did so because the
top page returned for the two keywords "cia" and "campus"
in all the search engines was a page about campus life at the
Culinary Institute of America. I was appalled that almost nothing
about the issue had even made it onto the Internet. No culture
that is completely oblivious to its own roots will survive for
long.
Hand:
What websites would you rank as the best for getting comprehensive
and balanced news?
Brandt:
I spend about 90 minutes downloading news and technical items
every day. Technical issues change quickly, and it seems that
there's always so much that one doesn't know. I scan headlines
like everyone else for the non-technical news. For search engine
news I scan several forums that specialize in Google. The difficult
part with Google is that they consider their algorithms to be
trade secrets, so it takes a lot of effort and experience to
figure out how you can get Google to work for you rather than
against you.
I've read all the books in NameBase,
which is how they got indexed. After reading and indexing 700
investigative books, there aren't too many surprises about what
the ruling class is up to. I know when something is new and interesting,
or is more of the same old useless spin, so it doesn't take much
time to keep up with non-technical news.
Hand:
Have you noticed any positive results from your campaign to get
Google to reform its PageRank and other practices? Is Google's
PageRank something that independent web publishers/bloggers should
be concerned about?
Brandt:
No, Google is not responsive to public criticism. Rumor has it
that they may file an IPO [initial public offering] in 2003,
which could introduce some new variables into the equation. I
have never heard directly from Google about anything. They use
robots to answer email, so I'll just keep on nagging them, like
a robot. I have noticed that other webmasters agree with me more
often these days. Only six months ago I was a lone voice in the
wilderness. I got kicked off of one of the webmaster (www.webmasterworld.com)
forums for being too anti-Google. But recently I've felt that
a fair number of webmasters have come around to my position on
Google.
Still, this has had no effect whatsoever
on Google. If you have a 75 percent monopoly, and it's growing,
and perhaps there's an IPO around the corner, you keep your mouth
shut and hope for the best. That's what Google is doing. The
other problem is that geeks have a poor record on social ethics,
and Google is very geeky. They don't know what the word "public
interest" means; it's completely outside their frame of
reference. Most of those PhDs at Google wouldn't recognize a
philosophical principle if they ran over one in their SUVs. It's
all binary to them--either they're gaining market share or they're
losing it. If they're gaining, then all is well with the world.
Ethics is too fuzzy a concept for Silicon Valley geeks.
PageRank is very important. The smaller
you are, the lower your PageRank, and the more desperate you
become to get Google to steer traffic to you. At the moment it's
do or die with PageRank. I'm hopeful that things will loosen
up in 2003 somehow, perhaps with some new competition from Yahoo.
Hand:
To what extent do you think the U.S. government's War on Terrorism
will erode public access to government information?
Brandt:
The FOIA [Freedom of Information Act] is already virtually useless.
On national security matters, we really don't have much access
to information. Congress is a joke. Intelligence oversight is
a joke.
American journalism is a joke too. A
typical first-rate investigative reporter might spend three years
on an important book, only to fail to find a publisher. If it
does get published, it's remaindered in about four months. Unless
it gets indexed in NameBase, it never sees any digital life on
the Internet--even assuming that some searchers are looking for
the information instead of looking for Britney Spears. It's not
the government that worries me, as much as it's the entire dumbed-down
culture that keeps me awake at nights.
Hand:
How would you rate the mainstream media's coverage of the Bush
administration and its War on Terrorism?
Brandt:
What coverage? I'm still waiting for some coverage. The media
is waiting for the camera in the nose-cone of those smart bombs.
That way you get some video. There's no coverage without video,
of course. To provide coverage without video requires facts and
historical perspective. Big business can't make money off of
the mass media if they have to actually go out and get a story.
It's too expensive to provide coverage when you can thrive without
it.
Hand:
How much would U.S. government actions be different today if
Al Gore had been handed the presidency in 2000?
Brandt:
It could be worse, because all those backroom spinmeisters who
went after Clinton would be feasting on Gore for being weak on
terrorism. Right now, the pressure on Bush is something he's
done to himself. In 1932, Huey Long said, "They've got a
set of Republican waiters on one side and a set of Democratic
waiters on the other side, but no matter which set of waiters
brings you the dish, the legislative grub is all prepared in
the same Wall Street kitchen." Nothing has changed in seventy
years.
Mark Hand
is editor of PressAction.com.
He can be reached at mark@pressaction.com.
Today's Features
Dr. Werther
Third
Reich Syndrome: George Will and the Collapse of Historical Knowledge
Kurt Nimmo
Bush's
Master Plan for the Internet
Robert Jensen
We
Won't Be Fighting for Freedom in Iraq
Krystal Kyer
Not
Another Draft!
M. Shahid Alam
Why
9-11 and Why Now?
Mark Weisbrot
Can the Courts Tackle Corporate Crime?
Alan Maass
Another Kick in the Teeth for the
Unemployed
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