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<forced straight face>
I think Google just wants a product that competes with Daniel Brandt's NameBase.
</forced straight face>

Way to look up the wrong domain - it's scroogle.org.

Operated by Daniel Brandt of NameBase, Google Watch and Wikipedia Watch

And the privacy policy is simple enough - no cookies, no search term records and access logs deleted within 48hr. Of course, whether you trust them to respect that is another issue altogether.

And yet, who are the real extreme conspiracy 'theorists?' The ones who make a living doing it.

They're the ones who tap the phones of the Raging Grannies and peace activists. Those who trumpet a threat through media mouthpieces about badly concocted risks, like WMD, ignoring or downplaying real risks, like traffic and poverty and the Mob. The McCarthys and the JE Hoovers, shock jocks and NSA spooks. The makers of the 100,000 person 'no-fly' lists, who stop people from travelling because of the cover of the mystery novel they're reading. Commies in the woodpile and all that.

Oh sure, there are plenty of ineffective kooks who make the Lone Gunman series look tame, but they're badly outgunned, outfinanced, and make a good paintbrush for the 'crazy' tag that is both so legitimate and so admittedly expanded by black propaganda, fear, and other disinformation.

So, it is both planned and true that firm believers in alternate histories and shadow elites are crazy, because the evidence is so tainted, that to believe it wholly is to be inevitably duped. Still, some of the evidence is for real, right? Occam's Razor suggests that documents like the PAO's "Greater CIA Openness" and Pentagon's "Information Operations Roadmap" memos are real, and that there are always those-who-would-be-king pulling whatever strings they can grasp.

Here's the situation for media skeptics:

• you have to question nearly every source, cross reference, etc.
• it is extremely tiring and brings about malaise (an intended effect)
• on public fora like this, expect the spanish inquisition

How much of USA's population celebrates indefinite ideological domestic and global war? Millions. And the first casualty is always truth (sorry). To answer your first question: conformity is comforting, and authoritarian.

Not just the cheapest possible carbon offsets, but very likely the least likely to actually *do* anything. There's a difference between Ford commissioning El Verde Grande LLC to plant trees in the Nevada desert (questions like "Are the trees even being planted" and "did the seedlings survive long enough to offset any carbon" come to *my* mind immediately) and Wayerhauser actually hiring actual workers to actually plant trees that they actually expect to actually grow to maturity.

While I know that some companies out there (say, Xcel Energy are indeed willing to offset their own emissions by replacing them with green technology (so long as the public is willing), the benefits of say Pearl Jam's CD production offsets, are a wee bit more vague.

Personally, I would prefer to *invest* money (with the expectation of profits and return on investment and all that corporate greed stuff) in a company that directly helps the environment than to "buy carbon offsets". At the very least, I get a nice profit-and-loss sheet and a decent understanding of what they did with my money (even at the risk of, well, you know).

So it's just a curious coincidence that these things all occur regularly in countries governed by Sharia law?

There is no country in the world today that is governed by Sharia law. Not one. As in none. You watch too much TV.

Your ad-hominem fails. An old workmate is an Iranian Muslim who left Iran with his family and moved to Australia due to the social conditions in Iran. One of my highschool friends is a Persian Baha'i whose family left Iran due to religious persecution. A uni mate and drinking buddy, and his ex-girlfriend, are both Muslim. All of these are peaceful Muslims with somewhat 'westernised' values, at least to the point where they don't believe in amputation or stoning, but none of them have ever argued that Sharia-governed countries in the Middle East are not Islamic countries.

It wasn't an ad-hominem, more of an observation. And actually, it still stands. A Muslim who goes out drinking isn't really the kind you're likely to learn much about Islam from. Not that I begrudge him his choice, there are many members of my family who choose to not take their religion seriously, it's up to each person to choose their own destiny. However, I doubt you'll hear much about the nature of Sharia law from them, as they really don't know much about it themselves. They're very much like most Christians today, most of whom couldn't name two apostles.

So not only are U.S. copyright laws the main objection of militant Islamists, but "the Western media" actually IS engaged in a global smear campaign to convince the world that Islamic extremists have a vendetta against Western values? Please.

Copyright laws have nothing to do with it, I was illustrating a point and you've gotten all carried away.

As for the smear campaign, well I don't know what you'd call the repetition of blatantly false information that is pretty obviously designed to spread fear about imminent doom at the hands of the hordes of extremist Muslims. I never used the words "smear campaign", you did. If you had any Muslim friends who actually knew anything about their religion, they'd be more than willing to point out where CNN/Fox is dishing out the BS, and believe you me, it gets dished out in spades on ever terror related news story.

The U.S. government may be taking U.S. citizens' rights away, but those rights are still lightyears better than in Sharia-governed countries.

Again, there are no Sharia governed countries. And if the US freedoms are better than those in Saudi Arabia or Iran, only time will reveal how long that remains the case.

A tiny minority (percentage-wise) of Muslim extremists have convinced themselves that Westerners' values are sinful

True.

thus demonising all Westerners, and that Allah wants them to spread Islam to the world, by force if necessary.

False. Muslims have no interest what you do on your side of the ocean. Muslims (and indeed all third world nations) *do* care what western governments and corporations do when they come into a country and do things like effectively enslave the population for a token wage, overthrow democratically elected governments and replacing them with dictators that serve them, attempt to seize control of the public interest through bribery and corruption, experiment on hapless third worlders with new drugs in the name of profits, and... the list goes on. If you think that it is Muslims/Commies/some other extremist group who are the aggressors and the west are the victims, you need to get your head out of your ass and look around you.

Non-profits are a protective layer of Capitalism: http://www.namebase.org/roelofs.html

Very good read.

See Bamford

NSA's eavesdropping on some 400 thousand phone calls crossing the U.S. border was reported in the early 1970s. As late as the 1960s the U.S. international cable companies (those handling international telegrams -- RCA Global Communications, Western Union International and ITT World Communications) regularly turned over their complete traffic logs to the government. This has been reported here and there, but I know personally of the practice at one of them because I was one of the people who made the tape copies for pickup by messengers.

A good read: http://www.namebase.org/roelofs.html "Those who wish to promote change should look closely at what sustains the present system."

This reminds me of Public Information Research, Inc.'s namebase.org java diagrams.

Linus Torvalds

Click the java diagram link from the top of the static gif diagram.

This has been around since 2000?

Also I think in...2002, Touchgraph came out with this google browser, and they have a wiki browser

sourceforge project page - touchgraph

This reminds me of Public Information Research, Inc.'s namebase.org java diagrams.

Linus Torvalds

Click the java diagram link from the top of the static gif diagram.

This has been around since 2000?

Also I think in...2002, Touchgraph came out with this google browser, and they have a wiki browser

sourceforge project page - touchgraph

I don't doubt what you say. It makes sense to me.

However, the question is whether the FBI is, in some ways, actually influencing law enforcement and the law in other countries. That's what happens with the U.S. government's CIA agency; "working with other countries" meant "infiltrating the governments of other countries". Does the FBI operate by its own rules, but show the other government only what it wants the other government to know?

In Brazil 40 years ago, U.S. government agencies "providing training" meant influencing the military to create a military dictatorship. Hidden actions of the U.S. government overthrew Brazil's government.

Corruption of the Brazilian government by the CIA in Brazil is a strong present-day concern. O Globo, the place where the article was originally published, is the biggest media company in Brazil.

The question is not what you see, but what is deliberately hidden from you.

In actuality, it is very difficult to run any organization. Organizations that have a high degree of secrecy quickly become uncontrolled.

U.S. Senator Frank Church investigated extreme corruption in the U.S. government's secret agencies. The agencies certainly never apologized; it must be assumed that nothing really changed.

I'm guessing that you, like most American citizens, have never read about the corruption mentioned here, or the many other cases of extreme corruption of the U.S. government in influencing other countries. That's why you mentioned "tinfoil hats".

--
Trying to make one book explain all of life makes some people crazy enough to kill.

Nice try, but you are wrong. I wrote one of the earliest anti-Microsoft essays.

Is Public Information Research's Namebase. They hate Google too: Google Watch

Personally I was more remind of "A Higher Form of Killing", by Jeremy Paxman (yes, that one!) and Robert Harris:

http://www.namebase.org/sources/IA.html
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0812966538/ qid%3D1114776015/sr%3D8-2/ref%3Dsr_8_xs_ap_i2_xgl/ 103-6502353-7703864

Mentions work on `patriotic` (ie designed to attack only people of a given genetic makeup) germs, the possible origins of AIDS etc. A good read.

The people behind Google Watch does not fully understand how PageRank works, and got burned because his site needs a redesign in order that the pagerank that he believes Namebase should receive on certain searches could be possible.

That said, I must admit that a lot of work has gone into making Namebase a valuable reference for people who do the kind of research that Namebase is suited to, and it offers a service that no-one else does. I use Namebase on a regular basis, about once or twice a week.

The points being made on the GoogleWatch page are mostly wrong minded (would you trust a Microsoft search engine to protect your privacy more than you'd trust google) and easily dealt with from a users point of veiw (block cookies from google if don't want them, set all cookies to expire at the end of the session if you don't like the expiration date). As far as I can tell, no-one (including myself) has really attempted to reasonably address the GoogleWatch folk about how a better pagerank can be acheived, what measures can be taken by Google users to protect their privacy (the same measures that are effective elswhere), or has bothered to link to useful searches that would help improve the PageRank for Namebase pages. Perhaps if Namebase would be willing to move beyond the concept of providing a (excelent and helpful) bibliography for researchers, then a better PageRank would be inevitable.

The people behind Google Watch does not fully understand how PageRank works, and got burned because his site needs a redesign in order that the pagerank that he believes Namebase should receive on certain searches could be possible.

That said, I must admit that a lot of work has gone into making Namebase a valuable reference for people who do the kind of research that Namebase is suited to, and it offers a service that no-one else does. I use Namebase on a regular basis, about once or twice a week.

The points being made on the GoogleWatch page are mostly wrong minded (would you trust a Microsoft search engine to protect your privacy more than you'd trust google) and easily dealt with from a users point of veiw (block cookies from google if don't want them, set all cookies to expire at the end of the session if you don't like the expiration date). As far as I can tell, no-one (including myself) has really attempted to reasonably address the GoogleWatch folk about how a better pagerank can be acheived, what measures can be taken by Google users to protect their privacy (the same measures that are effective elswhere), or has bothered to link to useful searches that would help improve the PageRank for Namebase pages. Perhaps if Namebase would be willing to move beyond the concept of providing a (excelent and helpful) bibliography for researchers, then a better PageRank would be inevitable.

The people behind Google Watch does not fully understand how PageRank works, and got burned because his site needs a redesign in order that the pagerank that he believes Namebase should receive on certain searches could be possible.

That said, I must admit that a lot of work has gone into making Namebase a valuable reference for people who do the kind of research that Namebase is suited to, and it offers a service that no-one else does. I use Namebase on a regular basis, about once or twice a week.

The points being made on the GoogleWatch page are mostly wrong minded (would you trust a Microsoft search engine to protect your privacy more than you'd trust google) and easily dealt with from a users point of veiw (block cookies from google if don't want them, set all cookies to expire at the end of the session if you don't like the expiration date). As far as I can tell, no-one (including myself) has really attempted to reasonably address the GoogleWatch folk about how a better pagerank can be acheived, what measures can be taken by Google users to protect their privacy (the same measures that are effective elswhere), or has bothered to link to useful searches that would help improve the PageRank for Namebase pages. Perhaps if Namebase would be willing to move beyond the concept of providing a (excelent and helpful) bibliography for researchers, then a better PageRank would be inevitable.

Its for everybody, not just the world elite to join.

Only Google and the CIA will have access to the broader picture and its associated cool interfaces.

All the users build it for the CIA, instead of the CIA having to build it for themselvs.

Talk about turning yourself in for questioning!

Ah yes, that page. "Google doesn't put my NameBase results on top! So Google is evil! Wah!"

There's some point where you have to realize that people aren't going to your site because it sucks.

And when it comes to blogs, it seems that now if you even mention Google on LiveJournal you get some random person you don't know evangelizing their favorite Google alternative, claiming that Google gave them pop-up ads, banners, herpes, or whatever.

I've got to agree with this. In this interview Brandt (director of GoogleWatch) admits to spending two years optimising namebase.org for Google.

One of Brandt's major problems with Google is PageRank, which he believes is tyrannical rather than democratic. This shows a fundamental lack of understanding of democracy. The modern concept of "democracy" does not say that everyone is equal or has an equal say. It does say that everyone is equal before the Law, and that democracy is founded on the premise of citizens who are knowledgeable and capable of understanding complex concepts. It also says that common people (collectively) hold power.

So PageRank doesn't give an equal say to every web page out there. Web pages that are widely references are assumed to be "more knowledgable" regarding the topic(s) they cover, and thus a more likely source of information. Not a completely unreasonable assumption.

Brandt's concerns about privacy are, mostly, founded. But then, there's no such thing as a free lunch. Google is a massively valuable resource, and you get it gratis. So far Google has disclosed its privacy policies and not broken any promises, so users have agreed to their terms. If they don't like that ... don't use Google.

...Except that these are the same people behind NameBase. At any rate, it's interesting.

I will respond to a selected few comments you have made.

I have been to Chile many times. I've talked to people who live there. The 1970s coup was very necessary. The whole country was an economic disaster and there were massive food shortages

I have lived in Chile since 1989, one year before Pinochet miscalculated the support he would get in a second plebiscite and was replaced by a "democratic" government.

The people you have talked to have told you one side of the story. As a matter of fact, you seem to have listened very carefully to them, as you have repeated the far-right-wing speech quite accurately.

Communists hate Pinochet because he was the only person to ever remove a communist government from power.

Might I point out that calling someone a "communist" in Chile amounts to saying that they do not glorify the military government and its actions? Note carefully that the criteria for being a communist has not changed. The difference is that from 1973 onwards you were "disappeared", tortured and often shot, while today you are just looked down upon by the right wing sector of society.

I bid you to take a few moments to think about your words: might it not be more likely that so-called communists resent the military government for having tortured and killed fathers, mothers, friends, family members, and, well, innocent people?

To this day, there is no understanding among the two sides in Chile. Day after day, year after year, the 11th of September comes and goes, and there is no understanding. So-called "communists" are told to their faces that the disappeared "do not exist", that they are a "marxist myth", or that they all ran away abroad. People mindlessly repeat the mantra that Allende's government was a disaster (it was, but not without considerable help from the USA and the Right), that it would have been much worse, look at Chile now, what a miracle, and so on.

Go on, I challenge you to read up about the Chicago Boys, about the amount of money spent manipulating Chile's media, about the right- and CIA- organized trucker strikes, about what Pinochet did to the public health system (AFP and ISAPREs).

Show your commitment to being well-informed, and form an opinion based not upon conversations with one side of an extremely polarised society, but on historical documents.

For your convenience, here are a few links, starting with an interview with Noam Chomsky: Secrets, Lies and Democracy, The Lawless State , U.S. Responsibility for the Coup in Chile. Please, take some time to Google a bit (or, heaven forbid, go to your local library ;-)

And then there's that whole CIA-Crack thing that no one ever did anything about. If they are on a leash, someone forgot to tie off the other end of it.

"some people"? It's one guy, and the guy is a nutcase. He's upset that his own site namebase.org isn't ranked as well as he wants, so he came up with a list of conspiratorial complaints. I read his complaints against google, and frankly they sound like tin-foil hat ravings. Then I looked at namebase.org and found that tin-foil hat ravings are not unusual from him. He's a loon.

You're trying to depict the FBI as an organization of jackbooted Gestapo thugs, and that's unfair.

Thats purely disingenuous. The poster describes a scenario where the FBI is unknowingly acting on bad information, and you cry Godwin.

Perhaps your expiriences with The Agency are limited to your dad's company picnics, but they can be pretty farkin scary if they're going after someone they think is a bad guy.

As for the examples you asked for, I decided to expand beyond computer error and include other abuses of FBI authority as well:

WW2 internment

Black Panther Murders

Rescources at GWU's CNSS

Michael Riconosciuto who is serving time for dealing heroin after testifying against the government in Iran Contra.

and so on,

and so on,

and so...

Do consumers have the right to spy on the government?

How will they stop us.

He would prefer that searches for, say, "Oliver North", turn up this, rather than this.

Quoting Brandt quoting himself: Regarding his opposition to Google's hegemony, Brandt says, "It feels like the right thing to do. It's the cyber equivalent of my draft resistance days." (see U.S. v. Brandt, 435 F2d 324, United States Court of Appeals, Ninth Circuit, Dec. 4, 1970)

He would prefer that searches for, say, "Oliver North", turn up this, rather than this.

Quoting Brandt quoting himself: Regarding his opposition to Google's hegemony, Brandt says, "It feels like the right thing to do. It's the cyber equivalent of my draft resistance days." (see U.S. v. Brandt, 435 F2d 324, United States Court of Appeals, Ninth Circuit, Dec. 4, 1970)

• Body of Secrets - Anatomy of the ultra secret National Security Agency by James Bramford. - I'm reading this now and it is excellent. It is quite astounding what the NSA were capable of in the 50s, let alone today.
• Report by the European Parliament into Echelon - huge, amazing, has some great pics. Quite focussed on Echelon's abilities in the corporate espionage area.
• Books by Phil Agee - CIA Diary: Inside the Company and On the Run. Both out of print, no suprise but I got my copies through a mail order house in the UK. The were posted a day after my order but took a month and a half to get to me. suspicious moi? Although more about the CIA they contain fascinating insights into the overall operations of the Intelligence Services as they were in the 70s. Especially interesting is Agee's description of the CIA being alerted to his every move from hotel checkins, phone taps, border checks and so forth. Makes you think twice about checking into a hotel - anywhere. Also very interesting is his description of standard CIA destabilisation stratagem - you can see these same tactics being deployed today against Chavez in Venezuela and Schröder in Germany.
• A Secret Country by John Pilger. The chapter on the CIA's infiltration of the Australian labor movement and the subsequent 'dismissal' of Prime Minister Gough Whitlam is excellent in particular. Whitlam had threatened to evict the NSA's Pine Gap and Narrungar remote monitoring and relay facilities from Australia. This was also aroud the time of the ill fated Nugan Hand bank which was being used by the CIA to launder heroin money. The NHB was the prototype for the equally ill fated BCCI, Bank of Credit and Commerce International aka Bank of Crooks and Criminals International. The bases, with their unregulated traffic were perfect conduits for heroin from south east asia.
• American Tabloid and The Cold Six Thousand - If you like his style, and many people don't, this is historical fiction by James Ellroy that is rich with character driven insight into the working of corruption on the grandest of scales. If i see the Cold6K on someone's shelf I just can't help picking it up, turning to a random page and reading. I am always immediatly drawn in. I can't wait for the 3rd in the series to come out. :-)

Now, this doesn't necessarily obviate his concerns, but Brandt is a veteran conspiracy-watcher whose obsessions include mind-control projects and secret cults amongst the elite -- and this tendency to indulge in, as Wm. Gibson would put it, "apophenia" is certainly likely to color his view of Google.

To my eye, his concerns display a kind of parochial paranoia: obviously, we're all aware of the uses and limitations of cookies, none of us want to see the cache (or the Wayback Machine) go away, and his comments about Google's "monopoly" and the "[y]oung, stupid script kiddies" who "think Google is 'way kool'" are just inexplicable.

Telling, I think, is his concern about Google having a former NSA developer on staff -- I've worked with a fairly large number of former spooks from the NSA, CIA and civilian contractors, and to suggest that having the NSA on your resume makes you some kind of Coder in Black is absurd. But, of course, YMMV.

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.

Where have we heard this before? Oh yeah, I remember now: From every marketroid who ever got in a tizzy because his web site wasn't appearing at the top of the list the way the highly paid search engine gaming conslutant promised it would.

namebase.org is now slashdotted. I would be able to view it via the Google cache, but some brilliant webmaster specified that the Googlebot should not archive the site.

Thanks, Daniel Brandt! You've prevented me from reading your own site!

• It's a search engine. You find info by typing names into a form. There are no obvious links to the content. How's that supposed to get spidered?
• His search engine is overloaded right now and just returns error messages. Maybe that's what Google sees.
• The good data is by subscription only: "And ask your library or student government to subscribe to NameBase ($200 for two years of unrestricted access from any campus computer) so that we can continue to add names, and you can continue to find them."
• <meta NAME="GOOGLEBOT" CONTENT="NOARCHIVE"> can't be helping.
• This guy is very picky about who gets to spider him. Here's his "robots.txt" file:

  User-agent: ia_archiver
  Disallow: /
  
  User-agent: scooter
  Disallow: /
  
  User-agent: mercator
  Disallow: /
  
  User-agent: psbot
  Disallow: /
  
  User-agent: SlySearch
  Disallow: /
  
  User-agent: *
  Disallow: /cgi-bin/
  Disallow: /zipdir/
  
  

• He uses one-pixel GIFs to trap spiders. He also uses cookies and web bugs, providing a long-winded explanation of why what he does is OK, but what Google does is evil.

I run three web sites. Each is at the top of the Google rankings for its obvious keywords, and I've done nothing whatsoever to make that happen. I just have useful content that people like.

Okay, I'll fix it:

nutcase, nutcase, nutcase, nutcase, nutcase, nutcase,....

Okay, I'll fix it:

nutcase, nutcase, nutcase, nutcase, nutcase, nutcase,....

Okay, I'll fix it:

nutcase, nutcase, nutcase, nutcase, nutcase, nutcase,....

Okay, I'll fix it:

nutcase, nutcase, nutcase, nutcase, nutcase, nutcase,....

Okay, I'll fix it:

nutcase, nutcase, nutcase, nutcase, nutcase, nutcase,....

Okay, I'll fix it:

nutcase, nutcase, nutcase, nutcase, nutcase, nutcase,....

His site isn't loading for me. Guess I'll have to go Google's cache to - oh, wait a minute... it's not in there! How rare!

a few links will fix namebase's spot on the list

a few links will fix namebase's spot on the list

a few links will fix namebase's spot on the list

a few links will fix namebase's spot on the list

a few links will fix namebase's spot on the list

a few links will fix namebase's spot on the list

a few links will fix namebase's spot on the list

a few links will fix namebase's spot on the list

a few links will fix namebase's spot on the list

a few links will fix namebase's spot on the list