Obama and the CIA: a conspiracy hypothesis

For years my friend Daniel Brandt has been telling me about circumstantial evidence that the young Barack Obama and his mother, Ann Dunham, had connections to the Central Intelligence Agency.

I never tried to delve into the truth of this.  I believe that the undisputed known facts are so appalling, and so ignored, that there is no point in using my limited time, energy and brainpower in speculating on what lies beyond my knowledge.

However, a blogger named Joseph Cannon did that work for me.  What he found is, shall I say, very interesting, although, as he himself wrote, not absolutely conclusive.  Here are links to Cannon’s posts on this topic.

The money: A spooky story.   (2008)

Spies, lies, Barry and his mom.  (2008)

Tim Geithner’s dad, Barack Obama’s mom and the CIA (2009)

Obama, the passport scandal and a murder (2009)

“The name’s Obama – BARACK Obama” (2009)

Obama’s parents and the CIA (2012)

Shadow government (2016)

As Cannon notes, all his evidence is circumstantial.  It is not proof.  But if true, it explains a lot—especially why President Obama gave impunity to torturers and other war criminals, and waged an unprecedented war on whistle-blowers.  There would be just too much that the CIA had on file that Obama couldn’t afford to have known.

My own attitude toward Obama is not based on speculation as to what he and his mother did in the 1970s and 1980s.  It is based on his record as President.

Obama is what he is—someone who has continued the Bush policy of invading foreign countries that do not threaten us, someone who claims the right to order the death of anyone he says is a threat or a potential threat to the nation, someone who has recommitted the country to endless war.

Beware of geeks bearing gifts

My friend Daniel Brandt e-mailed me this trailer for a movie about Google’s plan to digitize the world’s books and make them available on the Internet.

At first glance this would seem like a good thing, not a bad thing.  Daniel has two concerns.  One is violation of copyright.   It is a sign of the times that Google can ride rough-shod over copyright holders at a time when teenagers are prosecuted for file-sharing of copyrighted music.  The other and larger concern is the potential of a Google monopoly.  Authors, publishers, the U.S. Department of Justice’s anti-trust division and various European governments had the same concerns, and Google’s effort is stalled in the courts for now, but not stopped for good.

Like many people, I use Google virtually every day of my life.   One thing Google does is to make this web log possible.   Without Google, it would be not be so easy to find information I write about, and, without Google, I don’t think anybody outside my circle of friends could find their way to this blog.  I think the same is true of Daniel Brandt and his web site.

But there is a price for this.  My every interaction with Google is logged, and I have no knowledge or control over how this information is used.

When Borders opened its first super-store here in Rochester, NY, I felt I was in book-lovers’ heaven.   The established local new-book stores soon went out of business (we still have good used-book stores), but for me that was outweighed by the greater availability and choice of books at Borders made possible.  Then Barnes & Noble came to town, and eventually put Borders out of business.

Now, or so it seems to me, Barnes & Noble is cutting down its selection, and shifting to promotion of its Nook utility and sale of non-book items.  True, I still have a bigger selection of books at B&N than I did 20 years ago at Village Green, Park Avenue and the other local bookstores.   What I can’t find locally, I order over the Internet, mostly from used-book dealers in other cities.   I have no real grounds to complain, and yet the whole trend to consolidation makes me feel at the mercy of institutions I can’t control.

So it is with Google.  The worst-case scenario for Google’s digitization process is that a majority of the world’s readers decide they don’t need physical books or public libraries because they can get books free from Google over the Internet.  Availability of physical books declines, and then Google is in a position to charge monopoly prices.  More importantly, Google is in a position to decide which books are unsuitable for availability to the public.

One parallel is J-STOR, a utility which digitizes and makes articles in scholarly journals available to academics in return for a fee paid by universities and their libraries.  J-STOR is strict about barring unauthorized readers from access to its service.   A young man named Aaron Swartz was prosecuted on felony charges for downloading J-STOR articles with alleged intent to distribute to the public, and committed suicide.   It is not fantastic to imagine a future Google creating the same kind of arbitrary gated access to the world’s books.

I would like to see public authorities, such as UNESCO, the Library of Congress, the New York Public Library or the European Union, undertake the task of digitizing the world’s out-of-copyright books.   I would like to see more than one public institution do this because I don’t trust UNESCO or any other public institution with monopoly power either.  Daniel Brandt, with his usual foresight, proposed this 10 years ago.  But if Google gets in first, UNESCO and the Library of Congress will likely decide it is not worth the effort.

Click on World Brain: The Idea of a Permanent World Encyclopedia for H.G. Wells’ 1937 summary of his idea for universally available information.

Click on Google and the World Brain | Ben Lewis TV for background on Google by filmmaker Ben Lewis.

Click on Google and the World Brain considers the Internet as a sentient being for an intriguing review of the movie.

Click on The Great Google Book Grab for more of Daniel Brandt’s reporting on Google’s book project.

Click on Public Information Research for background on Daniel Brandt and his work.

Web watchdog’s new site: CloudFlare-Watch.org

Daniel Brandt, who has spent decades researching the Central Intelligence Agency, covert action and government conspiracies, and the last 10 or so years as an investigator and critic of Google and Wikipedia, has turned his attention to a obscure (to me) Internet company called CloudFlare.

I asked Daniel to explain in layman’s terms just what was so significant about CloudFlare.  This was his answer.

Thanks, Phil, for your invitation to write about what I’m trying to do with my new site, CloudFlare-Watch.org.

You are right — this CloudFlare-Watch stuff is much too technical. To confuse it more, CloudFlare is not a hosting provider, but merely a DNS provider (domain name system).  This is why CloudFlare tries to claim that they are unable to exercise any authority over content, since they do not host content for anyone.

However, it is impossible to get to a website without going through DNS.   If you deleted the records for a domain that uses CloudFlare’s nameservers, that site becomes unreachable within minutes.  Moreover, CloudFlare actually does cache some of their customer’s pages on their servers, in order to speed up access.  They currently claim that half a million domains are using their nameservers.  They offer several levels of service, and the lowest level is free of charge.

You asked about laws, which instantly means that one has to make a huge number of distinctions.  The DMCA (Digital Millennium Copyright Act) applies to sites hosted in the U.S.  Probably over half of CloudFlare’s clients are hosted in other countries, even if the person creating the content is still in the U.S.  The DMCA only covers copyright, and only covers providers in the U.S.  Thankfully, CloudFlare is headquartered in San Francisco, which means that they try to make it appear that they are minimally cooperating with DMCA requirements.  I believe that they are not doing this in good faith, and I provide evidence of this on my site.

Child porn, on the other hand, is universally illegal, which makes it easier to prosecute.  Even here, you have to identify the< hosting provider and hope that this provider will hand over the identity of the person operating and hiding behind the server.  In the U.S., a hosting provider will cooperate with the FBI if it involves child porn because they don’t want any servers seized at their data centers.  If the FBI wanted to play tough, they could haul off a few extra racks of servers just to be sure they get it all.  This would mean that many innocent customer sites in that data center would go down, and stay down.

But what about providers in other countries?  Will you need a court order to get anywhere?  You might even discover that the hosting provider is hidden behind a chain of “tunneling” servers in one or more countries.  From the point of view of an FBI agent, this means that you have to deal with authorities in various places —  Romania, Ukraine, etc., just to work your way toward identifying the perp.  That’s a huge amount of work.

Defamation?  Forget it.  The laws are all over the place, and these are mostly civil laws, which means that you don’t have the assistance of law enforcement. Your chances of identifying the person you need to sue are minimal. Are you rich enough to sue someone in another country, even if you are lucky enough to find them?

At the corporate level, everything is even more confused.  In 1996, the Communications Decency Act in the U.S. (Section 230) granted immunity to providers that host content, but do not create or monitor content.  The federal law trumps all state laws in the U.S.  Criminal laws are not affected, and copyright is handled by the DMCA, but that still leaves room for lots of nastiness on the web that is difficult to address. 

Other countries see things differently.  Google, for example, has court orders against them in Japan, Italy, Spain, Australia, and Argentina, based on search results that those courts have ruled are defamatory.  Google can ignore them by pointing out that the relevant content is not based in that country.  What’s the judge going to do, block all of Google?  Hardly.  That would be a career-killer.  Google basically does not respond to defamation complaints at all, even when it involves content on their servers (blogspot.com, YouTube, etc.) as opposed to mere search results.  For search results, Google consistently pretends that the algorithm did it, and they are not to blame — as if the algorithm was not created by Google’s engineers, and cannot not be fixed by those same engineers!   Google knows this, but they’re too busy laughing all the way to the bank.

CloudFlare thrives in a legal gray area that was already gray even before they came along. They are exploiting this.  Cyberwars are happening.  You may think this is movie fiction and hype, but it’s not.  CloudFlare is a cyberwar profiteer.  They deliberately attract both sides in this war — the cyber criminals as well as the cyber victims.  My new CloudFlare-Watch site is trying to sound the alarm so that CloudFlare’s chances of getting a second round of venture funding are diminished.  It feels like I’m a voice in the wilderness — everyone else is hyping CloudFlare as much as possible.

But I’m used to it.  I was the first Google critic at a time when webmasters ridiculed me on forums for arguing that Google was saving everything they could get on everyone (Google-watch.org started in 2002).  I remember one whiz-kid webmaster who argued that you couldn’t possibly fit much information into a little cookie.  I tried to explain that all you need in a cookie is a globally-unique ID of maybe 20 characters, and that this ID is what is used to reference all your information.  The actual data on you is kept offline somewhere in the Googleplex, and you don’t get to see it.  He couldn’t grasp what I was saying.

Much bigger fish than I are trying to tame Google these days, and this means that I can retire from Google criticism. Google’s search engine emerged into public consciousness around 2000, which was two years after they incorporated. In 2001 I noticed that there were some nagging questions that needed to be addressed, such as Google’s cookie that had an expiration date of 2038.  I knew your hard disk wouldn’t last that long, but this wasn’t about hard disks.  Rather, it was an important clue to Google’s state of mind about user privacy.  It turned out that I was right.

Now it’s time to concentrate on CloudFlare, which is less than three years old, before it becomes the next web monster. The basic problem I have with CloudFlare is that it offers one more way to hide the location and identity of your hosting provider, and it’s easy and free to use.

I believe in privacy for passive web users. For example, someone who is doing research on Google deserves privacy, and that’s why I ran Scroogle for seven years. But what about web publishers?  Anyone who publishes information on the web that can affect other people should not be allowed to hide behind a screen name, or behind CloudFlare, or behind VPNs (virtual private network or “tunneling” servers), or hide by cherry-picking a provider in whatever country they choose.

People who publish content that can affect others should use their real names so that they can be held accountable. Everyone who uses CloudFlare’s nameservers is some sort of web publisher, and CloudFlare should reveal the IP addresses of their hosting providers without any questions asked.  They should have a search box on their home page that spits out the IP addresses with date stamps for every domain that uses their nameservers.

The problem, from CloudFlare’s perspective, is that this would mean that half of their clients would disappear overnight. It would mean that their hype about protection against DDoS (distributed denial of service) attacks would be null and void, because the attackers could now target the original provider. And cyber-criminals who use CloudFlare to hide would have to go elsewhere.

Their entire package of hype would fall apart. All that would be left of CloudFlare is a DNS and caching service, which would not be nearly as enticing. It would, however, be much more socially responsible.

— Daniel Brandt

________________________

Click on A watchdog and iconoclast of the Internet for my profile of my friend Daniel.

Click on CloudFlare-Watch.org for his CloudFlare site.

A watchdog and iconoclast of the Internet

NameBase Book Index

CloudFlare Watch

My out-of-town friend Daniel Brandt for years was a one-person intelligence operation, compiling a data base on the Central Intelligence Agency, covert action and government conspiracies.  Later he became a critic of abuses of power by Google, Wikipedia and now a little-known company called CloudFlare.

He created a searchable data base on the Central Intelligence Agency, covert operations and governmental conspiracies, based on indexing of more than 100,000 names when mentioned in over 700 books and many thousands of articles in newspapers and magazines.  If you wanted to know what there was to know on the public record about, say, James Angleton or Dan Mitrione, you could search Daniel’s data base and find pretty much everything that was publicly known.  Click on Olliegate for an example of how that worked.  Daniel put the NameBase index on a web site in 1995, with articles and book reviews on intelligence related subjects.  Click on Counterpunch for a 2003 interview of Daniel Brandt about NameBase.

Daniel Brandt became a leading monitor and critic of Google and Wikipedia, and published his findings on his Google Watch and Wikipedia Watch web sites.  He pointed out, among other things, how Google keeps files on everyone who uses Google, recording every search and every transaction, and how Wikipedia runs articles that are not only inaccurate, but libelous, without liability.  Click on WikiScandal for the story of how John Seigenthaler, a respected civil rights lawyer and newspaper publisher, was falsely accused in a Wikipedia article of being a suspect in the Kennedy assassination.  The article doesn’t tell how Daniel used his Internet skills to track down the culprit, who was shielded by Wikipedia.  Seigenthaler forgave him.

As an alternative to Google, Daniel Brandt started a service called Scroogle, which enabled users to do Google searches without revealing any personal information to Google.  Last year Daniel’s web sites were taken down by malicious DDoS (distributed denial of service) attacks.  About the same time Google was finally blocking Scroogle more efficiently than it has before, so Scroogle was retired after a run of seven years.

Daniel is back on the Internet.  NameBase Book Index is the old NameBase web site, of interest mainly for the archive of book reviews and articles therein.  CIA on Campus is a collection of articles about the activities of secret intelligence agencies on campuses.  These articles are of more than historical interest.  Nothing has happened to limit the activities of intelligence agencies since these articles were written.

Google Watch is a collection of cartoons and illustrations from the old Google Watch site.  The Great Google Book Grab  provides articles and information about Google and copyright issues.  Wikipedia Watch is a continuation of Daniel’s original Wikipedia Watch site.

CloudFlare Watch is a new site in which Daniel Brandt critiques a company that functions as a reverse proxy for web sites and offers some protection against DDoS attacks, but which he says is also unapologetic when cyber-criminals use CloudFlare to hide the location and identity of their hosting providers.

I don’t always see eye-to-eye with my friend, but on matters we’ve disagreed about in the past, he has proven to be more right than I have.  In any case, his information is worth knowing and his ideas are worth discussing.

[Added 2/3/13]  Click on Web Watchdog’s new site for more about CloudFlare-Watch.