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.

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.