My email to SlimVirgin, my guess is that nothing will happen Options

[Daniel Brandt]

slimvirgin AT gmail.com
cc: info AT wikimedia.org
December 24, 2006

Dear Sarah:

I am looking for a Florida-based attorney to negotiate with the Wikimedia Foundation to take down my biography. If this fails, I plan to file an invasion-of-privacy lawsuit against the Foundation. Considering the fact that all the Talk pages are also made available to the search engines, I may include a defamation-of-character complaint in the suit. My main interest in litigation is to establish in a Florida court that Section 230 of the U.S. Communications Decency Act does not provide immunity to the Foundation, due to the fact that the Foundation's entire structure is designed to moderate the content on Wikipedia. I will argue that because of this, the Foundation functions as a publisher rather than a service provider. Only service providers are immune under Section 230.

I appreciate the fact that you supported my request to delete the article in October 2005, after we worked on it for a week and were unable to reach agreement. You warned me that you lacked the power to make the deletion stick, if some other administrators disagreed. This is exactly what happened.

I also appreciate your support of Linuxbeak's effort in December 2005 to move the content into other relevant articles on Wikipedia, so that most of the content would still exist, but not be featured in one Wikipedia article under my name. This effort was one that Linuxbeak and I agreed to at the time, but which failed due to a lack of support. I deleted hivemind.html as Linuxbeak made his effort, but then restored it when his effort failed. As you can see, the hivemind.html page is much larger now and also has small photos of most of the perpetrators.

The last meaningful AfD on my bio was concluded on April 9, 2006. Now I am asking you to initiate another AfD. This is something only a major administrator can do, because minor administrators will intervene on the grounds of "Speedy Keep."

I believe that one last meaningful AfD for my biography is warranted before this issue escalates further, and I hope you agree with me. If the article gets deleted, I will take down the hivemind.html page on www.wikipedia-watch.org (but not the hive2.html page), and will also take down the findchat.html page, the 1,545 chat log files that are linked from there, and the chat search engine.


Thank you,
Daniel Brandt

[Daniel Brandt]

I am an accountability activist, and have been since 1967. From 1982 until today my main project has been NameBase, which is a database that is designed to make individuals, corporations, and groups more accountable by recording where names appear in selected books and magazine/newspaper clippings, and making the data searchable. I began collecting books and clippings in 1973.

This is not comparable to a biography on Wikipedia. It's only a list of citations, and it takes time and effort to follow up and obtain a copy of what is said in the material cited. It's not like keying a name into Google and getting the full text of a biography in the first link. The time and effort needed to follow up on NameBase citations provides the proper balance between privacy for the person cited, and public accountability for that person.

My issue with Google is that Google should be accountable and more responsive to important social issues. They should not store all the information they collect on users indefinitely. Instead, they should have data retention limits. I also have other issues with Google. I believe that PageRank amounts to the tyranny of the majority. And later, I think they sold out and AdSense is ruining the web. I believe that Google is utterly arrogant and has no social conscience whatsoever. I resent all the hype that comes out of Silicon Valley about Google. I am anti-Google, and have been since 2000. In 2002 I started an anti-Google site. The first essay was about PageRank. Later I added material about privacy.

If I was a privacy advocate, I would have started a site about cookies. Instead I started a site about Google, and included information about Google's cookie. I'm much more interested in making Google accountable than I am interested in protecting individual privacy. But with Google, the two issues are closely meshed.

The problem I had with starting the anti-Google site is that I was the first Google critic. I made a lot of enemies because everyone thought that anyone who was anti-Google had to either be nuts, or had to fit into some preconceived box, like "privacy advocate," so that they could be understood more easily. If a reporter was interested in Google, and called me, I talked to that reporter about all the issues. If he then pegged me as a "privacy advocate" in the article, I have no control over that. In the context of an article on Google, it's not important how I get labeled by a reporter, or even how I describe Scroogle. In the context of a biography on the web, which should be a balanced presentation of the whole person, it's misleading and almost malicious to call me a "privacy advocate."

The fact that I have continued to identify some Wikipedia editors and administrators will not be held against me by a jury. This is exactly what the Wikimedia Foundation feels that I should be doing, because its position is that all editors are responsible for their own edits. This means I have to identify these people. The Foundation won't help me do this. I'm on record as requesting the IP addresses those who have edited my bio, in order to facilitate their identities. I received no response.

How do you hold someone accountable if you cannot identify them?

If I criticize Wikipedia for violating my own privacy by posting a biography of me, does that make me a privacy activist? No, it makes me an accountability activist. I'm trying to hold Wikipedia, or the editors of Wikipedia, or both, accountable.

If a concern for your own privacy makes you a privacy activist, and if being a privacy activist makes you a public figure, and if being a public figure means you are no longer entitled to privacy, then this is catch-22 crap, and my reaction is that you should be held accountable for promoting crap like this.

I'm an accountability activist. It's all a question of balance. The more accountability there is, the less privacy. Society seeks to achieve this balance. One common-sense principle is that those who have more power to affect the lives of others deserve less privacy by virtue of the power that they hold. Otherwise, democracy cannot exist.

Wikipedia's editors and administrators hold power over biographies of living persons. At the same time, many of them are anonymous. When you are anonymous, you are not accountable. Fundamentally, Wikipedia is undemocratic.

By the way, I use my real name on this board, and on Wikipedia before I was banned as a user. I expect to be held accountable for what I do on Wikipedia-Watch. That's more than I can say for Wikipedians and Wikipedia.

A bio that has detail on a person going back 39 years is hardly comparable to the name, location, and photo from the web that I'm showing on hivemind. What I'm showing on Wikipedia-Watch is about the same information that is shown on your driver's license. When you are driving a car down the road, you are accountable for your driving. When a cop pulls you over, he doesn't see "SlimVirgin" or "Jayjg" on your license in place of your name, and if he did, he'd haul you off to jail. When you tell the judge that you did it to preserve your privacy, he will either keep you in jail or order a psychiatric examination.

When you are driving on Wikipedia by editing a living person's biography, you should be just as accountable as a person driving on a public road.

The only reason I was originally pegged as a privacy activist on Wikipedia (it took me five months of effort to change that) is because it allows Wikipedians to mock me as they point to the hivemind pages. All of a sudden I become a "hypocrite" or worse, a "stalker." It's just another self-serving stupidity from Wikipedia, and I don't think a jury will fall for it.

[coriaceous]

The fact that I have continued to identify some Wikipedia editors and administrators will not be held against me by a jury. This is exactly what the Wikimedia Foundation feels that I should be doing, because its position is that all editors are responsible for their own edits. This means I have to identify these people. The Foundation won't help me do this. I'm on record as requesting the IP addresses those who have edited my bio, in order to facilitate their identities. I received no response.

It's a two-edged sword. Asking that everyone who makes an edit be fully identified (name, address etc) is an invitation to massive invasion of privacy. At the same time, Wikipedia's unwillingness to require such information, to be kept in a private database, in order to track down abusers/plagiarists/vandals/libelists/etc is probabluy criminal (or rather, will become so as new law on the topic evolves).

I think admins should publically indentified, however, and all admins would have a bio. This would be an interesting topic in a test-case.

My own feeling is that WP will eventually crash and burn in a morass of litigation, coming back as a propriatary product of Google, Yahoo, etc. Brandt may be the one to bring it down. But he's certainly gotten them running scared.

This post has been edited by coriaceous: