Geert Lovink on Sat, 27 Jan 96 21:55 MET |
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Daniel Brandt was one of the editors of the Covert Action Information Bulletin. The original name of this project was PowerBase: A Power Structure Reseach Database. Then he got interested in trying to identify CIA agents by cross-checking US embassy personnel lists with other State Dept. data, then cross-indexing the names with reports published in political journals, books and newspapers (Louis Wolf and Philip Agee helped with that). He wrote his own search engine which let you ask for, e.g., a list of all American businessmen reported to be in Chile during 1971-73 who later turned up as embassy employees in Iran or Afghanistan. At that point he changed the name to SpyBase. But as it's grown it's become harder to categorize the field he's tracking. He's certainly doing something potent at a grassroots level of fanaticism. From: dbrandt@crl.com (Daniel L. Brandt) Newsgroups: alt.journalism Subject: NameBase Online has new features! Date: 6 Jun 1995 11:03:41 -0700 Organization: CRL Dialup Internet Access (415) 705-6060 [Login: guest] Lines: 62 Message-ID: <3r259t$bke@crl2.crl.com> NNTP-Posting-Host: crl2.crl.com X-Newsreader: TIN [version 1.2 PL2] Blythe Systems Announces... NAMEBASE ONLINE! FREE PUBLIC ACCESS via telnet or rlogin to ursula.blythe.org (log in as: namebase) NameBase A unique microcomputer name and country index with over 180,000 citations. NameBase is used by hundreds of serious journalists and researchers. For anyone with an IBM-compatible or Macintosh microcomputer, it offers fast access to a database of 82,000 names of groups and individuals, compiled from over 500 investigative books published since 1962, and thousands of pages from periodicals since 1973. Areas covered include the international intelligence community, political elites from the Right and Left, the U.S. foreign policy establishment, assassination theory, Latin America, big business, and organized crime. NAMEBASE ONLINE NOW HAS ALL OF THESE FEATURES: NAME SEARCH: search for names of individuals, corporations, organizations PHONETIC LIST: if we have it, you can find it, even if you can't spell it COUNTRY SEARCH: search for all names flagged for any of 145 foreign countries for any span of years from 1901-1995 (28,000 of the 82,000 names are flagged for their presence in or involvement with foreign countries for a period of years) SOURCE LIST: a list of almost 600 sources, along with the total count of citations from that souce, plus one-screen annotations for each, described by one wag as "delightfully idiosyncratic" PROXIMITY SEARCH: if a particular name you specify has citations under it with, for example, a total of 50 pages cited, then this search scans the entire database to produce all the other names found on those same pages, displaying them in order of significance HELP SCREENS: 20 screens describe the various features, plus information on how to order the disk version, which is even more powerful E-MAIL NAMEBASE NEWSLINE TO YOUR BOX OR TO A FRIEND: you may select any of the back issues of NameBase NewsLine and tell the program to instantly e-mail the full text to an address you specify Try it out today! telnet ursula.blythe.org login: namebase Public Information Research a 501(c)(3) corporation based in San Antonio, Texas Daniel Brandt, president e-mail: dbrandt@crl.com