Links - 29th March 2020

Shanghai’s New Year’s Eve drone show spectacular didn’t actually happen - "Ever since 36 people were killed on the Bund as 2014 became 2015, New Year’s Eve festivities in Shanghai have been rather subdued.Which is why we were rather surprised to see videos circulating around on Twitter of an apparent NYE light show spectacular on the Bund featuring nearly 2,000 drones. Those drones “took over the night sky” forming various shapes and patterns including a “running man” and a countdown clock right beside the Oriental Pearl Tower.Video of the show has been shared by Chinese media outlets as well as international ones, including even the New York Times, impressing people around the globe with the innovative replacement to air pollution-causing fireworks. However, there’s just one problem. People who were on the Bund on the night of New Year’s Eve say they didn’t see anything in the night sky. No drones. No nothing... a video posted onto Weibo does show the drone show over the Huangpu with the running man and 2020 spelled out. The video is dated December 29.Our best, most charitable, explanation for this whole head-scratcher is that this was a practice run for a planned New Year’s Eve show that didn’t end up happening for some reason. Packaged footage of the show was always going to be from this practice run, in case something should go wrong on the big night.And not even the show failing to take place ended up changing these plans."
In China, everything is fake

Canadian military police assigned Pokemon Go after fans invade bases - "At least three military police officers were ordered to play Pokemon Go in Canadian bases across the country, after players invaded the facilities in a quest to catch them all... "We should almost hire a 12-year-old to help us out with this"... At the entrance to the base, one woman was caught playing Pokemon Go while her three children were climbing over tanks.A man separately arrested at CFB Borden explained he was just collecting points playing Pokemon Go and told officers: "I have to beat my kids.""

'Shattered': Inside the secret battle to save America's undercover spies in the digital age - "When hackers began slipping into computer systems at the Office of Personnel Management in the spring of 2014, no one inside that federal agency could have predicted the potential scale and magnitude of the damage. Over the next six months, those hackers — later identified as working for the Chinese government — stole data on nearly 22 million former and current American civil servants, including intelligence officials... “Very few people, maybe shepherds in rural Afghanistan, don’t leave some form of digital trace today”... In the space of a few short years, the rapid advance of technology, including nascent international surveillance systems, increasingly endangered the CIA’s traditional human intelligence gathering.Singapore was one example, recall three former intelligence officials. By the early 2000s, the agency ceased running certain types of operations in the Southeast Asian city-state, because of the sweeping digital surveillance there. The Singaporeans had developed a database that incorporated real-time flight, customs, hotel and taxicab data. If it took too long for a traveler to get from the airport to a hotel in a taxi, the anomaly would trigger an alert in Singaporean security systems. “If there was a gap, they’d go to the hotel, they could flip on the TVs and phones and monitor what was going on” in the room of the suspicious traveler, says the same former senior intelligence official. “They had everything so wired.”“You used to be able to fly into a country on one name and have meetings in another,” recalls this person. “It limited a lot of capabilities.”... Today there are “about 30 countries” where CIA officers are no longer followed on the way to meetings because local governments no longer see the need, given that surveillance in those countries is so pervasive... with the advent of commercial genetic databases, exposing a spy or other covert operative could be as easy as taking a saliva sample from a cigarette butt or a drinking cup. A suspicious foreign government could send the sample in and potentially find out if the person has been operating under an assumed name.  “It’s right out of a spy novel”... Chinese intelligence successfully hacked into the biometric data from Bangkok’s airport. “The Chinese have consistently extracted data from all the major transit hubs in the world”... “Now you show up at the border of Russia, they’ve got your high school yearbook out there where you wrote about your lifelong ambitions to work for the CIA. All that stuff is digitized.”... Nowadays, say former officials, NOCs must truly “live their cover” — that is, actually work as the professional engineer or businessperson that they present themselves to be. NOCs live and work under their true names, say former officials, though they are known to their CIA counterparts by a pseudonym... Recruitment to the CIA of younger people, particularly those born in the age of social media, has become more difficult, say former officials, with the agency lacking clearly defined policies for social media use... Until a few years ago, agency officials were still counseling younger employees to quit social media, even though such behavior could be seen as suspicious... The CIA still considers a Facebook friendship a “close and continuing relationship” for security purposes"

The CIA's communications suffered a catastrophic compromise - "From around 2009 to 2013, the U.S. intelligence community experienced crippling intelligence failures related to the secret internet-based communications system, a key means for remote messaging between CIA officers and their sources on the ground worldwide. The previously unreported global problem originated in Iran and spiderwebbed to other countries, and was left unrepaired — despite warnings about what was happening — until more than two dozen sources died in China in 2011 and 2012 as a result... “Can you imagine how different this whole story would’ve turned out if the CIA [inspector general] had acted on Reidy’s warnings instead of going after him?” said Kel McClanahan, Reidy’s attorney. “Can you imagine how different this whole story would’ve turned out if the congressional oversight committees had done oversight instead of taking CIA’s word that he was just a troublemaker?”Irvin McCullough, a national security analyst with the Government Accountability Project, a nonprofit that works with whistleblowers, put the issue in even starker terms. “This is one of the most catastrophic intelligence failures since Sept. 11,” he said. “And the CIA punished the person who brought the problem to light.”"

No one is ready for California’s new consumer privacy law - "The California Consumer Privacy Act goes into effect January 1st, and it doesn’t look like anyone, even the state of California itself, is totally ready. Draft regulations for enforcing the law are still being finalized at the state level, and questions about specific aspects of the most sweeping privacy regulation since the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) are still not clear.“If you thought the GDPR was bumpy, the CCPA is going to be a real roller coaster”"

Toronto Is Canada’s Poverty Capital For Working-Age People - "Torontonians pay more of their income on rent than most other Canadians, but the report points out that they also make about $4,507 less than their counterparts in other parts of the country. Most financial experts recommend spending no more than 30 per cent of household income on housing — 76 per cent of Toronto renters making under $50,000 a year in their household spent much more than that on a place to live. The city’s official count of homeless people in shelters has grown a staggering 69 per cent in just five years... Black Torontonians, for example, are highly segregated to two major areas: north Etobicoke and Scarborough, and that correlates to their chances of growing their wealth in the future."
Comments: "Naturally the social work 'professor' attributes all his findings to race, with no apparent regard for education, experience, marketable skills, tenure, aptitude, language comprehension, work ethic, presentability, attitude, personal initiative, et al."
"What did you expect? Urban areas like Toronto are a hotbed for both wealthy individuals who are looking to live in urban luxury and poor individuals (like immigrants) looking to find a better life. Of course the wealth disparity is significant.Maybe you should try addressing the problems of globalization and technology rather than simply trying to continuously raise the min wage?"
"If you don't have a high income, live in a lower cost city, town etc. Contrary to popular belief in Toronto (or Vancouver) there are jobs outside the metropolis. If you job is specialized you will be making lots of money, if it isn't and you aren't, there are lots of other places with much better living conditions."

Diane Abbott's son, 28, charged with 11 new offences - "Diane Abbott's son was in court yesterday after being charged with a string of violent offences including allegedly beating up police, emergency workers and doctors as well as exposing himself in a hospital.James Abbott-Thompson appeared before a judge at Thames Magistrates Court where he was accused of 11 crimes - most of them on NHS property... The 28-year-old faces nine charges of assault, a charge of of racially aggravated criminal damage and one of exposure over the past five months... The mother of one made headlines when she decided to send her only child to the private City of London School in 2003 after criticising colleagues for choosing selective and independent schools.  She was accused of hypocrisy, but claimed she had done a lot of work on ‘how black boys underachieve in secondary schools’"

King’s College hires 'safe space marshals' to police controversial speaker events on campus - "The university’s students' union employs the £12-an-hour officials to patrol meetings where there is a potential for audience members to be offended.  While on duty at an event, the marshals are expected to hand out leaflets detailing the students' union's Safe Space policy, and put up posters reminding students that “This is a Safe Space”.  They must be ready to take “immediate action” if anyone expresses opinions that breech the Safe Space policy. This could include derogatory comments about someone’s age, disability, marital or maternity or paternity status, race, religious beliefs, sexual orientation, gender identity, trans status, socio-economic status, or ideology or culture. Three marshals were present when Jacob Rees-Mogg MP spoke at the university’s Conservative Association last week. He said that the concept of safe space marshals is “bizarre” and “antithetical to free speech”... “It’s absolutely weird to send marshals to check the content of the speech by an elected Member of Parliament.“I think you should make the safe assumption that MPs have views that are acceptable to their electorate and therefore you should not need to send people whose purpose may be to censor what is discussed.”... she raised concerns about an event held during Israel Apartheid Week earlier this year, where speakers appeared to condone terrorism against Israelis. However, she said the student union refused to acknowledge that this was a breach of the Safe Space policy on the grounds that it was “political”. Ms Berena added that safe space marshals had been present at an Israel Society event last year but failed to prevent demonstrators throwing chairs and smashing windows of the room.
Clearly, safe spaces are only for "unproblematic" people with approved opinions

Stephen Pax Leonard on Twitter - "At British universities, safe-space marshals stand at back of room to ensure speaker doesn't 'trigger' students by saying anything sensitive. Speakers must sign form beforehand confirming material is not 'controversial'. This is the scar the Far Left has left on our universities."

Actually, opening up our failing NHS to the Americans may not be such a bad idea - "The NHS already contracts out great swathes of activity to private sector providers, including US firms such as the Nashville-based HCA Healthcare, and has done so for decades. There is no reason in principle why US firms shouldn’t be allowed to compete on an equal footing with UK and European providers for further NHS contracts, or even to run NHS hospital trusts; they could hardly do any worse than the incumbents.The confusion that Labour preys on is that whereas America has some of the best healthcare providers in the world, it also has a grossly inadequate healthcare system, one that is both fiendishly costly to use and discriminates according to means. You would not want it in the UK, just as you wouldn’t want to adopt the American system of pharma pricing, which for patented drugs is far and away the most expensive in the world. The US has always deeply resented the leverage enjoyed by monopoly healthcare buyers such as the NHS in bidding down drug prices, and with some justification believes that the high prices paid by its own citizens in effect subsidise the lower prices of European consumers. Yet to right this supposed wrong would require the UK to agree not just to much longer patents, but to the breakup of the NHS, and thereby the removal of its monopoly buying power.You either believe Boris Johnson when he says he won’t make the NHS part of any trade deal or you don’t, but on this, more so than any other issue, it seems very unlikely he is being deliberately duplicitous. Politicians that challenge our attachment to the NHS – stronger, some would say, than our allegiance to the crown – don’t tend to last very long... Labour is thus trying to create a political divide which doesn’t exist. More so than any other institution in Britain, the NHS desperately needs reform, yet its basic principles remain essentially untouchable, and the underlying causes of its ever more apparent failings politically unmentionable. Boris Johnson is not about to break the taboo.At its best, the NHS provides care as good as anywhere in the world, but it is also in effect a system of healthcare rationing; the producer, not the consumer, decides what you get and how you get it. With rising healthcare expectations, this naturally leads to a sense of permanent inadequacy and crisis.Yet our affection for the NHS has little if anything to do with the standards of care it provides. Rather it is a nostalgic throwback to the “all in it together” mentality of the Second World War. At a conference in China a year ago, Matt Hancock, then newly installed as health secretary, told me that his Chinese hosts couldn’t get their heads around the NHS, because in this supposed exemplar of the communist state it was far too socialist for them to comprehend. The NHS is a little bit of Corbynism at the heart of the UK economy, and oddly, citizens will have nothing else. This is their loss. The idea that the NHS is the only way of delivering reliable, universal healthcare, equally available to all, is ridiculous and increasingly disproved by the social insurance based models of the Continent.A study by the London School of Economics and Harvard School of Public Health published this week showed UK healthcare falling behind comparable foreign counterparts on multiple fronts, from cancer survival rates, to expenditure, nurses, doctors and beds per head. But woe betide the politician who dares to suggest the fault is in the system."