The Importance of Intelligence

“We are moving rapidly into a world in which the spying machinery is built into every object we encounter.” – Howard Rheingold

“It is essential to seek out enemy agents who have come to conduct espionage against you and to bribe them to serve you. Give them instructions and care for them. Thus double agents are recruited and used.” – Sun Tzu

China and America’s Spy Wars and a Double Agent: A naturalized American citizen, 53-year-old Jerry Chun Shing Lee, was charged Tuesday with two additional counts of unlawfully retaining documents related to US national defense. Lee was initially arrested last January at NY’s JFK airport and charged with conspiracy to commit espionage on behalf of China. He faces a maximum sentence of life in prison.

Lee had top-secret clearance working as a field agent for the CIA from 1994 until 2007. In 2010, the CIA began losing assets (informants) in China. Ultimately more than a dozen were killed or imprisoned. Two years later Lee came under suspicion when FBI agents searching a Honolulu hotel room discovered notebooks with classified information, including handwritten notes on “asset meeting, operational meeting locations, operational phone numbers, true names of assets, and covert facilities” pertaining to China. Authorities believe the information in Lee’s notebooks was used by Beijing to dismantle US spy operations and identify informants inside China.

According to the Associated Press: “The indictment alleges that three years after Lee left the CIA in 2007, two Chinese intelligence officers approached him and offered to pay him for information, including documents on US defense, until at least 2011. Lee made ‘numerous unexplained cash deposits, and repeatedly lied to the US government during voluntary interviews when asked about travel to China and his actions overseas.’ “

Lee was living in Hong Kong at the time of his arrest at JFK in 2018. It’s undetermined why his arrest was so long in coming, but it also isn’t known whether this was Lee’s first trip back to the US and the first opportunity for federal agents to snag him on American soil.

– President Trump tweeted excellent news Wednesday morning about the release by North Korea of three American detainees, apparently as a goodwill gesture prior to the upcoming summit meeting between North Korea and the US. Kim Hak-song, Tony Kim, and Kim Dong-chul had been jailed for anti-state activities and placed in labor camps. Hak-song and Kim were arrested in the spring of 2017. Dong-chul had been held since 2015. US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, in Pyongyang making arrangements for the summit, accompanied the men back to America. (BBC)

– The Pnut reported Monday on what the British newspaper, The Observer, had learned over the weekend about an Israeli intelligence “black ops” campaign against two Obama administration advisers who were proponents of the Iran nuclear deal. Ronan Farrow has more to tell about the firm hired to conduct those dirty tricks: Black Cube. Turns out an attorney for Harvey Weinstein had also hired Black Cube, as reported in The New Yorker last fall, to run a strikingly similar campaign to halt the publication of sexual misconduct allegations against Weinstein. (The New Yorker)

– Iranian President Hassan Rouhani spent his political capital on a nuclear diplomacy strategy that, despite fierce criticism from hardliners, culminated in 2015 in an agreement with six major powers to curb his country’s nuclear program in return for the easing of sanctions. Now that one of those powers has pulled out of the pact, the mild-mannered cleric faces the prospect of serving out his second term as a lame duck leader. Trying to get ahead of the hardliners, Rouhani said Tuesday Iran could remain in the accord with other Western powers. Indeed, Britain’s foreign secretary Boris Johnson has vowed the UK will not walk away from the deal. (Reuters and The Guardian)

More News Reads:

• John McCain calls on Senate to reject CIA nominee Gina Haspel (CNN)
• Malaysia election: Opposition scores historic victory (BBC)
• People-smuggler’s son’s DNA boosts case that Italian prosecutors have wrong man (The Guardian)
• Argentina seeks IMF loan to rescue peso from downward slide (The Guardian)
• Taiwan’s laws on language are showing China what it means to be a modern, inclusive country (Quartz)

Facebook Finds Its Footing and Forges Ahead: A national online Reuters/Ipsos poll released Sunday indicated Facebook has not suffered any real user repercussions from revelations that political consultant Cambridge Analytica (CA) wrongly obtained personal data through a quiz app connected to the social network giant. The CA scandal broke on March 16. Facebook endured a political headache, with pressure from regulators, privacy advocates, and shareholders. CEO Mark Zuckerberg testified before Congress for two days, apologizing for the data-harvesting and pledging to investigate others who collected Facebook user data and to reduce the amount of data available to similar app developers. (See full poll results.)

CA had advised President Trump’s election campaign, building psychographic profiles of the electorate to help micro-target voters with advertising in key swing states. An analyst for Wedbush Securities said: “I have yet to read an article that says a single person has been harmed by the breach. Nobody’s outraged on a visceral level.” However, in a decision that confirms the right of people abroad to seek data held by a UK firm, Britain’s data privacy watchdog has ordered CA to turn over all the personal information it holds on a US academic, David Carroll. The order sets a precedent that would enable millions of other US voters to request information that the company had collected on them. Both CA and its parent company, SCL Elections, have filed for bankruptcy.

Additional reads: Facebook to Reorganize After Scrutiny Over Data Privacy (NYT) and Before Irish Abortion Vote, Facebook Adds Tools to Curb Interference (NYT)

– In 2015 Andrew B. Hall, a Californian awaiting his doctoral degree from Harvard, was picked as one of the Top 30 Thinkers under 30 in the world of social and behavioral sciences. He wrote the following for the February 2015 issue of American Political Science Review: “This article studies the interplay of U.S. primary and general elections. I examine how the nomination of an extremist changes general-election outcomes and legislative behavior in the U.S. House, 1980–2010, using a regression discontinuity design in primary elections.” Fast forward to 2018. Dr. Hall is back at Stanford and continuing his research, with the same conclusion: In general elections, moderate candidates still tend to outdo extreme ones. He seems to stand by this analysis even though President Trump’s 2016 win has given birth to a rash of extreme candidates who believe they can beat moderates by galvanizing their party’s base. (NYT)

– A document published Tuesday revealed that special counsel Robert Mueller is investigating payments made to a company of President Trump’s former attorney Michael Cohen, by several large corporations. Swiss drug giant Novartis confirmed it had paid Cohen $1.2 million; AT&T paid at least $600,000. The document also showed a payment to Cohen’s company of $500,000 from a Russian oligarch closely linked to Russian President Vladimir Putin. (The Guardian)

• Days, Weeks, Years? Scientists Say Hawaii Volcano Eruption Has No End In Sight (NPR)
• Mormon Church Will Sever Ties With Boy Scouts, Create Own Youth Program(NPR)
• Pentagon Niger Ambush Report Will Not Assign Blame For Soldiers’ Deaths(NPR)  
• A black Yale graduate student took a nap in her dorm’s common room. So a white student called police (CNN)
• If you’re stopped by the NYPD an officer will now give you a business card in case you want the bodycam footage (CNN) 

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– Talk about an international faux pas (literal translation: false step)! A celebrity chef in Israel tried to serve up something fancy for dessert to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s dinner guest, Shinzo Abe, Prime Minister of Japan. It was a selection of chocolate truffles, served in a metal “designer shoe.” Rather a public way to learn that shoes are considered particularly offensive in Japan. (BBC)

– The World Still Spins Around Male Genius. “Genius, a means to godliness and its best evidence, cannot be argued with. Genius cannot be reasoned with. Genius is the answer and the question. It will be heard. It will be respected. Even when it kicks and stalks and climbs up the side of the house at night.” (The Atlantic)  

– Despite the endless search for the fountain of youth, it turns out that for many, life gets better after 50. A senior fellow at the Brookings Institution found that after all the striving of our 20s, 30s, and 40s, by the time we hit our sixth decade, we feel less stress and regret, focus less on negative information, and are better able to regulate our emotions. Also, as we get older, our values change: “You hear people say, ‘I don’t feel the need to check those boxes any more’, or ‘I don’t care that much what other people think’.” Amen to aging! (The Guardian)

More Fascinating News:

• Quirky conveniences: the toilets of Tokyo – in pictures (The Guardian)
• Meet the Renegades of the Intellectual Dark Web. An alliance of heretics is making an end run around the mainstream conversation. Should we be listening? (NYT)
• How Free Speech Warriors Mainstreamed White Supremacists (GQ)
• Think you’re special? That just proves you’re normal. There’s a reason Big Tech knows us so much better than we think – each of us is far more normal than we realise (The Guardian)
• The Character-Building School of Parenthood (The Art of Manliness)

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