GEOFF RABY.-Why Xi Jinping has had a very good year (AFR 18.12.2019)
“Ever since I’d heard my voice, I’d been saying things I’d never have dared say before.”
COLD WAR II: US Navy Bans TikTok, Citing ‘Cybersecurity Threat.’ “Both the United States Navy and the Army are instructing service members to avoid ByteDance’s TikTok on government-issued smartphones. Lawmakers suggest the popular app poses a threat to national security. ByteDance, however, denies any close relationship with the Chinese government.”
Police watchdog loses boss after criticism
The government announcement came two weeks after LECC chief commissioner Michael Adams, QC, said there was a "significant corruption" problem with NSW Police.
Five sentenced to death for Jamal Khashoggi's killing
The trials of the accused were carried out in near total secrecy, although a handful of diplomats attended.
China’s leader has shrugged off a trade war and an uprising in Hong Kong, and confounded Australia’s establishment security hawks.
“The only writers who have any peace of mind are the ones who don’t write.”
“For the reader it is an attempt at escape. For the creator, an attempt at redemption.”
21st CENTURY PROBLEMS: China flight systems jammed by pig farm’s African swine fever defences.
A Chinese pig farm’s attempt to ward off drones – said to be spreading African swine fever – jammed the navigation systems of a number of planes flying overhead.
The farm, in northeastern China, was ordered last month to turn in an unauthorised anti-drone device installed to prevent criminal gangs dropping items infected with the disease, according to online news portal Thepaper.cn. . . .Chinese state media reported last week that gangs were exploiting the African swine fever crisis by deliberately spreading the disease by using drones to drop infected items on to pig farms. The farmers are then forced to sell meat cheaply to the gangs, who then sell it on as healthy stock, according to China Comment magazine, which is affiliated to state news agency Xinhua.
The Chinese Communist Party: Does It Stay or Does It Go?
MOBO GAO. China finding its place in the world.
China: A Country with Soft and Hard Power
Australians need to understand more about Chinese hard and soft power, given the weight of the Chinese economy in world trade and the role of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) in international organisations. Continue reading
RUSSIAN COLLUSION: Top German Spies Unload on Merkel’s Kowtowing to Putin.
COLLUSION, STRAIGHT UP: Europe Ensnared in a Web of Russian Spies.
Surveillance Net Blankets China’s Cities Giving Police Vast Powers = The New York Times – The authorities can scan your phones, track your face and find out when you leave your home. “One of the world’s biggest spying networks is aimed at regular people, and nobody can stop it. China is ramping up its ability to spy on its nearly 1.4 billion people to new and disturbing levels, giving the world a blueprint for how to build a digital totalitarian state. Chinese authorities are knitting together old and state-of-the-art technologies — phone scanners, facial-recognition cameras, face and fingerprint databases and many others — into sweeping tools for authoritarian control, according to police and private databases examined by The New York Times. Once combined and fully operational, the tools can help police grab the identities of people as they walk down the street, find out who they are meeting with and identify who does and doesn’t belong to the Communist Party.
The United States and other countries use some of the same techniques to track terrorists or drug lords. Chinese cities want to use them to track everybody. The rollout has come at the expense of personal privacy. The Times found that the authorities parked the personal data of millions of people on servers unprotected by even basic security measures. It also found that private contractors and middlemen have wide access to personal data collected by the Chinese government…”
The New York Times – Twelve Million Phones, One Dataset, Zero Privacy – By Stuart A. Thompson and Charlie Warzel, December 19, 2019. “Every minute of every day, everywhere on the planet, dozens of companies — largely unregulated, little scrutinized — are logging the movements of tens of millions of people with mobile phones and storing the information in gigantic data files. The Times Privacy Project obtained one such file, by far the largest and most sensitive ever to be reviewed by journalists. It holds more than 50 billion location pings from the phones of more than 12 million Americans as they moved through several major cities, including Washington, New York, San Francisco and Los Angeles. Each piece of information in this file represents the precise location of a single smartphone over a period of several months in 2016 and 2017. The data was provided to Times Opinion by sources who asked to remain anonymous because they were not authorized to share it and could face severe penalties for doing so. The sources of the information said they had grown alarmed about how it might be abused and urgently wanted to inform the public and lawmakers.
After spending months sifting through the data, tracking the movements of people across the country and speaking with dozens of data companies, technologists, lawyers and academics who study this field, we feel the same sense of alarm. In the cities that the data file covers, it tracks people from nearly every neighborhood and block, whether they live in mobile homes in Alexandria, Va., or luxury towers in Manhattan. If you lived in one of the cities the dataset covers and use apps that share your location — anything from weather apps to local news apps to coupon savers — you could be in there, too. If you could see the full trove, you might never use your phone the same way again…”
Back in 1980s I used to do newspaper clippings in legislative landscapes Farewell to the Newseum - Los Angeles Times – Michael Hiltzik: “…At any newspaper worth its salt, articles and photos were clipped and placed in cross-referenced envelopes, along with archival copies of every edition. As reporters we were drilled never to start writing a story without “checking the clips” to see what had been written about our subject before. But what has happened to these treasures with the passage of time, especially as their owners have gone bust? Some papers donated their morgues to their local libraries — that of the Buffalo Courier-Express, my first daily newspaper employer, now resides at the Buffalo State University library, bless its soul. Some sold them off to commercial firms, which will make them available via a searchable database or provide you with a facsimile of the front page from the day you were born, for a fee. Some historical archives can be found at the Chronicling America online collection of the Library of Congress at no charge. Writers of financial history know that archives of the Commercial and Financial Chronicle, a weekly founded in 1865 more than two decades before the Wall Street Journal, have been placed online by the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis. But others have been strewn to the winds — saved, if at all, thanks to heroic individual efforts. They include the creation of the American Newspaper Repository in 1999 by the author Nicholson Baker, who rescued the remains of the British Library’s excellent collection of American newspapers from dispersion or pulping by buying the collection at auction and installing it in what he described in the New Yorker as “six thousand square feet of space in a nineteenth century brick mill building in Rollinsford, New Hampshire, with room to shelve all the papers and to hold a small reading room.”…
After 11 hours of fierce argument, lawmakers voted almost entirely along party lines to impeach the president on charges that he abused his office and obstructed Congress
The New York Times – President Trump is the third president in history to be charged with committing high crimes and misdemeanors and face removal by the Senate. “On a day of constitutional consequence and raging partisan tension, the votes on the two articles of impeachment fell largely along party lines…”
Politico – Trump impeached in historic rebuke – For only the third time ever, the House recommends a president’s removal from office.
CNN – Speaker Pelosi Will Not Select House Managers or Send Articles to Senate Until House Sees Proposed Senate Trial Rules; Chance of Articles Being Withheld From Senate Persists.
VICTOR DAVIS HANSON: The Era of ‘Good’ Fascism?
If and when fascism comes to America, it will not arrive with jackboots, stiff arms, and military uniforms. The attempt to suppress political opposition in anti-constitutional fashion, to regiment the economy by denying constitutionally protected freedoms, and the efforts to change the Constitution to reflect political utility, will come under the auspices of “equality,” “fairness,” “saving the planet,” and “social justice”—as a way to combat “climate change,” “racism,” “homophobia,” and “sexism.”The old Confederate idea of state nullification of federal law—the great bane of a century of civil rights movements—is now a progressive trademark.Over 550 sanctuary jurisdictions have announced that federal immigration law simply does not apply in full within their confines. Because there were no federal consequences when states simply ignored federal immigration legislation, why would not local jurisdictions—such as an increasing number of counties in Virginia—simply renounce state laws in matters of gun control?
It wouldn’t be the first time that the era of “good fascism” descended upon America.
