That Tangled Web : Hiding In Plain Sight

COVID-19’s Early Spread In Wuhan, China

"[The team planned to] take various sequences from similar coronaviruses, and create a new sequence that is essentially the average of them ..."

"They would then synthesize the viral genome from the computer sequence, thus creating a virus genome that did not exist in nature, but looks natural as it is the average of natural viruses."

"If SARS-CoV-2 comes from an artificial consensus sequence composed of genomes with 95 percent of similarity to each other ... I would predict that we will never find a really good match in nature and just a bunch of close matches across parts of the sequence, which so far is what we are seeing."

"The problem is that those opposed to a lab-leak scenario will always just say that we need to sample more ..."

"Scientists overall are afraid of discussing the issue of the origins due to the political situation. This leaves a small and vocal minority of biased scientists free to spread misinformation."

Unidentified WHO collaborator

An aerial view of the Wuhan Institute of Virology. Wuhan scientists have consistently denied creating Sars-CoV-2 in a lab Credit: AFP via Getty Images/Hector Retamal

 

"...In a letter in the journal Science, 18 prominent biologists—including the world’s foremost coronavirus researcher—are lending their weight to calls for a new investigation of all possible origins of the virus, and calling on China’s laboratories and agencies to 'open their records' to independent analysis."

"'We must take hypotheses about both natural and laboratory spillovers seriously until we have sufficient data', the scientists write."

"The letter, which was organized by the Stanford University microbiologist David Relman and the University of Washington virologist Jesse Bloom, takes aim at a recent joint study of covid origins undertaken by the World Health Organization and China, which concluded that a bat virus likely reached humans via an intermediate animal and that a lab accident was 'extremely unlikely'."

"That conclusion was not scientifically justified, according to the authors of the new letter, since no trace of how the virus first jumped to humans has been found and the possibility of a laboratory accident received only a cursory look. Just a handful of the 313 pages of the WHO origins report and its annexes are devoted to the subject."

Rowan Jacobsen, MIT Technology Review

Newly-revealed information has now seen publication to the effect that Chinese scientists in Wuhan and American scientists working alongside them, had planned the creation of an entirely new coronavirus outside of nature. Their idea was to combine the genetic code of other viruses in the creation of one which, while unique, saw its creation as laboratory-made, not one spontaneously appearing through natural means unassisted by human intervention.

 

A grant application that had been submitted to the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) revealed through newly leaked documents that the team of international scientists planned to combine closely related strains' genetic data for the purpose of producing new viruses. The plan was uncovered by a genetics expert who worked with the World Health Organization who took the time to study the proposals in detail and concluded that had SARS-CoV2 been produced like this the mystery of a close match in nature never having been found would be solved.

 

Shi Zhengli in a high security laboratory at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. The Chinese virologist says calls by outsiders to inspect her lab's records are "not acceptable."  AP Images

A virus strain called Banal-52, discovered in Laos a month ago shares 96.8 percent of the genome, as the closest naturally occurring virus to SARS-CoV-2. The expectation by scientists is a direct ancestor to the SARS-CoV-2 virus causing COVID-19 should be found to be 99.98 percent of a match, and to the present none has been found. The international scientific team had laid plans to take sequences from naturally occurring coronaviruses for use in the creation of a totally new sequence, according to the DARPA proposals, leaked to the pandemic origins analysis group Drastic.

 

It was revealed that British zoologist Peter Daszak submitted the proposal on behalf of a consortium which included Daszak EcoHealth Alliance, the Wuhan Institute of Virology, the University of North Carolina and Duke NUS in Singapore. As a member of the WHO investigating team who travelled to China to look into the possibility that the SARS-CoV-2 virus had been leaked from the WIV laboratory as many have suggested and Beijing angrily denies, the team's search for the virus's origins, canted heavily toward Dr. Duszak's confident denials.

 

Dr.Duszak, in fact, had close professional ties to the Wuhan Institute and had spent some time there previously in his collaborative scientific capacity. Just incidentally, Dr. Duszak was seen to be the knowledgeable individual behind the investigation's conclusion, published in The Lancet, dismissing any suggestions that COVID's origins were not natural, dismissing the expressed doubts of its origin in nature as a conspiracy theory.

"A proper investigation should be transparent, objective, data-driven, inclusive of broad expertise, subject to independent oversight, and responsibly managed to minimize the impact of conflicts of interest,"

"Public health agencies and research laboratories alike need to open their records to the public."

"Investigators should document the veracity and provenance of data from which analyses are conducted and conclusions drawn."

Search-of-SARS-CoV-2-origins Letter

Peter Daszak and others visit a cave at Seven Star Park in Guilin, China, where visitors are likely to encounter bats.   Credit: EcoHealth Alliance

"Scientists have called for Peter Daszak, the president of U.S.-based research organization EcoHealth Alliance (EHA) to quit, accusing him of concealing conflicts of interest, witholding critical information, and misleading public opinion during the COVID pandemic."

"EHA has been thrust into the public eye during the pandemic because of its work studying bat coronaviruses with the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV), which is located in the city Chinese city that was the first epicentre of the COVID outbreak."

"EHA recently came under heavy scrutiny after a group of online researchers and correspondents known as the Decentralized Radical Autonomous Search Team Investigating COVID-19 (DRASTIC) published a 2018 proposal to the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) for research that would have involved enhancing viruses to study them."

Newsweek

The Intelligence of (some) Animals

"It suggests the octopus is carrying these tools [stacked coconut shells] around because it has some understanding they may be useful in the future."
"[Researchers have argued that smarter animals] cooperate and learn from other members of the same species."
"We can't take for granted that there's just one way to intelligence. There could be different paths [nature devises for her various creatures]."

"Octopuses, unlike many other molluscs, they do not have a protective shell. So [octopuses] are very, very vulnerable to many kinds of predators — from fishes to marine mammals to birds — and the idea is that by becoming quite smart, this is a kind of weapon they can use to avoid being eaten."

Piero Amodio, graduate student, Cambridge University, Britain

A two-month-old octopus tries to unscrew the lid of a jar to get hold of its content, a crab, at Denmark's Aquarium in Copenhagen. (JORGEN JESSEN/AFP/Getty Images)

Scientists have focused on studies to reveal how different animals' intelligence evolved and have come up with some pretty astonishing findings. None more strange than the intelligence of cephalopods, an animal grouping including octopuses, squid and cuttlefish. In a paper published recently in Trends in Ecology and Evolution, Piero Amodio and five other biologists who focus on animal intelligence explore this biological mystery.

Generally speaking, shared factors of intelligent animals have been identified by scientists; large brains, animals whose lifespan is long, and animals that evolve a social culture forming long-lasting social bonds. For the conundrum of how certain animals have evolutionarily become intelligence those similarities explain much.

 One intelligence hypothesis speaks of intelligence evolving as a foraging adaptation. Some animals enjoy the advantage of a reliable food supply in their habitat, while others must cope with the unpredictability of food availability. And then there are those species which form cooperative bonds, learning from the experiences and successes of others within their community.
 

It was the middle of the night and no one saw Inky the octopus leave New Zealand's national aquarium, but staff found a trail of water leading from the tank to a 50-metre drainpipe leading to the ocean. (National Aquarium of New Zealand)

Cephalopods are known to behave in ways suggesting high intelligence, demonstrated when an octopus escaped from the National Aquarium of New Zealand, by exiting his enclosure, slithering into a floor drain and presumably out to sea and freedom. There is an instructive video showing an octopus pulling two halves of a coconut shell together to enable it to hide inside. The octopus subsequently stacks the shells like nesting bowls and hauls them off as it leaves the area.

In Israel, researchers at Hebrew University placed octopuses alongside an L-shaped box with food placed within. The animals then managed to figure out they could push and pull the food through a tiny aperture in the wall of their tank to access the tempting morsel. Cephalopods have a good-sized brain; most of the neurons the brain instructs are located in the arms of the octopus, differentiating it substantially from other animals with large brains and high intelligence.

Among scientists involved in researching intelligence in  animals like cephalopods it is theorized that some 275 million years ago their ancestors lost their external shells leaving the animals free to explore places they were unable to access with a shell -- such as rocky crevices, in their hunt for prey. With the loss of the shell cephalopods became vulnerable to predators which may have led to the need to outwit those predators.

In so doing cephalopods learned to disguise themselves and to escape threatening situations, accomplishing this through the evolution of their large brains leading to the capacity to solve new problems; even plan for the future, such as occurred with the octopus that took along those coconut shells (or clam shells) which could prove useful at some future time.

And though most intelligent animals are thought to live long with their large brains, cephalopods do not, with some living up to two years, and others only a few months. Cephalopods are also social loners, they don't form social bonds. The traits that identify other animals' propensity for intelligence are obviously not shared by these creatures, making their high-grade intelligence all the more perplexing to science.

A veined octopus hides in an coconut shell. Scientists have filmed the octopus collecting and assembling coconut shells for shelter. (Associated Press/Museum Victoria, Roger Steene)

Word Origin for pulchritude. C15: from Latin pulchritūdō, from pulcher beautiful. Word Origin and History for pulchritude. "beauty," c.1400, from Latin pulchritudo "beauty; excellence, attractiveness," from pulcher "beautiful," of unknown origin.

"When I was thirteen, my mom said she had a dream that I would win Miss Universe in a red dress."
"[Qualifying contestant question; legalizing marijuana] I'm for it being used for medical use, but not so for recreational use."
"Because I think if people will argue, then what about alcohol and cigarettes?"
"Everything is good, but in moderation."
Catriona Gray, Miss Universe 2018

With its lava colour and appearance, her gown's design was influenced by Mayon Volcano in the northeastern province of Albay, from where her Filipina mother hails, Gray said. (Gemunu Amarasinghe/Associated Press)

"Ms. Gray truly made the entire Philippines proud when she sashayed on the global stage and showcased the genuine qualities defining a Filipina beauty: confidence, grace, intelligence and strength in the face of tough challenges."
"In her success, Miss Philippines has shown to the world that women in our country have the ability to turn dreams into reality through passion, diligence, determination and hard work."
Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte

The new Miss Universe, Catriona Gray named on Monday in Bangkok, Thailand is of Filipino ancestry on her mother's side. She has an Australian father, and Cairns, Australia, is where she was born and raised. She is an accomplished singer and also a model. Her musical education came through the Berklee College of Music in Boston. So she is rather cosmopolitan, and even so, her attitude toward marijuana legalization reflects that of the president of the Philippines whose mission to battle recreational drugs and the proliferation of drug gangs in his country has been on the brutal side.

Miss Universe 2018: For her national costume, Miss Spain donned a traditional Spanish "bata de cola."

There were beauty contestants representing 94 countries competing for the title of Miss Universe, in Bangkok. Among those contestants was a first, a transgender entrant from Spain, Angela Ponce. That the contest accepted a transgender woman represents a tidal turn of tradition. And as it happens, transgender contestant Angela Ponce's beauty certainly rivals that of the finalists as well as the winner, all born female. Possibly, the world is not yet ready to crown a transgender beauty queen.

Angela Ponce said it was "an honor and pride" to be part of the history of Miss Universe pageant

In the presence of so many beautiful, accomplished women, the judges certainly had their work cut out for them. The crowd that assembled in the Thai capital seemed ecstatic at the choice, crowning a contestant from southeast Asia. As the 67th Miss Universe, 24-year-old Catriona Gray appears a fitting symbol of female accomplishment augmenting beauty. Her red gown, she pointed out, was influenced by the Mayon Volcano in Albay, Philippines. She is the fourth Filipino in the history of the pageant to be crowned.

The contestant from the United States failed spectacularly in an outreach to other contestants, her potential popularity hampered by her mockery of contestants from Cambodia and Vietnam whose English-language skills failed to impress her. Sarah Rose Summers ended up apologizing for her rude manners at a pageant whose theme for 2018 was Empowered Women, judged by seven women including former pageant winners, businesswomen and a fashion designer.

Miss Philippines Catriona Gray is crowned 2018 Miss Universe by outgoing title holder Demi-Leigh Nel-Peters. (CR: Frank Micelotta / FOX)

Credit Where It's Due : The Intelligence of Birds

"The purpose of the crows ... is to educate the people, to open their minds, to think, 'OK, the birds are able to do something that we are much more able to do than them, so we should do this by ourselves',"
"It's a funny way to show the people that you cannot throw the papers everywhere."
"In an affectionate, supportive atmosphere, they like to communicate with humans and establish a relationship through play."
"The goal is not just to clear up, because visitors are generally careful to keep things clean, but also to demonstrate that nature itself can teach us to take care of the environment."
Park President Nicholas de Villiers, Puy du Fou park

"I captured a series of crows in a park, tagged them and released them. They didn’t like it."
"Many weeks later, I returned to the park with colleagues, and the crows I had tagged attacked me but ignored the others."
Frédéric Jiguet, ornithologist, Paris Museum of Natural History

And they are indeed intelligent. Some species more so than others. Some, like parrots and crows whose tongues have been slit, can be taught to 'speak', emulating words taught to them, and knowing their correct context; uttering them at appropriate times and circumstances; in some instances reflecting their own emotions. They have excellent memory recall, and we tend to do them an injustice when we relegate them to the status of animals incapable of thinking, assessing situations, making use of their environment in unusual ways, and being capable of interacting with other species, including humans.

Rooks have the ability to sort out litter. (Photo: Puy Du Fou blog)

A park in France has taken steps to use the innate intelligence of rooks, a larger, even more clever offshoot of the crow family to teach them to pluck litter left by careless park visitors and deposit that litter in waste containers on regular park patrols. The birds, six of them, have names: Boubou, Bamboo, Bill, Black, Bricole and Baco. Each time they deposit a cigarette butt or any other piece of trash in a special receptacle, it dispenses a treat. There are times when birds like any other animal, will commit altruistic acts, but this is a working environment that compensates their labour.

The birds would not consider what they do labour -- in all likelihood it is for them something akin to a game where they offer something of value to their trainer to be disposed of, and anticipate a reward in recognition of their effort. The trainer, to illustrate just how clever the birds are, speaks of their attempts to innovate, by bringing along slivers of wood to exchange for the treats. The park in question is a theme park; what better place to deploy such activities to demonstrate the birds' capacity to learn and to engage in a trade; their worthless (to them) offerings for valuable food.

The mechanism that has been created for the crows to collect the trash. (Photo: Puy Du Fou blog)

Working industriously, they are able to fill a bucket with disposables in fewer than 45 minutes. It was a bird handler, a park falconer who first thought of putting the birds to work. Accustomed to training birds of prey, Christophe Gaborit explained: "They were motivated by the reward and they soon understood how the game worked". And it would certainly not have been a difficult thing to entice the birds to collect trash for reward. Some biologists consider them to be as intelligent as the average seven-year-old child.

They have demonstrated how they prepare tools by tearing strips from leaves, using the strips to pry bugs from tree trunks. In experiments they have been innovative in response to situations where they have manipulated material to advantage themselves in some way. Given wire, though never having encountered it before, they will bend it to fashion hooks. Given unshelled peanuts, they will smash the peanut held in their beak against a hard surface to open it and release the nuts. They will remember the faces of people who habitually take peanuts into a park to deposit them in various places. Thereafter the birds regularly visit those places, in competition with squirrels.

Some scientists decided to test the rooks through an experiment, placing litter in a room with a worm in a tube of water slightly below the distance the birds could peck. The birds responded by dropping pebbles into the water gradually lifting the worm within reach. Those filler objects too large for the container, or that would float in the water were rejected in favour of the pebbles which sank to the bottom as required to achieve their goal; more than adequately demonstrating their grasp of volume displacement.

Gabroit with his rooks. (Photo courtesy: Puy Du Fou blog)

"We used a box with an exchangeable, transparent front featuring a shaped hole at its centre. When an object was successfully inserted through the hole, a collapsible platform inside the box released a tasty nut at the lower end" says Cornelia Habl who conducted the study at the Goffin Lab in Vienna. "The birds selected the correctly shaped objects from a selection of up to five different shapes almost immediately without requiring any training." She continues: "Furthermore, they required fewer placement attempts to align simple shapes (circle, square, triangle) than non-human primates. Another interesting finding was that they turned complex object shapes in a way that would minimise their effort during insertion. For example, a cross shaped object would be turned at 90°, so only two protrusions would have to be inserted instead of four, or an L-shaped object with one protrusion facing forward and backward."

Read more at: https://phys.org/news/2017-11-cockatoos-tool-use-task.html#jCp

"We used a box with an exchangeable, transparent front featuring a shaped hole at its centre. When an object was successfully inserted through the hole, a collapsible platform inside the box released a tasty nut at the lower end" says Cornelia Habl who conducted the study at the Goffin Lab in Vienna. "The birds selected the correctly shaped objects from a selection of up to five different shapes almost immediately without requiring any training." She continues: "Furthermore, they required fewer placement attempts to align simple shapes (circle, square, triangle) than non-human primates. Another interesting finding was that they turned complex object shapes in a way that would minimise their effort during insertion. For example, a cross shaped object would be turned at 90°, so only two protrusions would have to be inserted instead of four, or an L-shaped object with one protrusion facing forward and backward."

Read more at: https://phys.org/news/2017-11-cockatoos-tool-use-task.html#jCp

"We used a box with an exchangeable, transparent front featuring a shaped hole at its centre. When an object was successfully inserted through the hole, a collapsible platform inside the box released a tasty nut at the lower end" says Cornelia Habl who conducted the study at the Goffin Lab in Vienna. "The birds selected the correctly shaped objects from a selection of up to five different shapes almost immediately without requiring any training." She continues: "Furthermore, they required fewer placement attempts to align simple shapes (circle, square, triangle) than non-human primates. Another interesting finding was that they turned complex object shapes in a way that would minimise their effort during insertion. For example, a cross shaped object would be turned at 90°, so only two protrusions would have to be inserted instead of four, or an L-shaped object with one protrusion facing forward and backward."

Read more at: https://phys.org/news/2017-11-cockatoos-tool-use-task.html#jCp

Superior Bird Brains

"Cockatoos are very interesting for this, because they're very playful with objects. [As was one cockatoo producing 'fishing sticks', stripping long slender strips from a wood block in his enclosure]."
"So we had one innovator, [one of the birds named 'Figaro' who spontaneously used sticks to fish out nuts] and a very important aspect of innovation [is] how it can spread in a group."
"This was the interesting thing [that other cockatoos were inspired by Figaro but manipulated the wood in their own way to achieve a similar function]. They were successful and interacting with the materials, but they weren't copying Figaro - they devised their own strategy of obtaining the reward."
"It's very interesting that they come up with this more effective technique. It confirms how innovative and how adaptable this species is to novel problems."
Dr Alice Auersperg, lead researcher, University of Oxford and University of Vienna

The birds make 'food fishing sticks" by stripping blocks of wood  Photo: A. Auersperg

"It was thought to be an exclusively human ability for a long time [fitting shapes]. Compared to primates, the cockatoos performed very well. [To succeed in various environments] they have to be very, very flexible."
"They did figure out a couple of ways to trick the box. But it was not counted as successful because it was not what I wanted them to do."
"They surprise you every day. Sometimes they outsmart me."
"They are escape artists. They are very, very exhausting in a home environment."
Cornelia Habi, master's student, University of Vienna

Cornelia Habl Vienna tested Goffin's cockatoos in a tool use task. Credit: University of Vienna

Together with Alice M.I. Auersperg, a researcher at the University of Veterinary Medicine in Vienna, Ms. Habi conducted a number of experiments with Goffin's cockatoos -- extremely intelligent birds, as they discovered throughout the course of their study. As difficult to credit as it may seem on first hearing, these birds were tasked with identifying and placing square tiles into square holes and then moved on to more complex, asymmetrical shapes to be placed in matching holes. The birds were well motivated since success equated with a treat.

The researchers' study, reported in the journal PLOS One, demonstrated that these highly intelligent birds were capable of improving on the performance of monkeys or chimpanzees in matching shapes to holes of similar pattern. Human babies are capable of placing a sphere into a round hole by age one, but placing a cube properly before age two eludes them. Primates are capable of similar tasks once they've had basic training before they succeed in the use of the experimental apparatus, named a 'key box'.

The birds, on the other hand, required no preparation, they proved able to assess the situation without prior exposure, and yet they excelled at the tasks. The researchers' explanation for the cockatoos' capabilities reasoned that the birds are foragers, taking advantage of whatever food that is available and thus sufficiently adaptable to perform well in some urban areas in Australia. To enable them to succeed, flexibility is a great aid.

Their very flexibility enabled the birds to figure out how they might exceed the parameters of the experiment to find the treat they craved. A video showed one bird tearing a splinter off a chair, using it to pry the apparatus open without having to match a shape to a hole. They are evidently experimentally ingenious. But their clever bypassing of the parameters earned them no kudos. They had to play within the rules of the game to earn their treats. Don't we all?

The animals had to choose the correct 'key' out of five. Credit: Bene Croy

Tempest In A Sanctimonious Apple

"We have no tolerance or sympathy for terrorists. When they commit unspeakable acts like the tragic attacks in San Bernardino, we work to help the authorities pursue justice for the victims."
"Apple is a uniquely American company. It does not feel right to be on the opposite side of the government in a case centering on the freedoms and liberties that government is meant to protect." "[But] this case is about much more than a single phone or a single investigation, so when we received the government's order we knew we had to speak out."
Tim Cook, CEO, Apple Inc.

"We simply want the chance, with a search warrant, to try to guess the terrorist's passcode without the phone essentially self-destructing and without it taking a decade to guess correctly. That's it."
"We don't want to break anyone's encryption or set a master key loose on the land."
James Comey, director, Federal Bureau of Investigation, Washington

"This is a specific case where the government is asking for access to information [Apple should assist the U.S. government's wish to hack into a locked iPhone, in the San Bernardino, California terrorist attack]."
Bill Games, former head, co-founder, Microsoft

A demonstrator outside the Apple store at the Grove shows a "digital sign" in support of Apple's resistance to help the FBI. 
(Sarah Parvini / Los Angeles Times)

He's out of the game that other vast conglomerates and their chief operating officers are still headily involved in, but his opinion still has a good measure of clout, if not now as a highly respected computer-giant-software entrepreneur, then as a philanthropic philosopher whose billions derived from the world-wide-web have been put to inestimable good use universally. So, while Apple, Facebook, Twitter and Google are all averse to ceding to a government request to enable them to investigate possible links to Islamist terrorism through their platforms, Bill Gates stands foursquare for co-operation in this instance.

Tim Cook may talk a good line about lack of sympathy for the jihadi agenda, but he sees greater facility of purpose in denying investigative intelligence authority the means by which they may use the advanced technology of the Apple iPhone as a conduit to that intelligence. For one thing, defiance of government is hugely popular, particularly in the field of perceived intrusions into privacy, and a corporation such as Apple balancing its reputation on integrity and loyalty to its client base through their guarantee of privacy fits the bottom line as a superior public relations strategy.

While stating on the one hand that "it does not feel right" (thus establishing their selective patriotism) to defy government through a specific request bolstered by a court order, it is to Apple's credit among its clients that it poses as a protector of their security issues in a world where intrusiveness has been the subject of a colossal backlash from people addicted to their interface with online services and Internet social platforms, where in fact, they don't one whit mind unleashing on the world all their private concerns and actions which portray them as the noble and high-minded citizens that they reveal themselves to be.

So, Tim Cook loftily proclaims his pride in his and his company's decision to never to risk the "security of hundreds of millions of law-abiding people", who happen to be their clients, just for the possible chance that in allowing the FBI to hack one device owned by one erstwhile American citizen whose dalliance with fanatical Islamism caused him to take the lives of an unfortunate number of his co-workers. If the FBI hope to be able to link others within the community where the atrocity took place, or further afield, to the crime to alert them to the possibility it might be repeated, they can bloody well use other means.

The plea by FBI director James Comey that Apple owes this concession to the victims of the San Bernardino assault has fallen on the unconvinced ears that have balanced all the pros and cons and found that plea wanting even if it means that the FBI "can't look the survivors in the eye, or ourselves in the mirror, if we don't follow this lead". So the iPhone that was a technical companion in communication for Syed Farook who killed 14 innocent people for the crime of not being Muslim, will remain locked against the FBI enquiry.

In the balance between a federal magistrate judge ordering Apple to concede its assistance to the FBI to enable it entrance into the password-protected phone, an industry giant thumbs its metaphorical nose at government, its intelligence agency, and its judiciary. Apple as defiant of orders to cooperate is simply Apple doing 'the right thing' for its product-constituents who expect no less of it, for having selected Apple's products they have chosen the fail-safe technology of encryption, a lock that puzzles authorities and investigators and that's just the way it is.

Seeding Terroristic Jihad

"Two or three years!?" [Senator Lang]
"Yes, unfortunately."
Cathy Hawara, director general, Canada Revenue Agency
"We've been told privately by some people within the intelligence service that there's millions of dollars coming into this country. It's a very legitimate question for the public and all agencies within the government to find out what's going on. I would ask that we try to speed it up."
Senator Daniel Lang, chair, National Security and Defence Committee

"A lot of these funds, I think, are directed to religious institutions or quasi-religious institutions. It's very difficult in this country to start poking about, if you'll forgive my English, religious institutions because of the respect that we have for freedom of religion."
"I think it's fair to say, without commenting on the particular country of origin, there are moneys coming into this country which are advocating this kind of approach to life."
Richard Fadden, National Security Adviser

"It tends not to be funds directly sent to support overt acts of terrorism in large volumes (here). If we had that happening, terrorist groups in Canada would be more powerful and already causing damage to critical infrastructure."
"Yet, there is funding for so-called extremist purposes, including for terrorist propaganda."
Christine Duhaime, expert, terrorist financing, money laundering

In the 2014 federal budget there was a commitment to expend $23-million over five years for the purpose of modernizing the IT system at the Canada Revenue Agency's charities directorate. It is the agency's hope that an upgraded system will make it possible for charities to provide annual, and more detailed reporting requirements. Which would include specific activities meant to benefit by foreign donations.

At the present time, however, Canada Revenue Agency is not capable of tracking money received by Canada-based charities from foreign donors ostensibly for religious and educational work. The suspicion is there that millions ultimately go to fund Islamist terrorist recruiting and propaganda. But, according to Cathy Hawara speaking for the CRA, two or three years is what it will take to provide that kind of data.

Canada's intelligence agencies have suspected for years that the wealth in Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and Qatar has been bankrolling fundamentalist Wahhabi and Salafist institutions in western countries. Better yet, it is widely acknowledged within the Western intelligence sector that this is precisely what has been occurring, and it's no different in Canada.

Wealthy oil-rich Arabs have been lavishing funding on madrassas, and these are the breeding grounds for present and future jihadists.

Security experts feel the conservative ideologies of Salafist and Wahhabi Islam represent the fertile soil from which springs individuals geared toward jihad. It is, after all, a fundamental and obligatory aspect of Islamist values. Money arriving in Canada for the promotion of extremist Islamism goes to religious institutions, according to Richard Fadden, testifying before the Senate committee in April.

His testimony was a repeat of very similar testimony heard by the committee which was delivered by a Canadian imam who manages 13 mosques across the country. Non-resident charitable donations coming into Canada face no restrictions as long as they are not coming from a banned terrorist organization. Instead, wealthy individuals send the money for the purpose of achieving the groundwork leading to terrorist militias.

Most of these donations arrive by bank wires and the CRA is unable to track them because it has no access to banking transactional records or money services business records. Non-resident gifts of over $10,000 are meant to be disclosed by the charities themselves. If they fail to report those gifts CRA has no method of ascertaining how much of that funding is directed to Islamic religious and educational programs.

"We know that that's (not) ideal and we want to be able to collect better information and we're looking at that actively now", Ms. Hawara informed the Senate committee. But it is theorized that the millions arriving in Canada from Persian Gulf States include the support of organizations that may be determined to be fronts for terrorist organizations, or those affiliated with them, said Christine Duhaime.

The Ego of Self-Exoneration

"When we combine these steps [of leaking to media] in aggregate there is a very strong case to be made that the public interest was maximized and the public risk was minimized."
"Very little harm has been done."
"We're losing our way as a society. If we don't stand up, if we don't say what we think those rights should be, and if we don't protect them, we will very soon find out that we do not have them."
"[The recent] departure from the traditional models of intelligence gathering [which once involved use of] extraordinary powers only in extraordinary circumstances [speak of the erosion of privacy]."
Edward Snowden, American cyber-espionage whistleblower

Matthew Sherwood for National Post   Edward Snowden's address to a world affairs conference at Upper Canada College, just days after his revelations about a massive Canadian online surveillance program known as Levitation, showed him to be as grandiose of vision as Julian Assange, the Wikileaks founder.

"The chances of you dying in a terrorist attack are infinitesimal."
"And yet your government continually hypes the threat."
Glenn Greenwald, journalist

THE CANADIAN PRESS/Graham Hughes   Glenn Greenwald, the journalist who has broken many Snowden stories, and who also addressed the conference via webcam.

The two individuals who have excelled in the sanctimonious denunciation of governments who, facing exterior and interior threats of violent atrocities, undertaking extraordinary vigilance and intelligence gathering in prodigious efforts to forestall Islamist jihadist attacks on their territory and their people, speak from the lofty perch of the liberal left for whom no government nor its security agents are ever considered to be examples of administrations 'by the people, for the people'.

They indulge in their right to practise freedom of speech in free, liberal societies, enjoying the art of condemning the very processes and systems that gain them the freedom to speak as they will, and generally speaking ill of governments they would never have voted for, but the majority of people with whom they share a democratic social contract, obviously have, in belief and trust.

What they have in fact accomplished is to demonstrate quite effectively that actions once deemed treasonable and thought deserving of capital punishment, now are countenanced out of necessity, even though revealing the existence of purloined files and state secrets do harm to the integrity of the protections that free states must engage in; surveillance, investigations, coalitions with like states in exchange of vital data, and the capture of mega-data.

If people living in the free world expect and wish to live their lives unmolested by the malign intentions of religiously- or ideologically-inspired mass violence, they must trust that their government is capable of formulating and acting upon plans with their security agencies to keep them safe from harm. These are not totalitarian governments, those of the United States and Canada.

And while it is human nature that when  people gain high places and are entrusted with safeguarding a country, there are temptations to overstep authority, the penalties for having been found out when such incidents occur, ensure that most people decide that corrupt policies defeat any purpose. When an electorate chooses, through the ballot box, to install political parties and their representatives we do so with some element of trust.

Investigative journalists often reveal that trust to be in small or in large part, misplaced, and then the electorate resorts once again to the ballot box. North Americans live ordered lives enhanced by laws that protect our human rights of equality, respect and freedoms. These are not fragile, but guaranteed rights in our societies.

And these are rights that must be protected against the malign intentions of terrorist groups determined to replace what we value with their idea of how societies should function; in thrall to a religion that dominates every aspect of public and private life. And Islamist jihadists are prepared to inflict pain and hardship, mass slaughter and slavery in their campaign to achieve a sharia-led caliphate.

They are dedicated to their mission of conquest through jihad.

In Canada, as in the United States and throughout Europe, cells of Islamists with violent intentions sometimes succeed in committing their crimes, and more often, thanks to the dedicated work of law enforcement and surveillance, are apprehended while their crimes are still in the planning stages. There is little comfort in Mr. Greenwald's assurances of infinitesimal chances of dying at the hands of jihadists.

That many do, is proof enough that those incidents occur and we would prefer they not.

Edward Snowden is viewed as heroic by people who commit to the leftist ideal and ideas that government that is not far-left is one that stifles freedoms in the pseudo-pursuit of state security. How heroic is he, having fled initially to an Asian regime whose human rights record is abysmal, and from there to eastern Europe where Russia welcomed him with open arms for his propaganda value?

While he accuses his own country of abusing the trust of its citizens in planning to scoop and snoop their private business, he escapes any method of lawful punishment for having stolen state secrets and revealing them to the world, in the process doing harm to his country's surveillance and law enforcement establishment, along with revealing details of the administration's espionage services, while seeking protection from a country whose government is oppressive, dictatorial and internationally acknowledged as dangerously threatening to its neighbours.

Glenn Greenwald's description of the Canadian political climate of "fear-mongering" as a justification of cyber security overreaches exemplified as far as he is concerned in a new federal bill to expand domestic security responses, is permitted him because such accusations can be made in a free and democratic country without fear of state-sponsored recrimination that could be the death of some journalists, as happens in Russia.

The Toronto private school that arranged for Edward Snowden and Glenn Greenwald to address a world affairs conference at Upper Canada College, a prestige academy for elite families' offspring, may have felt that they are preparing their graduates for life in the real world, a real world where a Conservative-led government is held in contempt and its values held to be degraded, but this is a spurious coup for the student body.

Matthew Sherwood for National Post