Quotulatiousness

January 26, 2024

Canada’s sooper-sekrit warship program

Filed under: Cancon, Government, Military — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

David Pugliese on the cone of silence the federal government seems to have pulled down over the Canadian Surface Combatant shipbuilding program as it steadily escalates in total cost to the taxpayer:

An artist’s rendition of BAE’s Type 26 Global Combat Ship, which was selected as the Canadian Surface Combatant design in 2019, the most recent “largest single expenditure in Canadian government history” (as all major weapon systems purchases tend to be).
(BAE Systems, via Flickr)

National Defence has brought in a new and unprecedented shroud of secrecy around a controversial warship project now estimated to cost taxpayers more than $80 billion.

After withholding documents for almost three years, the Department of National Defence has released nearly 1,700 pages of records that were supposed to outline specific costs and work done so far on the Canadian Surface Combatant program.

But all the details of what taxpayers have so far spent and what type of work has been done by Irving Shipbuilding for that money have been censored from the records.

“I pretty much got nearly 1,700 blank pages,” Ken Rubin said of the access to information request he filed to National Defence in April 2021 about the warship program. “I have never seen this level of secrecy or lack of accountability over a project that is costing so much.”

Rubin, an investigative researcher who has used the access law to obtain federal documents for decades, said there was not a single cost figure contained in any of the 1,700 pages. One page noted that Irving was required to perform 19 specific tasks, but all details were censored. Others pages listed numerous amendments made to the CSC program, but all details were blacked out. Information about the annual profit Irving has made so far on the CSC project is censored.

Irving declined to provide comment, referring this newspaper to National Defence.

Defence Minister Bill Blair’s office sent this newspaper a statement noting the “minister believes strongly in openness and transparency, and expects the Department of National Defence to respect the rights of Canadian citizens, permanent residents and persons or corporations present in Canada, to access records of government institutions that are subject to the Access to Information Act“.

National Defence noted in a statement that, since some of the records involved Irving Shipbuilding, government officials consulted with the firm to determine if the records contained proprietary information of the firm. Irving objected to the release of information, the department added.

But Rubin pointed out that National Defence was not required to follow Irving’s orders on what records could be released to the public. The amount of tax dollars spent on the surface combatant and how that money was being spent shouldn’t be secret, he added.

In addition, National Defence originally claimed in a statement to this newspaper that the long delay in providing the documents was because Rubin had asked for 20 years of records. But, when challenged on that claim, the department acknowledged it wasn’t true. It did not, however, provide an explanation why it had provided false information to this newspaper.

The Canadian Surface Combatant project will involve the construction of 15 warships for the Royal Canadian Navy at Irving on the east coast.

August 19, 2023

One Day in August – Dieppe Anniversary Battlefield Event (Operation Jubilee)

WW2TV
Published 19 Aug 2021

One Day in August — Dieppe Anniversary Battlefield Event (Operation Jubilee) With David O’Keefe, Part 3 — Anniversary Battlefield Event.

David O’Keefe joins us for a third and final show about Operation Jubilee to explain how the plan unravelled and how the nearly 1,000 British, Canadian and American commandos died. We will use aerial footage, HD footage taken in Dieppe last week and maps, photos, and graphics.

In Part 1 David O’Keefe talked about the real reason for the raid on Dieppe in August 1942. In Part 2 David talked about the plan for Operation Jubilee. The intentions of the raid and how it was supposed to unfold.
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August 18, 2023

One Day in August – Dieppe – Part 2 – The Plan

WW2TV
Published 17 Jan 2021

Part 2 – The Plan With David O’Keefe

David O’Keefe joins us again. In Part 1 he talked about the real reason for the raid on Dieppe in August 1942. In Part 2 we talk about the plan for Operation Jubilee and David will share his presentation about the intentions of the raid and how it was supposed to unfold.

A final show sometime in the summer will come live from Dieppe to explain how the plan unravelled and how the nearly 1,000 British, Canadian and American commandos died.
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August 17, 2023

Dieppe – One Day in August – Ian Fleming, Enigma and the Deadly Raid – Part 1

WW2TV
Published 29 Nov 2020

In less than six hours in August 1942, nearly 1,000 British, Canadian and American commandos died in the French port of Dieppe in an operation that for decades seemed to have no real purpose. Was it a dry-run for D-Day, or perhaps a gesture by the Allies to placate Stalin’s impatience for a second front in the west?

Canadian historian David O’Keefe uses hitherto classified intelligence archives to prove that this catastrophic and apparently futile raid was in fact a mission, set up by Ian Fleming of British Naval Intelligence as part of a “pinch” policy designed to capture material relating to the four-rotor Enigma machine that would permit codebreakers like Alan Turing at Bletchley Park to turn the tide of the Second World War.

In this first show we will look at how the raid has been written about in previous books and the research David undertook and as importantly why he did it. In a future show, we will look at filming in Dieppe itself and explain the sequence of events.
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June 3, 2023

“Rather than having a culture of transparency, we have a culture of secrecy”

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Cancon, Government — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

In The Line, Philippe Lagassé writes about Canada’s remarkably non-transparent approach to classified information and the very limited ability of our elected representatives to see anything the government chooses to deem “a secret”:

Institutions are tough to change, Canadian institutions especially. But change is possible. Gradual change can happen when we reinterpret existing rules or add new ones on top of old ones that are deeply entrenched. In other cases, a crisis happens that leads to rapid and significant change. These crises either destroy old ways of doing things, or they open a window of opportunity to shake things up. Revelations of Chinese interference in Canadian elections, and David Johnston’s first report on the matter, have opened one of these windows when it comes to Parliament and classified information.

Two sets of Canadian parliamentarians have access to classified information: Privy Councillors (though usually only those currently serving as ministers of the Crown), and those who sit on the National Security and Intelligence Committee of Parliamentarians (NSICOP). In both cases, they have access to classified information in an executive capacity, not their parliamentary capacity. Put differently, they have access to this information by virtue of an executive office they hold in addition to their parliamentary one. Parliament doesn’t have a body that has access to classified information, nor do parliamentarians have access to that information unless they hold an executive office.

Keeping classified information squarely within the executive, or in limited cases within the judiciary, reflects deep-seated Canadian pathologies. As our pathetic Access to Information system highlights, the Canadian government over-classifies things or deems too many of them subject to cabinet confidence. Rather than having a culture of transparency, we have a culture of secrecy. This secrecy culture exists for a number of reasons. Public servants don’t want their ministers to be embarrassed. Information is power within the bureaucracy and giving it out easily diminishes its value. Risk aversion is rewarded and admitting failure is frowned upon. We can’t disclose anything that might rub an ally the wrong way. The list goes on.

Above all, though, Canadian government encourages the strange notion that our secrets are super-super-secret. What do I mean by that? When you look at our allies, Canadian is an outlier in terms of what we disclose and to whom we disclose it. Canadian officials have convinced themselves that they are applying a well-established set of norms around classified and sensitive information, when in fact we’re an outlier. This is particularly notable with it comes to sharing national security information with Parliament.

In the United Kingdom, there’s a statutory committee of Parliament that has access to classified information, called the Intelligence and Security Committee. Since the United Kingdom’s Public Accounts Committee is also expected to oversee all the government’s spending, the chair of that committee has had access to classified information as well to review secret agency budgets. Australia has a similar committee, the Parliamentary Joint Committee on Security and Intelligence. This is a very active and important body. It allows Australia to regularly update its national security legislation to meet new threats and to ensure that the powers conferred on the executive are not abused. New Zealand has a parliamentary Intelligence and Security Committee, too. The Kiwi committee is a bit of an odd duck, since it’s chaired by the prime minister and has the leader of the official opposition as a member. Given that New Zealand is probably one of the most zealous countries when it comes to government transparency, though, it isn’t too surprising. They release stuff that would lead the Privy Council Office to have a collective head explosion if we did the same.

April 26, 2023

Lowered standards, lowered trust, and the US military

Filed under: Military, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

In The Free Press, Rob Henderson considers the changes in how the US military recruits for the various branches now that patriotism is a word only used ironically in scare quotes:

Uncle Sam wants YOU
Iconic recruiting image used in the First and Second World Wars.

The military can’t meet its recruitment goals. Too many young people are too fat, do drugs, or have a criminal record. This has been a problem for years. It’s now approaching a crisis.

To address the recruitment shortfall, the military has reduced previous standards for entry, allowing men to be 6 percent fatter (and women, 8 percent). It is also trying hard to lure recruits by appealing to their self-interest, with a video of individual soldiers speaking to the camera, encouraging candidates to find “the power to discover, to redefine yourself, to improve yourself, to challenge yourself” and “to realize there’s more in you than you ever knew that you could do”. Recruits can also win up to $50,000 bonus money for enlisting.

But this strategy carries a big risk: young adults tend to be less loyal to organizations with lowered standards that target their personal motives. Study after study has shown as much.

As the University of Toronto psychologist Paul Bloom has written, “If entering the group required a thumbs-up and a five-dollar entry fee, anyone could do it; it wouldn’t filter the dedicated from the slackers. But choosing to go through something humiliating or painful or disfiguring is an excellent costly signal, because only the truly devoted would want to do it.”

In other words, by lowering the barrier to entry, the military has opened itself up to more recruits like Jack Teixeira.

No one knows exactly why Teixeira, 21, the Massachusetts Air National Guard airman, allegedly leaked classified information about the CIA, exposing our intelligence on Russia, South Korea, Israel, and Ukraine. He is now cooling his heels in prison, charged with violating the Espionage Act for spilling state secrets on the gaming platform Discord.

The Tucker Carlson right and the Glenn Greenwald left have come to a similar conclusion: that Teixeira is a kind of folk hero. Greenwald recently stated that, much like Edward Snowden, Teixeira aimed to “undermine the agenda of these [intelligence] agencies and prove to the American people what the truth is”. And it’s hard to imagine any Republican ten years ago making the argument that Marjorie Taylor Greene did — that the “Biden regime” considers Teixeira an enemy of the state because he is “white, male, [C]hristian, and antiwar”. Regardless of their specific reasons, this bipartisan agreement that Teixeira should be applauded is emblematic of a broader lack of confidence in the American government and our military.

In recent years, support for the military has plummeted more than in any other American institution — with 45 percent of Americans voicing trust in the armed forces in 2021 versus 70 percent in 2018. This decline is almost entirely due to younger Americans: among those 18 to 44, confidence in all the branches of the military is in the low- to mid-40 percent range; for those 45 and up, it’s in the 80 percent range, according to a 2022 YouGov survey.

This decline in support for the military coincides with declining patriotism among young Americans: 40 percent of Gen Zers (those born from 1997 to 2012) believe the Founding Fathers are more accurately characterized as villains, not heroes, according to psychologist Jean Twenge’s forthcoming book, Generations.

January 5, 2023

Trudeau’s government has paid 30 times as much to consultants McKinsey and Company as the Conservatives did

Filed under: Business, Cancon, Government — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Paul Wells on the amazing profit margins McKinsey and Company must be making thanks to their booming business with the Canadian federal government under Justin Trudeau:

From Radio-Canada, and not yet translated into English at this hour, comes news that the Trudeau Liberals have paid 30 times as much to the global consulting firm McKinsey and Company as the Harper Conservatives did, even though the Liberals have so far spent less time in office than the Conservatives did.

That’s $2.2 million in nine years under Harper, against $66 million in seven years under Trudeau.

And this chart, which I’ve taken from the Rad-Can report, shows the recourse to McKinsey is accelerating: the company’s take from the feds last year was almost as much as its combined take from all previous years.

Rad-Can reporters Romain Schué and Thomas Gerbet write: “What was the firm’s precise role? It’s impossible to know for sure. [McKinsey] refused to answer our questions … And despite our requests, Ottawa didn’t want to share the reports the firm produced.”

This is only the latest evidence of a massive trend in government in Canada’s federal government, in many provinces, and abroad: the contracting-out of complex problems to private firms that charge a premium; are never around when problems arise later; often produce work of questionable quality; and are too often exempt from even the minimal transparency and accountability that’s expected of work done in-house by the regular public service.

We’re seeing that latter point play out in a Commons committee’s attempts to find out how the ArriveCan app came to cost so much. The app was developed by outside contractors (not McKinsey — today’s Rad-Can story is about McKinsey but the use of contractors benefits many firms), and MPs seeking details have so far received only shrug emojis from the Trudeau government.

This increasing resort to secretive external consultancies impoverishes public discussion about ideas for the future. It is brutally demoralizing to the professional public service, which means it pays nasty dividends by making public-service worse ever less attractive to talented people. It allows timid elected officials to buy a backbone, in the form of a commissioned study supporting their preferred option, and the only cost is the burden on public finances, which elected officials plainly soon learn not to worry about.

November 27, 2022

The Biggest Lie of WWII? The Myth of the Norden Bombsight

Filed under: History, Military, Technology, USA, Weapons, WW2 — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Flight Dojo
Published 16 Jun 2022

I think most of us, at some point, have had someone say to us “You know, we went to the moon with less computing power than your iPhone” or something to that effect. What you may not know, though, is that less than a century ago, a 2000-piece mechanical computer that lacked a single transistor or chip was the most closely guarded military secret of the Allied war effort. Or, at least, the second most.

Before being overshadowed by the Manhattan Project, the U.S. Navy spent billions helping Carl Norden develop a mechanical computer with one job and one job only: to determine the point at which a level-flying bomber would need to drop its bombs to achieve “pinpoint accuracy” on an intended target.

When it was completed, Mr. Norden famously claimed that the sight was so accurate that it was capable of putting a bomb inside a pickle barrel. And if it could, then war would be revolutionized, or so the powers-at-be thought. The idea was simple: fly your bombers above the enemy’s air defenses, above the reach of their flak batteries, faster than their fighters could fly, and drop your bombs, with pinpoint accuracy, on crucial industrial sites, robbing the enemy of their ability to manufacture the equipment they need to wage a war in the first place.

The only problem was that everything about the Norden Bombsight turned out to be a myth. Not just the obviously mythical bits, like the fact that the crosshairs in the site itself were actually webs from a Black Widow, or that, instead, the reticle was made from the strands of hair of a young Midwestern girl, but everything, the accuracy, the secrecy, and even the fact that it was the only bombsight used in the war.

So how can this be? Until two weeks ago, I believed that the Norden Bombsight was an ingenious piece of equipment that more than any other singular device, changed the tides of WWII in favor of the allies. So why do we still believe in the Norden Bombsight?

Because, as it turns out, myths are useful, not just to the Army Air Corps, the Carl Norden Company, and Hollywood, but to us, the public. As it turns out, they can help us swallow hard truths about the war we’d prefer to avoid.
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January 9, 2022

QotD: Secrets in plain sight

Filed under: Business, Quotations, Science, Technology — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

One such trend – which Thiel approaches in a lot of different equivalent ways – is the loss of belief in secrets. People no longer believe that there are important things that they don’t know, but which they could discover if they tried a little harder.

Past scientific discoveries came from a belief in secrets. Isaac Newton wondered why apples fell, thought “Maybe if I work really hard on this problem, I can discover something nobody has ever learned before”, and then set out to do it. Modern people aren’t just less likely to think this way. They’re actively discouraged from it by a culture which mocks the story of Newton as “the myth of the lone genius”, and tells young people that even thinking about this risks promoting a regressive political agenda. Nowadays people get told that if they think they’ve figured out something about gravity, they’re probably a crackpot. Instead, they should wait for very large government-funded programs full of well-credentialled people to make incremental advances.

Good startups require a belief in secrets, where “secret” is equivalent to “violation of the efficient market hypothesis”. You believe you’ve discovered something that nobody else has: for example, that if you set up an online bookstore in such-and-such a way today, in thirty years you’ll be richer than God. This is an outrageously arrogant claim: that you have spotted a hundred-billion-dollar bill lying on the sidewalk that everyone else has missed. But only people who believe something like it can noncoincidentally found great companies. You must believe there are lucrative secrets hidden in plain sight.

Scott Alexander, “Book Review: Zero to One”, Slate Star Codex, 2019-01-31.

June 25, 2021

The Birth of the Manhattan Project – WW2 Special

Filed under: Britain, Germany, History, Military, Science, USA, WW2 — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

World War Two
Published 24 Jun 2021

When nuclear fission was discovered, scientists theorized it could be used in an atomic bomb. Thus, the American Army sets up one of the biggest research projects in history: The Manhattan Project.
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May 28, 2021

The essential — and largely non-replenishable — trust in government

Filed under: Government, Health, Liberty, Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Last week, Tom posted a then-recent discussion he overheard at The Last Ditch:

[Click to see full-size flowchart]

Two svelte American ladies of a certain age were having coffee today at my West London health club. They were in the next “pod” to me outdoors as I had a post-swim coffee before heading home. Perhaps it’s those wide-open prairies but Americans, bless them, always speak a little more loudly than us so I didn’t really have a choice but to listen to their conversation.

The topic was their mothers. Both moms back in the States are apparently unsure of the wisdom of being vaccinated. One cost of parenthood no-one tells you about beforehand is that one day you will be judged and found wanting by humans you could not love more; your children for whom you would cheerfully die. I confess their mothers immediately had my sympathy, regardless of the correctness of their views.

There was a good deal of sneering about conspiracy theories circulating on the internet. I found it surprising that both errant moms believed 5G was involved, but having listened quietly for another few minutes discovered that neither had ever said so. Their daughters were simply assuming that if they doubted government advice on vaccines, they believed all the other stuff too. One of the mothers is apparently a 9/11 “truther” and her daughter’s observation that no government is capable of keeping such a dark secret struck me as fair.

[…]

There are available facts and facts that will only become available in the future. People must make their choices based on their own risk assessment today. That useless truism is not the point of this post. The truly significant thing I overheard was this. Having sneered at her mother’s belief that “we can’t trust government”, one of the ladies said;

    I thought to myself – Mom, I don’t want to believe what you believe because if it’s true I can’t have any of the things I believe in.

There, I thought, was a moment of insight; a moment (almost) of self-awareness. If government can’t be trusted, then the societal change she wants isn’t possible. Therefore, whatever the evidence, government must be trusted. That pretty much sums up the statist mindset.

I don’t know whether these mothers or daughters are right about this issue. I do know that one of the daughters (and her companion seemed to agree) is allowing her desires to displace her reason. In consequence, sadly, her mind will only ever be changed by a catastrophe I would never wish upon her.

I suspect many such earnest, well-meaning souls as Goneril and Regan (as I christened them) felt they needed to believe the state could be trusted at key points in the deadly history of the 20th Century. If the brave new world of Communism was to happen, for example, government had to be trusted with enormous power to make immense change.

Many Gonerils and Regans must have ruefully reflected on that in the Gulag.

February 12, 2021

Calls for the federal government’s Broadcasting bill (Bill C-10) to be withdrawn

Filed under: Cancon, Government, Media, Technology — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Michael Geist updates the situation with the federal government’s attempt to massively rework the Canadian broadcast and internet regulation framework without proper scrutiny or transparency:

I have not been shy about expressing my concerns with the Bill C-10, the Broadcasting Act reform bill. From a 20 part series examining the legislation to two podcasts to a debate with Janet Yale, I have actively engaged on policy concerns involving regulation that extends far beyond the “web giants”, the loss of Canadian sovereignty over broadcast ownership, the threat to Canadian intellectual property, and the uncertainty of leaving many questions to the CRTC to answer. Yet beyond the substance of the bill, in recent days an even more troubling issue has emerged as Canadian Heritage Minister Steven Guilbeault, his Parliamentary Secretary Julie Dabrusin, and the Liberal government abandon longstanding commitments to full consultation, transparency, and parliamentary process.

Last week, I appeared before the Standing Committee on Canadian Heritage as part of what it is calling a “pre-study” on Bill C-10. In this case, “pre-study” is euphemism for avoiding the conventional parliamentary process. Bill C-10 has not yet passed second reading in the House of Commons and has not been referred to committee for study. There have been extensive debates in the House and last week Conservative MP Michael Kram called for the bill to be withdrawn, noting that politicians could do Canadians a lot of good by “rewriting it from scratch.” That move drew criticism from Guilbeault during an interview at the CMPA Prime Time event, as he called for pressure on the Conservatives to support referring the bill to committee. There are instances of pre-study, but doing so concurrently with second reading makes no sense since a pre-study allows for a wide range of amendments, whereas after second reading the permitted amendments are more limited.

In an earlier era (or with a different government), the prospect of conducting a study of the bill while simultaneously engaging in second reading would garner loud objections. In fact, at the Heritage Committee hearing last week, opposition MPs wondered why they were already being asked for amendments to the bill when they had yet to hear from witnesses, much less conduct an actual study of the bill. Indeed, for a government that once prized itself on robust consultation, it seemingly now wants to avoid any genuine consultation on Bill C-10, content to have potential amendments presented through lobbyists, rather than on the public record in open hearings.

The secrecy does not end there. At the same hearing (I was a witness and waited patiently for these issues to play out), Conservative MPs raised questions about promised data on how the government had arrived at claims that the bill will generate over $800 million in new money. Leaving aside the fact that Guilbeault has often inflated that figure to over $1 billion, there has no public disclosure about the source of this claim. Cartt.ca reports that officials told the committee that the calculations could be “confusing” without a verbal explanation. Days later, Dabrusin told the committee that in fact the data had been provided to the committee late last year but perhaps not distributed to committee members.

When I was questioned by Conservative MP Kevin Waugh during my appearance before the committee, he again raised concerns about the claim. Dabrusin interjected with a point of order to make it clear that the data had been provided to the committee, albeit not distributed to MPs. What made the exchange so striking was that Dabrusin – a parliamentary secretary – seemingly did not give any thought to the fact that the data has not been made publicly available. Promoting long overdue disclosures to a handful of MPs while the public is kept in the dark is hardly the stuff worthy of praise or a point of order.

January 27, 2021

QotD: Open-source the data

Filed under: Quotations, Science, Technology — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

We know, from experience with software, that secrecy is the enemy of quality — that software bugs, like cockroaches, shun light and flourish in darkness. So, too, with mistakes in the interpretation of scientific data; neither deliberate fraud nor inadvertent error can long survive the skeptical scrutiny of millions. The same remedy we have found in the open-source community applies – unsurprisingly, since we learned it from science in the first place. Abolish the secrecy, let in the sunlight.

Eric S. Raymond, “Open-Sourcing the Global Warming Debate”, Armed and Dangerous, 2009-11-23.

November 17, 2020

Private SNAFU “Censored” WW2 US Army cartoon

Filed under: History, Humour, Military, Pacific, USA, WW2 — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

PeriscopeFilm
Published 11 Aug 2020

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Visit our website www.PeriscopeFilm.com

Censored is one of 26 Private SNAFU (Situation Normal, All F*cked Up) cartoons made by the U.S. Army Signal Corps to educate and boost the morale of the troops. The SNAFU character was created by Theodore Geisel (Dr. Seuss) and Phil Eastman, and most were animated by Warner Brothers Animation Studios. They were voiced by actors including Mel Blanc and scored by Carl Stalling. This cartoon Censored, depicts the lengths to which Private SNAFU will go to sneak an uncensored letter in the mail — with terrifying results. Fortunately it all turns out to be a dream, but SNAFU is so shaken that he censors his own mail. The film was obviously inspired by the mass censorship of personal letters by the Army during the war, to reduce the chance that enemy spies would be able to gain intelligence by intercepting them.

Much of the military correspondence during the war took place via V-mail, short for Victory Mail. This was a hybrid mail process used as the primary and secure method to correspond with soldiers stationed abroad. To reduce the cost of transferring an original letter through the military postal system, a V-mail letter would be censored, copied to film, and printed back to paper upon arrival at its destination. The V-mail process is based on the earlier British Airgraph process

During World War II, both the Allies and Axis instituted postal censorship of civil and military mail. The largest organizations were those of the United States, though the United Kingdom employed about 10,000 censor staff while Ireland, a small neutral country, only employed about 160 censors. Both blacklists and whitelists were employed to observe suspicious mail or listed those whose mail was exempt from censorship. In the United States censorship was under the control of the Office of Censorship whose staff count rose to 14,462 by February 1943.

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September 18, 2020

Was the Wuhan Coronavirus (aka Covid-19) created in a Chinese lab?

Filed under: China, Health, Science — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Rowan Jacobsen profiles the scientist who believes, based on her own research, that the Wuhan Coronavirus was not a naturally occurring mutation and was instead deliberately created in a Chinese government lab:

It wasn’t long before she came across an article about the remarkable stability of the virus, whose genome had barely changed from the earliest human cases, despite trillions of replications. This perplexed Chan. Like many emerging infectious diseases, COVID-19 was thought to be zoonotic — it originated in animals, then somehow found its way into people. At the time, the Chinese government and most scientists insisted the jump had happened at Wuhan’s seafood market, but that didn’t make sense to Chan. If the virus had leapt from animals to humans in the market, it should have immediately started evolving to life inside its new human hosts. But it hadn’t.

On a hunch, she decided to look at the literature on the 2003 SARS virus, which had jumped from civets to people. Bingo. A few papers mentioned its rapid evolution in its first months of existence. Chan felt the familiar surge of puzzle endorphins. The new virus really wasn’t behaving like it should. Chan knew that delving further into this puzzle would require some deep genetic analysis, and she knew just the person for the task. She opened Google Chat and fired off a message to Shing Hei Zhan. He was an old friend from her days at the University of British Columbia and, more important, he was a computational god.

“Do you want to partner on a very unusual paper?” she wrote.

Sure, he replied.

One thing Chan noticed about the original SARS was that the virus in the first human cases was subtly different — a few dozen letters of genetic code — from the one in the civets. That meant it had immediately morphed. She asked Zhan to pull up the genomes for the coronaviruses that had been found on surfaces in the Wuhan seafood market. Were they at all different from the earliest documented cases in humans?

Zhan ran the analysis. Nope, they were 100 percent the same. Definitely from humans, not animals. The seafood-market theory, which Chinese health officials and the World Health Organization espoused in the early days of the pandemic, was wrong. Chan’s puzzle detectors pulsed again. “Shing,” she messaged Zhan, “this paper is going to be insane.”

In the coming weeks, as the spring sun chased shadows across her kitchen floor, Chan stood at her counter and pounded out her paper, barely pausing to eat or sleep. It was clear that the first SARS evolved rapidly during its first three months of existence, constantly fine-tuning its ability to infect humans, and settling down only during the later stages of the epidemic. In contrast, the new virus looked a lot more like late-stage SARS. “It’s almost as if we’re missing the early phase,” Chan marveled to Zhan. Or, as she put it in their paper, as if “it was already well adapted for human transmission.”

That was a profoundly provocative line. Chan was implying that the virus was already familiar with human physiology when it had its coming-out party in Wuhan in late 2019. If so, there were three possible explanations.

For the record, my strong suspicion is that she is correct about the origins of the virus, but I don’t think it was deliberately released by the Chinese government. I think if it had been deliberate, it would have been much more directly “weaponized” in both delivery mechanism and targeting.

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