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Disney pulls ‘Simpsons’ episode mocking Chinese censorship

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Disney pulls ‘Simpsons’ episode mocking Chinese censorship
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Disney‘s Hong Kong subscribers will no longer be able to watch “The Simpsons” mock Chinese censorship of the Tiananmen Square massacre after the entertainment giant yanked the 2005 episode from the platform’s offerings there.

The Hollywood Reporter reported on Monday that the 16th season of Fox’s animated sitcom now jumps from episode 11 to 13 for viewers of the Disney+ streaming service in Hong Kong. Episode 12 depicts the Simpsons family journeying to China, where they encounter in Tiananmen Square a sign that reads: “On this site, in 1989, nothing happened.”

“It appears the episode has suffered precisely the kind of censorship it was written to ridicule,” Patrick Brzeski writes in the Hollywood Reporter article.

The communist government of mainland China continues to ban all political depictions of the 1989 massacre, a protest of pro-democracy students that the government suppressed with tanks.

While the laws governing digital content in Hong Kong remain less clear, pressure from Beijing last month resulted in a new batch of legislation nullifying the former British colony’s free speech protections.

One of the new laws bars films labeled contrary to Chinese national security from being screened or distributed in the city, which for many decades has maintained ties with Hollywood and a certain amount of creative independence due to its status at the center of the martial arts film industry.

The new law promises up to three years in jail and a $130,000 fine for anyone who exhibits an unauthorized film.

Jack Dorsey Expected to Step Down as C.E.O. of Twitter

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Jack Dorsey Expected to Step Down as C.E.O. of Twitter
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Mr. Dorsey, who will remain on Twitter’s board until its next election in 2022, stressed that he had made the decision to leave and had not been forced to go. He had recently discussed his desire to leave Twitter and to focus on projects in cryptocurrency and philanthropy, said a person familiar with his thinking who was not authorized to speak publicly.

In recent years, Mr. Dorsey has become increasingly interested in cryptocurrencies and the principle of technology decentralization. He said in 2019 that Twitter would help to build a decentralized form of social media that would allow users to set their own algorithms for promoting content and moderate their own communities rather than relying on a tech company to make those decisions.

Mr. Dorsey tapped Mr. Agrawal to oversee Twitter’s contributions to the project, known as Bluesky, which is funded by Twitter but operated independently. In August, Twitter hired Jay Graber, a cryptocurrency developer and the founder of a social events start-up, to lead Bluesky.

Mr. Agrawal, 37, is a low-profile figure who started his career at Twitter over a decade ago, as an engineer. He worked his way up through the company and was made its chief technology officer in 2017.

“Parag has been behind every critical decision that helped turn this company around,” Mr. Dorsey said in his email. “My trust in him as our C.E.O. is bone-deep.”

The majority of Mr. Dorsey’s wealth comes from Square, which he founded in 2009 during his last departure from Twitter. Last April, Mr. Dorsey announced that he would donate $1 billion, or nearly a third of his total wealth, to relief programs related to the coronavirus and other philanthropic endeavors. Mr. Dorsey has also given $15 million to guaranteed-income projects, which allow cities to provide financial support to residents in need.

Twitter’s stock jumped 5 percent on the news of Mr. Dorsey’s departure before a halt in trading.

“That’s because he was running two companies at the same time,” Mr. Hubbard said of investor reaction. “If you take the pressure off of the C.E.O to run two companies, I think the value of the company is just going to go up.”

Supply-Chain Kinks Force Small Manufacturers to Scramble

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Supply-Chain Kinks Force Small Manufacturers to Scramble
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“We are not going to assemble iPhones in the U.S.,” Mr. Shih said.

Some experts believe the problems will persist. “Our findings indicate the disruption could be for up to three years,” said Manish Sharma, group chief executive of operations services at the consulting firm Accenture.

Even Two-One-Two New York, a strictly domestic manufacturer of apparel with a plant on Long Island, is being forced to do things differently, said Marisa Fumei-South, the company’s owner and president.

The company has accumulated larger stocks of yarn and other raw materials in response to rising prices and higher shipping costs. “We’re sitting with a lot of inventory,” Ms. Fumei-South said. “We’re waiting to see how this evolves.”

That kind of behavior feeds on itself, Mr. Shih said. As companies buy up supplies to get ahead of rising prices, it contributes to the inflationary dynamic. “People are ordering more than they need, and that’s aggravating shortages,” he said.

American Giant, a maker of hoodies, T-shirts and other clothing, has sidestepped the worst of the supply chain problems because it makes its products in North Carolina and other domestic locations, said its founder and president, Bayard Winthrop.

The company’s apparel, sold through its own stores and online, falls between products sold by retailers like Old Navy or Lands’ End and more expensive brands. A full-zip sweater for men sells for $128, while a woman’s slub turtleneck goes for $70.

But American Giant can’t escape higher labor costs and surging cotton prices, Mr. Winthrop said. While he expects cotton prices to eventually come down, he’s not so sure how long it will take.

Judge halts Biden admin COVID-19 vaccine mandate for health workers

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Judge halts Biden admin COVID-19 vaccine mandate for health workers
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A federal judge in Missouri on Monday temporarily blocked the Biden administration’s COVID-19 vaccine mandate for health care workers in 10 states.

U.S. District Judge Matthew Schelp granted a preliminary injunction barring the administration from enforcing the mandate while litigation continues in the case filed by a coalition of 10 state attorneys general.

Judge Schelp, a Trump-appointee, ruled that the administration did not have the authority to issue the mandate requiring health care workers employed by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services to be vaccinated by Jan. 4.

“Congress did not clearly authorize CMS to enact this politically and economically vast, federalism-altering, and boundary-pushing mandate, which Supreme Court precedent requires,” Judge Schelp wrote.

The mandate is paused in Alaska, Arkansas, Iowa, Kansas, Missouri, Nebraska, New Hampshire, North Dakota, South Dakota and Wyoming.

Missouri Attorney General Eric Schmitt, a Republican, applauded the ruling in a statement on Monday.

“This is a huge victory for healthcare workers in Missouri and across the country, including rural hospitals who were facing near certain collapse due to this mandate,” Mr. Schmitt said.

For more information, visit The Washington Times COVID-19 resource page.

Health, The New York Today

‘Looking for the Good War’ Says Our Nostalgia for World War II Has Done Real Harm

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‘Looking for the Good War’ Says Our Nostalgia for World War II Has Done Real Harm
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Toward the end of “Looking for the Good War,” Elizabeth D. Samet’s discerning new book about the gauzy mythology that has shrouded the historical reality of World War II, she reminds us of the 2019 speech that then-President Trump gave at Normandy, on the 75th anniversary of D-Day. Some listeners were so surprised by the solemnity of Trump’s words that they eagerly welcomed it as evidence that he was donning the mantle of dignified statesman. But Samet, a professor of English at West Point who has previously written about teaching the literature of warfare, refuses to grade on a curve.

She briskly enumerates the speech’s jumble of platitudes — “‘Great Crusade’ (Eisenhower), ‘Freedom’s Altar’ (a Civil War song), ‘consecrated to history’ (bastardized Lincoln), ‘new frontiers’ (misappropriated Kennedy), ‘heat of battle,’ ‘fires of hell,’ ‘Nazi fury,’ ‘awesome power,’ ‘breathtaking scale,’ ‘cherished alliance,’ ‘undying gratitude’ (clichés) and ‘tough guy’ (ad-lib).” What Samet calls our “tin-eared age of tweets” can make it harder to distinguish soaring oratory from flimsy bombast, but “most of the sentences won’t bear the weight of careful reading,” she writes.

And “careful reading,” as Samet provocatively (and persuasively) argues, can in fact be a matter of life or death. Glib treatments of World War II have done real harm, she says, distorting our understanding of the past and consequently shaping how we approach the future. As “the last American military action about which there is anything like a positive consensus,” World War II is “the good war that served as prologue to three-quarters of a century of misbegotten ones.”

Her book is therefore a work of unsparing demystification — and there is something hopeful and even inspiring in this. Like the cadets she teaches at West Point, civilians would do well to see World War II as something other than a buoyant tale of American goodness trouncing Nazi evil. Yes, she says up front, American involvement in the war was necessary. But she maintains that it’s been a national fantasy to presume that “necessary” has to mean the same thing as “good.”

Among the most credulous offenders, she says, have been figures like Stephen Ambrose and Steven Spielberg, who came together for the HBO mini-series of Ambrose’s “Band of Brothers” — an ode to American might and pristine intentions. Ambrose may have been an academically trained historian, but he seemed to pride himself on being a hagiographer. “I was 10 years old when the war ended,” he once recalled. “I thought the returning veterans were giants who had saved the world from barbarism. I still think so. I remain a hero worshiper.”

Credit…Hedy Samet

Not that Ambrose’s heroes would have necessarily recognized themselves in his beatific portraits. Samet quotes a memoir by the Shakespeare scholar Alvin Kernan, who joined the Navy in 1941 in order to escape a dire economic situation in rural Wyoming. “We were children still,” he wrote, “and, like all children, fascinated with killing.” Such children may have fought valiantly, Samet writes, “but their motivations were hardly lofty, their experience less than ennobling.”

The extreme depravity of the Nazis would retrospectively sanctify the “inglorious work” of the Allied effort, but Samet points out that even after American entrance into the war, liberating the Jews was never a priority. “Why We Fight,” a series of propaganda films that Frank Capra made between 1942 and 1945, made no mention of the Nazis’ systematic attempt to exterminate the Jews, even though the American government learned of the Final Solution” as early as the summer of 1942.

The United States only entered the war after the attack on Pearl Harbor — and even then, Samet says, contemporary observers remarked on “a general American indifference to the fact that the world was on fire.” The war in the Pacific was “begun in revenge and complicated by bitter racism,” she writes. She quotes a Marine’s memoir recounting how Americans’ antipathy toward the Nazis couldn’t compare to their “burning hatred” for the Japanese. “Japanese were looked upon as something subhuman and repulsive,” the journalist Ernie Pyle wrote, “the way some people feel about cockroaches or mice.” Surveying the records of the era, Samet contrasts this dehumanization with the portrayal of European fascists, who were more typically described as “gangsters.”

Despite the swift ascent of the “good war” mythology, there was a moment after World War II when a more complicated picture persisted — and traces of it continue to this day, even if an “open, ambivalent, reflective mode of remembrance” has been largely obscured, Samet writes. She seems to have seen every noir film featuring a disillusioned veteran who struggles to adjust to the postwar American dispensation. But she also shows how Hollywood was quick to overwhelm the culture with its “habitual optimism.” The 1947 movie “The Hucksters,” for instance, begins with a veteran returning to the advertising business only to find himself feeling disgusted by it; the happily-ever-after ending comes not with him rejecting the industry but with his resolve to “sell good things, things that people should have, and sell them with dignity and taste.”

The fall of Saigon in 1975 may have temporarily hobbled the American strut of exceptionalism and invincibility, but the end of the Cold War and the beginning of Operation Desert Storm worked to restore some American confidence. Yet as good as such confidence can feel, it can also be deadly, Samet writes, feeding a “pernicious American sentimentality” that “short-circuits reason.”

She ends with a chapter on the old Lost Cause mythology of the Civil War, which we have turned into “a kind of theme park,” suffused with symbolism and nostalgia, ignoring the expansionist wars this mythology later enabled. The country’s imperialist ambitions in the late-19th and early-20th centuries were promoted as a nationalist project that would finally unite the North and South against a foreign enemy.

But Samet is maybe too insistent that the truth of the Civil War has been irrevocably lost to fanciful delusion. The myth, she says, is “so resistant to all subsequent attempts to undo it, the removal of a few statues and the renaming of a few buildings notwithstanding.” This seems to me a pat way of playing down what’s been happening over the last several years. Dismantling a few statues may not amount to a wholesale revision of historical memory, but to write it off as extraneous detail is to submit to another abstraction, one where the edges of Samet’s nuanced argument are tidier than they need to be. As she herself puts it, “Wars are seething struggles, not object lessons.”

New details on Chris Cuomo’s role advising brother Andrew

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New details on Chris Cuomo’s role advising brother Andrew
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NEW YORK (AP) – Transcripts released Monday shed new light on CNN anchor Chris Cuomo‘s behind-the-scenes role advising his brother, former New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo, in the face of sexual harassment allegations that forced him from office.

Chris Cuomo told investigators he spoke regularly with his brother, exchanged text messages with his top advisers and was looped in on emails in February in March as they formulated a response to allegations from multiple women.

He also offered to help try and find out through his “sources” whether more women were going to come forward, including possibly learning their identities.

Chris Cuomo’s role as his brother’s unofficial adviser was previously known. After some details of his work were highlighted in an August report by state Attorney General Letitia James, the journalist acknowledged it was a “mistake” to have joined in strategy calls with a group of his brother’s advisors.

But a transcript of Chris Cuomo‘s July interview with investigators, as well as the release of 169 pages of emails, text messages and other communications offer more detail on his involvement in shaping his brother’s message – and acting as a bulldog sparing with top aides over strategy.

“I was worried that this wasn’t being handled the right way, and it’s not my job to handle it, okay?” Chris Cuomo testified. “I don’t work for the governor. I’m not defending him in this matter. I’m not covering it. You know, this is – this is not what I do.”

“I am worried about my brother and worried that this is being handled the best way it can. And my feeling was that, to my basic mantra, you need to tell the truth and get in front of these if you have something to say. And if you have something to own, you need to do that as well,” he said.

Andrew Cuomo resigned in August to avoid a likely impeachment trial, in the wake of an independent investigation that found he sexually harassed at least 11 women.

Chris Cuomo, the host of CNN’s “Cuomo Prime Time,” has defended himself by saying he never reported on Cuomo’s situation for CNN and never tried to influence coverage.

“I tried to do the right thing,” the host said on-air in August, adding that he “wasn’t in control of anything.”

A message to CNN representatives for comment was not immediately returned.

The transcript of Chris Cuomo‘s interview was part of a new batch of materials released Monday by the attorney general’s office, gathered during its monthslong investigation into the governor’s conduct with women.

A copy of Gov. Cuomo‘s video testimony was released for the first time. Transcripts of it had previously been made public.

The attorney general also released transcripts or videos of interviews with several of Cuomo‘s key aides and advisors, who described their efforts to defend him against harassment allegations.

The governor’s former top aide, Melissa DeRosa, wiped away tears as she told investigators about a tense conservation she had in a car with Cuomo when she confronted him about his interactions with a former aide who, Charlotte Bennett, who said she felt like the governor was hitting on her. Bennett said he also made her uncomfortable with unwanted comments about her experience as a sexual assault survivor.

“I can’t believe you put yourself in a situation where you would be having any version of this conversation,” DeRosa said, recalling what she said to Cuomo.

DeRosa said the car stopped at a traffic light and she got out of the car.

DeRosa said after Bennett’s allegations, the governor’s office no longer left Cuomo alone with junior staff.

DeRosa testified that the change was similar to the “Graham-Pence” rule, referring to former U.S. Vice President Mike Pence’s practice of never eating alone with a woman other than his wife. That policy was inspired by former Evangelist Billy Graham’s preaching.

“She thought that it was important that there were always two people together, if it was a junior staff person, so that there couldn’t be any misperceptions or any conversations that could happen,” DeRosa said, referring to former special counsel Judith Mogul.

Sen. Rand Paul blasts Dr. Anthony Fauci for claiming that he represents science

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Sen. Rand Paul blasts Dr. Anthony Fauci for claiming that he represents science
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White House chief medical adviser Anthony Fauci insists that Republicans are actually criticizing science when they criticize him, but Sen. Rand Paul disagrees with the doctor’s political diagnosis.

The Kentucky Republican denounced Dr. Fauci for declaring “I represent science” in a Sunday interview on CBS’ “Face the Nation.”

“The absolute hubris of someone claiming THEY represent science,” tweeted Mr. Paul, who is also a medical doctor. “It’s astounding and alarming that a public health bureaucrat would even think to claim such a thing, especially one who has worked so hard to ignore the science of natural immunity.”

In the interview, Dr. Fauci said there was a “distinct anti-science flavor” to the Republican criticism of his work on COVID-19.

“So if they get up and criticize science, nobody’s going to know what they’re talking about. But if they get up and really aim their bullets at Tony Fauci, well, people could recognize there’s a person there. There’s a face, there’s a voice you can recognize, you see him on television,” Dr. Fauci said. “So it’s easy to criticize, but they’re really criticizing science, because I represent science.”

Dr. Fauci and Mr. Paul, an ophthalmologist, have clashed repeatedly at Senate hearings over the U.S. response to the novel coronavirus.

Earlier this month, the senator called on Dr. Fauci to resign, accusing the National Institutes of Health of funding gain-of-function research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology in central China, which Dr. Fauci denies.

Mr. Paul, who refused to wear a mask after recovering last year from COVID-19, has also charged Dr. Fauci with giving short shrift to the role of natural immunity in fighting off COVID-19 infections.

For more information, visit The Washington Times COVID-19 resource page.

Health, The New York Today

Max Scherzer to join New York Mets on massive free agent deal

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Max Scherzer to join New York Mets on massive free agent deal
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Mr. Met, meet Mr. Max.

Former Washington Nationals pitcher Max Scherzer is expected to join the New York Mets in a massive three-year, $130 million deal, according to multiple reports. The Nationals traded Scherzer to the Los Angeles Dodgers last summer at the trade deadline and will now have to regularly face off against their former ace as Scherzer joins an NL East rival.

MLB insider Jon Heyman first reported Scherzer was nearing an agreement with the Mets. 

With an estimated annual salary of $43.3 million, Scherzer would become MLB’s highest-paid player on a per-year basis. And that appears to be by a substantial margin. According to Spotrac, the Yankees’ Gerrit Cole ($36 million) and the Angels’ Mike Trout ($35 million) are the next highest-paid players in baseball. There are others, such as Philadelphia’s Bryce Harper ($330 million) and the Dodgers’ Mookie Betts ($325 million), who have bigger contracts in terms of overall value, but the salaries are weighed down by the length of the deal. 

Under billionaire owner Steve Cohen, the Mets were looking to make a major splash this offseason as they look to get back into contention — and signing Scherzer, a three-time Cy Young winner, qualifies as such. 

Even at 37 years old, Scherzer was dominant in 2021 — finishing as a Cy Young finalist with a 15-4 record and a 2.46 ERA. He was even better after his trade to the Dodgers. Scherzer was a perfect 7-0 with a 1.98 ERA in 11 appearances. In the postseason, Scherzer was solid — though he was limited in the NLCS as he was forced to skip a start due to a “dead arm.” The Dodgers fell to the Atlanta Braves in six games. 

Scherzer’s deal comes days before MLB’s collective bargaining agreement is set to expire. If a new deal is not reached before 11:59 p.m. Wednesday, as expected, MLB owners will likely lockout the players for the league’s first work stoppage since the players’ strike in 1995. Scherzer is one of eight players who sit on the players’ union executive committee.

There has been a rush of free-agent deals in recent days because of the impending lockout — a change from past years when MLB’s free agency had become slow-moving. According to ESPN, there was $405 million worth of contracts handed out Sunday — including Marcus Semien’s seven-year, $175 million deal with the Texas Rangers and Kevin Gausman’s five-year, $110 million agreement with the Toronto Blue Jays.

Regardless of baseball’s labor tension, it will be jarring for Washington fans to see Scherzer in a Mets uniform next season. Scherzer spent six-plus seasons in the District after arriving on a seven-year, $215 million contract in 2015. He not only won the Cy Young twice in that span, but helped the Nationals win their first World Series title in 2019. Scherzer became a fan favorite for his intensity and precision on the mound.

In July, the Nationals sent Scherzer and shortstop Trea Turner to Dodgers for a package of young players that included catcher Keibert Ruiz, seen as one of the best prospects in MLB. 

“We got everything out of this group that we could’ve got out, and we reached the highest level,” Nationals general manager Mike Rizzo said then. “There’s no shame in having to take a step back, refocus, reboot, and start the process again. And that’s what we’re preparing to do.”

Scherzer is the second former Nationals star to join a Washington rival in recent years. Harper signed a 13-year, $330 million deal with the Phillies in 2019.

By joining the Mets, Scherzer gives New York a top pitching tandem alongside two-time Cy Young winner Jacob deGrom. 

It is not immediately clear who the Mets will start yet on opening day (March 31). But their opponent?

The Washington Nationals, who will be in the Big Apple for a three-game series.

Biden: Omicron cause for ‘concern’ but not ‘panic’

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Biden: Omicron cause for ‘concern’ but not ‘panic’
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President Biden said Monday the omicron variant first detected in South Africa is “cause for concern” but “not a cause for panic.”

The new coronavirus strain has now popped up in Canada and other countries as scientists raced to figure out if alarming mutations can puncture through vaccines and other defenses against the pandemic.

Mr. Biden said the U.S. will fight omicron with “action and speed, not chaos and confusion” and pleaded with Americans to get vaccinated or boosted with an extra dose if they haven’t already, saying the shots appeared to stave off deaths from the previous worrisome mutation, the delta variant.

“You have to get the shot, you have to get the booster,” Mr. Biden said. “We’re going to fight and beat this new variant as well.”

He said he wants widespread vaccination that suppresses the virus to be the “new normal,” rather than a recurring cycle of scary variants. And he said vaccination and mask-wearing will be the preferred plan of action instead of lockdowns.

Mr. Biden, who repeatedly referred to the variant as “omni-cron,” is plotting a response with Dr. Anthony Fauci of the National Institutes of Health and his COVID-19 advisers as global scientists grapple with whether the variant can spread more rapidly, cause more severe illness than previous variants or elude the protective power of vaccines.

The new COVID-19 variant features nearly 30 mutations.

Drugmakers are laboring to figure out if approved vaccines are effective against omicron, but it may take about two weeks to get a clear picture. Companies such as Pfizer and Moderna said they could produce an updated version of their vaccines, though it would take at least three months and they are looking at whether existing booster shots fight off omicron.

Mr. Biden said Dr. Fauci and others believe the vaccine will be effective against the variant but he said the administration is in contact with drugmakers about contingency plans if needed, including specially tailored booster shots to fight omicron.

He directed the Food and Drug Administration to speed those specialized vaccines to market “without cutting any corners for safety.”

Vice President Kamala Harris and Dr. Fauci, who serves as the president’s top COVID-19 adviser, attended the speech.

Omicron has been detected on multiple continents. At least two cases were reported in Canada. The U.S. hasn’t detected a case among sequenced samples but the variant might already be here and spreading.

“This variant is a cause for concern, not a cause for panic,” Mr. Biden said. “We have the best vaccine in the world, the best medicines, the best scientists and we’re learning more every single day.”

Mr. Biden on Friday joined European nations in banning travel from South Africa and surrounding nations. The ban went into effect Monday.

Japan, Morocco and Israel banned all foreign travelers and Australia delayed a planned reopening of its borders.

The South African government took umbrage over travel bans that singled them out, saying their elite scientists raised the alarm over omicron only to be punished by wealthy nations that enjoy broad access to vaccines. Scientists also say the bans could make other governments less likely to come forward if they detect a new variant.

Mr. Biden said the travel ban bought the U.S. time to figure out a game plan and applauded South Africa for coming forward.

“This kind of transparency is to be encouraged and applauded,” Mr. Biden said.

Mr. Biden said he doesn’t think the travel restrictions will have a chilling effect and reiterated that he wanted to buy time to expand the vaccine push. As it stands, roughly 59% of the U.S. is fully vaccinated.

That’s a far higher rate than the 24% in South Africa and less than 10% in Africa as a whole, fueling calls by the World Health Organization and others for vaccine equity.

“Omicron’s very emergence is another reminder that although many of us might think we are done with COVID-19, it is not done with us. We are living through a cycle of panic and neglect. Hard-won gains could vanish in an instant. Our most immediate task, therefore, is to end this pandemic,” WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said Monday.

Mr. Biden pushed other nations to donate more vaccines to poorer nations, touting the U.S.’s role as a leading donor while saying he will not leave Americans wanting for shots.

“Vaccinating the world is just one more tool in how we need to meet our moral obligations as Americans and how to best protect Americans we well,” Mr. Biden said.

The World Health Organization is pushing for greater vaccine equity but on Monday said it is important for receiving nations to get a heads up on shipments, instead of “ad hoc” deliveries, so they can distribute the vaccines wisely and store them properly.

Mr. Biden acknowledged that South Africa has sufficient supply but is struggling to get shots in arms. He didn’t outline a game plan for assistance on that front.

For more information, visit The Washington Times COVID-19 resource page.

Health, The New York Today

What Uber’s Spies Really Did

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What Uber’s Spies Really Did
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The relationship was tense, Mr. Gicinto recalled, and both men seemed uneasy about sharing leadership.

Still, their work ramped up quickly. The group, which grew to include dozens of employees, wanted to keep track of Uber’s competitors overseas, whether they were taxi drivers or executives at the Chinese ride-hailing firm Didi. But they also needed to protect their own executives from surveillance, and fend off web-scraping operations, which used automated systems to collect information about Uber’s pricing and driver supply.

It was an overwhelming task. To keep up, the team outsourced some of the projects to intelligence firms, which sent contractors to infiltrate driver protests. Other work was done in house, as Uber built its own scraping system to gather large amounts of competitor data. Scraping public data is legal, but the law limits the use of such data for commercial purposes.

The team rushed to hire more staff, and Mr. Gicinto recruited people he knew from his time at the C.I.A.: a fellow agent, Ed Russo, and Jake Nocon, a former agent for the Naval Criminal Investigative Service, who met Mr. Gicinto when they worked at the Joint Terrorism Task Force in San Diego.

When Jean Liu, Didi’s chief executive, visited the Bay Area, Uber had her tailed. And when Travis Kalanick, Uber’s chief executive at the time, traveled to Beijing, employees tried to throw off Didi’s surveillance teams, shuttling Mr. Kalanick’s phones to other hotels so his location would ping in a place he wasn’t.

“To us, every bit of this was this game of helping our executives carry out their meetings without divulging who they were meeting,” Mr. Henley, who led Uber’s global threat operations, said. “And it was super fun, right? It was a cat-and-mouse game going back and forth.”

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