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Why?
Because that's where the most severe officially imposed sanctions can come from. Less severe stuff like parking fines can be done wrong and it's not such a big deal.
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I am a professor in the field of cryptography and there are export restrictions here as well. Under no circumstances would I allow the US government to block publication of my papers or talks based on the theory that my speech is “a technology export.” It’s not even clear that this would be allowed under the First Amendment. The government could obviously try to advance that theory, but I strongly suspect they would…
I don't understand how you think your point relates to it's parent. Are you just piggybacking off the point that the US does control export of semiconductor technology to make this separate point? Or are you suggesting the US shouldn't control export of semi-conductor technology in the same way they shouldn't restrict your publications on cryptography?
While I'm not in the field of semiconductor research, the export control laws in my field are quite similar (in fact, they're literally the same Federal laws.) And if you read the US code, you'll see that it excludes "[p]ublic domain information which is published and is accessible or available to the public, unrestricted: publications & conferences, patents, fundamental research." These exceptions exist because earlier laws did not have such exceptions and were found (in a case involving cryptography) to be unconstitutional.
To at least attempt to think about this critically, and to try to ignore the amount of frankly shocking things people are saying here, can I ask, maybe from people in the field, is this level of industrial/scientific espionage even a critical factor in our current world? We live in a global world where scientists in various institutions are constantly trading papers, findings. Why are we so worried that the U.S. migh…
>Surely, everyone is working on different things here and there, but this idea that there is such critical intellectual property the US that needs to be guarded so intensely in this like James Bond scenario, just feels a little wacky lots of technology that took billions of dollars and decades to develop? Why would you give that away for free? Protecting IP isn't some new thing, humans have done it for thousands of y…
I don't know, ask Alexander Fleming maybe. To save lives? Make the life better for scores of other people, no matter their nationality or class? Why do you even do research, just for the bilions?
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McCarthyism boils down to someone having absolute power to destroy somebody else's life based on their own beliefs. For instance, homosexuals were also targeted by McCarthy, simply because they were interpreted as subversive. It's nothing more than a modern witch hunt, a practice that can't be reconciled with what we consider the rule of law today. There is absolutely nothing noble about it.
> There is absolutely nothing noble about it. The cause, not the execution. I never said that the execution was noble. The phrase “noble cause” is used to describe this exact kind of situation, where the ends don’t justify the means. That they botched the execution was my entire point. Rounding up homos was easy and made themselves look good in the eyes of the public. Much easier than identifying and rounding up actu…
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I'd like to point out that the majority of replies to this comment are about industrial espionage, and not academic research.
Academic research tends to run some time ahead of industrial applications.
I think that there's a difference if the professor in question were consulting for US companies, or specifically in projects within the DoD(versus receiving a grant, which again is a different situation), and shared those with Chinese entities. But as far as I can tell, nobody in this comments section is looking into that and we're just having arguments about other situations instead of what has actually happened. That obfuscates the matter at hand.
"The dismissal is a setback to the China Initiative, an effort started in 2018 to crack down on economic and scientific espionage by China." No, it is not. Why would it be a setback if somebody who is innocent has their case dismissed. I mean who writes such lines? Doesnt this line imply that this dismissal was a bad thing (since nobody endorses espionage).
One assumes that the goal of the China Initiative is to charge people who are actually guilty of espionage. Highly public failings at that goal would seem to be setbacks, right?
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I've personally witnessed Chinese national students attempting to acquire access to sensitive lab equipment and documentation their research wouldn't require (this is physics, here, not CS). I've been on the defensive end of attacks by employees (all Chinese citizens, living in China) in our Chinese organization attempting to breach data and infrastructure firewalls. Once upon a time my work touched some sensitive, c…
> There are politically powerful people who would see these things used to ends that hurt others for their own gain. It happens all the time, and likely will as long as humans are what we are. Don't you think this group of politically powerful people might include the ones you research for?
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Well, many military technologies developed by the US companies are being used to manufacture weaponries used to kill foreign civilians... what's the moral of that story? Also, by your logic what if totalitarian regimes are to steal medical technologies from US companies to develop medicines for their citizens? Is that moral or immoral?
false equivalence. If you actually cared you would acknowledge the vast difference between China's human rights record and that of the United States.
Please read about the Cultural Revolution. To call this “equivalent “ is laughable.
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Because that's where the most severe officially imposed sanctions can come from. Less severe stuff like parking fines can be done wrong and it's not such a big deal.
I suppose that's a practical argument for it. Philosophically it still doesn't seem right, though.