FBI raids home of prominent computer scientist who has gone incommunicado
11–20 of 517 posts
Re: FBI raids home of prominent computer scientist who has gone incommunicado
#12[deleted]
Re: FBI raids home of prominent computer scientist who has gone incommunicado
#13[flagged]
What is cleared up?
Re: FBI raids home of prominent computer scientist who has gone incommunicado
#14[flagged]
The university would likely not have scrubbed them from their site if they were merely being deported. There are either espionage concerns or this guy solved prime factorization.
I think both things can be true: this involves espionage and the FBI collected what it needed then "disappeared" them.
Re: FBI raids home of prominent computer scientist who has gone incommunicado
#15Problem is, with things as they are now in USA, when you see stuff like this first question is : is this the ongoing, developing oppression, or is there is a real issue here?
Re: FBI raids home of prominent computer scientist who has gone incommunicado
#16FBI + Client Attorney present + University's data scrub + nothing on the public docket likely means FISA court, which is in theory reserved for espionage and terrorism in the US. Most University cryptographic research happens in public these days, so I have a hard time imagining a sequence of events strictly bounded by cryptography research + chinese origin that yields FISA court motions.
The real thing to say here is that we will probably never know what's alleged, much less what's happened.
Interesting would be if he were a skilled enough cryptographic theorist to have gotten a backdoor into a NIST approved algorithm; new ideas in this field are almost always appreciated.
Re: FBI raids home of prominent computer scientist who has gone incommunicado
#17The fact pattern doesn't fit well with ICE, because Indiana University cooperated with the investigation (and struck him and his wife from their pages). The track record of espionage investigations against people of Chinese origin is not great, so it's not a defense of this investigation to say that that the details rhyme with that rather than immigration.
Spies don't get "vanished," at least not historically. They're caught, imprisoned and tried in huge public media-heavy trials. The USSR even did huge public trials for American spies, because there's no incentive to forgo the nationalist boost to public opinion when collaborators would be aware of the disappearance either way.
Media-heavy espionage cases are the exception, not the norm.
"Diplomats" routinely get declared persona non grata and just put on the next plane home. Neither the U.S. nor the other country wants to make a fuss.
Re: FBI raids home of prominent computer scientist who has gone incommunicado
#18The fact pattern doesn't fit well with ICE, because Indiana University cooperated with the investigation (and struck him and his wife from their pages). The track record of espionage investigations against people of Chinese origin is not great, so it's not a defense of this investigation to say that that the details rhyme with that rather than immigration.
Spies don't get "vanished," at least not historically. They're caught, imprisoned and tried in huge public media-heavy trials. The USSR even did huge public trials for American spies, because there's no incentive to forgo the nationalist boost to public opinion when collaborators would be aware of the disappearance either way.
Being removed from your employer's web pages isn't "being vanished"; we don't even know if Wang is in custody. All I'm saying is, in the fact pattern where this is another unhinged ICE raid, IU doesn't strike a tenured faculty member in an endowed chair position from all their websites. I've got nothing past that.
Later
From the TPM follow-up link downthread: faculty at IU were notified more than a week before the raid that he'd been placed on leave, and it was at that point Wang's pages were zapped from the IU sites.
Re: FBI raids home of prominent computer scientist who has gone incommunicado
#19Re: FBI raids home of prominent computer scientist who has gone incommunicado
#20Sound scary but when looking at the facts, it is probably reasonable. Both the university, the court, and the lawyer seem to not raising any fuss yet, signaling that whatever this is, it likely all legal and severe enough to warrant absolute silence. The employer was likely contacted far in advance for detail not available to the public, and very likely they complied and realized there are serious issues that can tar…
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