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FBI raids home of prominent computer scientist who has gone incommunicado

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Re: FBI raids home of prominent computer scientist who has gone incommunicado

#71

Post by outer_web »

refulgentis wrote: post #25

https://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/more-details-on-situati... Exclusive with more info on the timeline, but nothing substantive enough to clarify entirely. TL;DR: Professor was placed on leave which was announced to colleagues around 3/14. "What’s still unclear is whether the University investigation lead to the federal law enforcement actions or whether early stages of a federal law enforcement investigation led t…

Seems like it'd be difficult or legally troublesome to fire someone (in his role) who has been afk for a couple of weeks.

Re: FBI raids home of prominent computer scientist who has gone incommunicado

#72

Post by avs733 »

mschuster91 wrote: post #53
avs733 wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While the question is not unreasonable, it is worth remembering that the FBI is not just a criminal investigation department. They also are the nations internal intelligence - I.e. anti foreign intelligence- leads.

> They also are the nations internal intelligence - I.e. anti foreign intelligence- leads. And they are still bound by whatever who is in charge of the FBI wants. Always remember how the FBI was used in the Nixon era to target Black people and hippies [1]. [1] https://www.vera.org/reimagining-prison-webumentary/the-past...

You aren’t wrong but there is no evidence of that here, at least for now.

Re: FBI raids home of prominent computer scientist who has gone incommunicado

#73

Post by tptacek »

orochimaaru wrote: post #69
tptacek wrote: post #5

The 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.

This isn’t immigration. He’s a tenured professor and already has permanent residency at the very least. He is most likely a US citizen. FBI is most likely dealing with an espionage angle. His research field of cryptography and using it to protect genomic data probably has something to do with it. The US govt track record on stuff like this is quite abysmal with several researchers having their career and livelihood d…

(For what it's worth, at the time I wrote the comment, the rest of the comments on this story were about ICE raids).

Nobody knows anything about this story. He might be in custody, he might be in Indiana, he might be abroad, he might be about to get charged, he might not be, he might keep his positions at IU, he might have lost all his positions at IU.

It's an interesting story worth paying attention to because he's a prominent figure in an area of research we all pay attention to. But given some kind of criminal investigation is in process, and that he has a lawyer, there's no signal to derive from the fact that we can't get quotes from him in the media; that could just be him being smart.

Re: FBI raids home of prominent computer scientist who has gone incommunicado

#74

Post by Animats »

This hasn't hit mainstream media yet. It should have by now. Disappearing people is not something the US government is allowed to do.

Here's Xiaofeng Wang's bio on the Indiana University site.[1]

Google Scholar.[2]

Archived version of home page at Indiana University.[3]

If anybody has a PACER account, please check there.

[1] https://alliance.iu.edu/members/member/8580.html

[2] https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=pONu-5EAAAAJ&hl=en

[3] https://web.archive.org/web/20240930195057/https://homes.lud...

Re: FBI raids home of prominent computer scientist who has gone incommunicado

#75

Post by belter »

whatshisface wrote: post #54
tptacek wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ra…

It's also pretty clear that this isn't matching the pattern of an espionage case, since they gave everyone more than a week of advance notice that something was to happen.

> It's also pretty clear that this isn't a normal espionage case,

You don't know if its detained, you don't know if is in the territory of the USA, you don't know anything....If it's a US Citizen would be espionage because?

Re: FBI raids home of prominent computer scientist who has gone incommunicado

#76

Post by raverbashing »

gopher_space wrote: post #66
raverbashing wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

Probably being downvoted for the deadpan naivete. Nobody wants to hear "let's just trust the government" right now.

I do agree that the level of trust right now is very low

> Both the university, the court, and the lawyer seem to not raising any fuss yet, signaling that whatever this is, it likely all legal

I'm not a lawyer to say if it's legal or not, but to me it seems that the university is being cooperative and with due reason

Re: FBI raids home of prominent computer scientist who has gone incommunicado

#77

Post by mvdtnz »

Animats wrote: post #74

This hasn't hit mainstream media yet. It should have by now. Disappearing people is not something the US government is allowed to do. Here's Xiaofeng Wang's bio on the Indiana University site.[1] Google Scholar.[2] Archived version of home page at Indiana University.[3] If anybody has a PACER account, please check there. [1] https://alliance.iu.edu/members/member/8580.html [2] https://scholar.google.com/citations?use…

What evidence do you have that they US government disappeared him? It's just as likely that he is an escaped spy and the university wants nothing to do with him.

Re: FBI raids home of prominent computer scientist who has gone incommunicado

#78

Post by 01HNNWZ0MV43FF »

Animats wrote: post #74

This hasn't hit mainstream media yet. It should have by now. Disappearing people is not something the US government is allowed to do. Here's Xiaofeng Wang's bio on the Indiana University site.[1] Google Scholar.[2] Archived version of home page at Indiana University.[3] If anybody has a PACER account, please check there. [1] https://alliance.iu.edu/members/member/8580.html [2] https://scholar.google.com/citations?use…

[flagged]

Re: FBI raids home of prominent computer scientist who has gone incommunicado

#79

Post by m2024 »

perihelions wrote: post #24

- "None of this is in any way normal," Matthew Green, a professor specializing in cryptography at Johns Hopkins University, wrote on Mastodon. He continued: "Has anyone been in contact? I hear he’s been missing for two weeks and his students can’t reach him. How does this not get noticed for two weeks???" Prof. Green also posted about the vanishing of Prof. Wang here on HN the other day, https://news.ycombinator.com/…

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