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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

#141

Post by orochimaaru »

stonogo wrote: post #128
orochimaaru wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The FBI does not deal with immigration action.

Yes it does. It's always had Title 8 authority, and several recent executive orders have directly expressed support for such action. https://www.cbsnews.com/news/dhs-authorizes-federal-law-enfo... https://www.wsbradio.com/news/local/fbi-atlanta-confirms-new... https://www.wkrg.com/baldwin-county/fbi-immigration-enforcem... https://www.nbcpalmsprings.com/2025/02/27/fbi-arrests-coache...

That's the DHS authorization. It deals with immigration issues as a part of its investigations (for all federal agencies). But immigration action is not its primary role. They won't come looking for you because you broke immigration laws. But they will enforce them if it's found that you broke immigration laws while investigating something unrelated.

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

#142

Post by genocidicbunny »

gtirloni wrote: post #131
lolinder wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> by the government "disappearing" anyone (which they have objectively been doing lately) Notably, they haven't been "disappearing" people in the manner that would have to be happening here. Even the most egregious cases, which are very bad, have left a paper trail for lawyers and journalists to follow. This case is notable because no one seems to know where this man has gone. But yes, point taken: the extrajudicial…

> This case is notable because no one seems to know where this man has gone If this was simply a missing person case, wouldn't the local police be involved instead of the FBI? If it's still in the FBI's jurisdiction (odd), wouldn't they have something to say instead of nothing?

Not necessarily -- if there's evidence of the disappearance being across state borders, FBI might get involved because that's now federal jurisdiction. Similarly, if it's someone of high profile, or involved with a high-profile organization, the local police might also choose to hand that over to the FBI to deal with since they can probably get better access.

In this case, this was a professor working on cryptography stuff, which if you will recall was infamously treated as munitions by the US govt for a long time. And he is likely either a naturalized citizen or greencard holder who was originally from China, so there's both an international and potentially geopolitical aspect to it. I suspect that if the local police were involved, they very quickly handed that off to the FBI. There aren't many police forces in the US equipped to deal with that nexus of factors.

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

#143

Post by jaredklewis »

lurk2 wrote: post #139
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/…

> But HN is an increasingly difficult place to discover such stories, what with the systematic flagging brigades. What stories are getting flagged?

A lot of stories with a political angle get flagged.

I also don’t want the site to become all politics, but it feels weird to me that stories like this with overt overlap with tech and SV still often get flagged.

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

#144

Post by runarberg »

CodeWriter23 wrote: post #104
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…

Occam’s Razor suggest he was exfiltrated.

I know this is HN and we love these simplistic universal laws here (Hanlon's razor being another beloved law) but Occam’s razor isn’t really applicable here, or at the very least, it isn’t very helpful, and it certainly isn’t conclusive. That he was exfiltrated by the Chinese government also requires the same number of variables as that he was disappeared by the American government. So Occam’s Razor actually suggests nothing here.

Occam’s razor is a rule of thumb which suggests that if several hypotheses explain the same thing, the simplest one should be favored. When we have a missing person with several unknown variables, until we see some evidence, any guess is as good as other. And no hypotheses should be ruled out.

On HN we also like Bayesian analysis, so instead of looking for the simplest explenation, we should be asking what we already know. What is the probability that this person was disappeared by the government, given that 3 other students have been disappeared by the government lately? Given that these 3 other students were also people of color? Etc.

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

#145

Post by dale_huevo »

dragonwriter wrote: post #134
dale_huevo wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This hasn't hit mainstream media yet. It should have by now. Is it typical for the media to write stories when spies surreptitiously sneak out of a country? I speculate this guy was long gone before the feds kicked in his door. Assuming he and his wife were indeed spies of course. Right now we cannot confirm or disconfirm that, but the narrative fits it so far. > Disappearing people is not something the US governme…

[flagged]

Yes, apologies, original post was misworded and corrected.

Everyone is assuming this guy was maliciously 'disappeared', but no evidence has been presented proving that vs. that he vanished on his own.

Everything is rage-porn speculation at this point, like a fresh airplane accident where everyone becomes an armchair pilot.

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

#146

Post by [deleted] »

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/…

[deleted]

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

#147

Post by lolinder »

TheOtherHobbes wrote: post #138
slg wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Even the most egregious cases, which are very bad, have left a paper trail for lawyers and journalists to follow. How can you be confident in this? Is it possible that you are saying this because the only cases we know about are when they have happened to leave "a paper trail for lawyers and journalists to follow"?

It's clearly not true that everyone is properly documented. https://www.nbcnews.com/news/latino/lawyers-advocates-say-48...

This article says that the communities are having a hard time figuring out which 48 people were arrested, which is a very different problem than having a specific person you're looking for and not knowing where they went to.

Again: still bad, still inexcusable, but not the same thing as what would have to be happening here.

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

#148

Post by formerly_proven »

genocidicbunny wrote: post #142
gtirloni wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This case is notable because no one seems to know where this man has gone If this was simply a missing person case, wouldn't the local police be involved instead of the FBI? If it's still in the FBI's jurisdiction (odd), wouldn't they have something to say instead of nothing?

Not necessarily -- if there's evidence of the disappearance being across state borders, FBI might get involved because that's now federal jurisdiction. Similarly, if it's someone of high profile, or involved with a high-profile organization, the local police might also choose to hand that over to the FBI to deal with since they can probably get better access. In this case, this was a professor working on cryptography…

The article claims his status is unknown ("Their resident status (e.g. US citizens or green card holders) is currently unknown."), but I doubt a non-citizen could be "Director of NSF Center for Distributed Confidential Computing".

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

#149

Post by fracus »

lolinder wrote: post #82
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…

We have no evidence that Wang "was" disappeared. We know that he's nowhere to be found, that the university put him on leave weeks ago [0], and that the FBI recently searched his home. Notably, the university put him on leave weeks before the FBI searched his home. That sequence is better explained by the hypothesis that Wang vanished himself suddenly and the university called in the FBI to investigate things that th…

Doesn't the sequence of events read more like the University found something grave enough to put him on leave and contact the FBI, and for both the teacher and school to keep it quiet?

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

#150

Post by orochimaaru »

ck2 wrote: post #129
orochimaaru wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Read the article. It's the FBI in this, not ICE.

FBI is after the fact follow up. Someone else may be responsible for his disappearance in the first place.

Maybe, maybe not. It does follow a pattern of how FBI handles espionage though. https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/spy/spies/fou....
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