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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

#151

Post by kortilla »

tptacek wrote: post #73
orochimaaru wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Does he have a lawyer? It wasn’t clear who retained council, it sounded like it was just a woman living at the Carmel house, which could have been a rental tenant…

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

#152

Post by slg »

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?

You can see it on this story. It was in the top 3 on HN as of a few minutes ago and now is already down to #20 on the front page. Although this could also be potentially blamed on the flamewar detector, but I'm not sure if the specific cause matters in this instance since the primary complaint is the lack of visibility these stories get.

It also seems like perihelions's comment likely received some flags as it went from being the top comment to being buried down at the bottom near a bunch of fully flagged comments.

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

#153

Post by fracus »

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…

> The Chinese govt also has a pretty nasty track record of pressuring erstwhile Chinese citizens to engage in espionage by making life hard for family back in china

China also has a history of establishing "police" stations in foreign countries with the mandate to harass and control expats. They did this in Canada at least, surely they did in the US too.

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

#154

Post by generationP »

His old website: https://web.archive.org/web/20240415075438/https://homes.lud...

An app he wrote: https://web.archive.org/web/20240304061200/https://sit.luddy... or https://web.archive.org/web/20240727022112/https://homes.lud...

A news (probably PR) article about it: https://web.archive.org/web/20220622001223/https://www.compu...

None of these sites is available any more. This looks suspicious, even given the regular bit rot of American college servers. The app is supposedly downloadable at https://apkcombo.com/app-guardian/edu.iub.seclab.appguardian... . Anyone around with a disassembler and too much time?

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

#155

Post by Ar-Curunir »

rolph wrote: post #32

if you look around, you can find, reconstruct a c.v. this guy is someone you dont want the badguy to get ahold of. AI research in an adversarial context is dual purpose tech, and could easily awaken ITAR

Please don't blabber nonsense speculation. There are plenty of academic researchers that study AI safety and security and who all publish their work and code in open-access venues and preprint repositories.

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

#156

Post by donnachangstein »

slg wrote: post #108
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…

>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"?

The scenario everyone here is hoping for, that he was absconded in the middle of the night in a red, white, and blue painted Cybertruck by men in suits and sunglasses, is also the least likely to have happened.

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

#157

Post by throwaway48476 »

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...

Documentation is hard to do accurately when someone illegally immigrates with no documents.

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

#158

Post by stonogo »

orochimaaru wrote: post #141
stonogo wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Not only is that whole different set of claims from "The FBI does not deal with immigration action," but the new set of claims are also incorrect, which you can see from the links I've already provided.

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

#159

Post by [deleted] »

lolinder wrote: post #147
TheOtherHobbes wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

[deleted]

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

#160

Post by lucubratory »

cma wrote: post #101
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…

Unlike the other recent disappearances and deportations to the concentration camp in El Salvador, this one does say it was with a court order.

Great! Can you provide a link to the court order so we can see?
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