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FBI raids home of prominent computer scientist who has gone incommunicado
161–170 of 517 posts
Re: FBI raids home of prominent computer scientist who has gone incommunicado
#162Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
> When we have a missing person with several unknown variables, until we see some evidence, any guess is as good as other.
Really? So that he was abducted by aliens is also on the table and has the same probability?
Obviously there can be some prior information that makes „he was exfiltrated by Chinese intelligence services“ more likely than „he was disappeared by US intelligence services“.
I’m not saying there is, but philosophically, you don’t need to know anything more than „A person with relations to china disappeared“ to be able to determine one hypothesis as the most likely one.
Re: FBI raids home of prominent computer scientist who has gone incommunicado
#163The 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.
Some spies in the USSR did just get vanished, especially low-level domestic spies. Yeah the American dude running around and being caught for spying would probably get the media circus, but the mid-level manager he gave some cigarettes and money to in exchange for information about the production levels at the factory the manager worked to might instead find himself quietly arrested one evening, tried and sent off to the gulag by the early hours of the morning. You didn't really want or need to make a spectacle of those kinds of spies, since everyone already sort of had an idea of what happened.
Re: FBI raids home of prominent computer scientist who has gone incommunicado
#164Earlier quoted context omitted.
Occam’s Razor suggest he was exfiltrated.
Seems like the most likely explanation to me. If he were arrested for being a spy, presumably the DOJ would want to showcase it.
Think like a Bayesian. How many spies have been caught lately? of them, how many did the DOJ showcase?
Wikipedia has a list of imprisoned spies in the USA. It is pretty sparse, the last spy to be convicted in the USA was in 2016. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_imprisoned_spies
Searching the DOJ homepage with the search term “spy” (to see which they have showcased) gives us 209 results, including a bunch of news around the 2009 conviction. The most resent news I found was from 2022 (https://www.justice.gov/archives/opa/pr/five-individuals-cha...) a very vague news which is actually more about harassing private citizen (presumably piggy-banking out of the anti-asian hate following Covid). The most resent news about actual spying against the US government was from 2020 (https://www.justice.gov/archives/opa/pr/former-cia-officer-a...) Alexander Yuk Ching Ma. He was actually found guilty in may 2024 (so he is missing from that Wikipedia list). The DOJ article about the conviction doesn’t use the word spy, so it is missing from my search, but here it is: https://www.justice.gov/archives/opa/pr/former-cia-officer-s....
Given the above, I think it is safe to bet that if he was arrested for being a spy, the DOJ would indeed want to showecase it. However, spies are very rare, and the likelyhood of OP’s case being a spy is very low. It is much more likely that he disappeared for other reasons.
Re: FBI raids home of prominent computer scientist who has gone incommunicado
#165This 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…
> the university put him on leave weeks
but then why did his students not know about it?
if normally a professor or similar is put on leave there are procedures about informing students in affected courses, replacement professors being found or courses being cancelled etc.
the fact that this procedures seem to not have been followed is strange and looks like someone wanted this to go over without much attention
that his wife seems to be affected too is even more strange
that no even vague reason is told even now is also supper strange
I mean thing about it especially given how much it has blown up there is no reason for them to not at least give a vague reason, if they don't it's because they can't (e.g. court order) or they have a good reason to not want to (which is strange by itself).
Re: FBI raids home of prominent computer scientist who has gone incommunicado
#166Earlier 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"?
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.
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Re: FBI raids home of prominent computer scientist who has gone incommunicado
#167Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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 f…
> You can see it on this story
This story is on the front page and stories like it have been on the front page almost every day since last October.
Re: FBI raids home of prominent computer scientist who has gone incommunicado
#168Know little about this case, but given what happened with China Initiative in Trump I, I’m genuinely surprised there are still Chinese professors not leaving or preparing to leave US. 200+ lost jobs, at least one suicide, if that still not ring alarm for these Chinese-born professionals, their IQ may not match up the tenure I assume.
It's not easy to leave a tenured position you worked half your life to get to I suppose...
From what I understand the PRC tries pretty hard to provide a lot of incentives to academic returnees. I do wonder if they have a tenure match program, where if you have tenure at an American university of a given calibre you are automatically granted tenure at a Chinese university of a similar calibre if you return to China. They probably should.
Re: FBI raids home of prominent computer scientist who has gone incommunicado
#169This 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…
> Disappearing people is not something the US government is allowed to do Since when? Been happening for a long time, here is just one recent-ish (2021) report: > FFI documented 698 enforced disappearances of immigrants in Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) custody between 2017 and 2021 https://www.freedomforimmigrants.org/news/2021/8/30/detained... Has to be countless more that aren't documented, especially w…
lets also not forget how the US has a history especially in the recent ~decade or so to redefine all kind of things as "domestic terrorism" and then use it to remove very fundamental rights from people which at most are activists
Re: FBI raids home of prominent computer scientist who has gone incommunicado
#170This 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…
> That sequence is better explained by the hypothesis that Wang vanished himself
That probably isn't correct given that IU has scrubbed him from their web pages. That alone makes this look like disappearing him and his wife.
The feds unconstitutionally "disappearing" this couple doesn't exactly fit either, but based on the article, that's what fits best.