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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

#171

Post by runarberg »

echoangle wrote: post #162
runarberg wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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, b…

I answered the exfiltration likelihood in a sibling thread. The summary is that spies are very rare and it is not a likely explanation. Keeping the Bayesian hat on we can pretty much rule out aliens. We have never witnessed an alien abduction, so the chances of this being an alien abduction is actually infinitely smaller than exfiltration.

We can set the same prior probability to all the possibilities, that is fine. But given the evidence the posterior for alien abduction is very close to 0, if not just simply 0.

Given the recent pattern of behavior from the US government, we have seen quite a few people disappeared. The posterior for US government involvement is IMO much higher than exfiltration. That said, no government involvement is higher still (and is actually the hypothesis favored by Occam’s Razor).

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

#172

Post by lolinder »

bediger4000 wrote: post #170
lolinder wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> 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.

Why?

As a possible explanation: Wang disappears suddenly and without warning. The university investigates and in the course of the investigation discovers that he was working as a spy for the PRC for the past 20 years while employed with them. They freak out, knowing that the current political climate (especially in their state) is one where they can't afford to become known as that school that harbored a Chinese spy, so they rush to try to keep everything under wraps.

Unfortunately, they have to report what they found to the FBI, which proceeds to very un-subtley raid Wang's homes, drawing media attention and possibly triggering the firestorm they hoped to avoid.

---

As with anything at this stage, this story is entirely supposition, but it does explain the known facts, and it explains them better than any other explanation I've seen floated in this thread.

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

#173

Post by jltsiren »

formerly_proven wrote: post #148
genocidicbunny wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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".

The "center" in that means a collaborative project with multiple PIs instead of a grant used to fund a single lab. The total funding for the project in the current funding cycle seems to be ~$10 million over 5 years: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/simpleSearchResult?queryText...

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

#174

Post by echoangle »

mimsee wrote: post #102
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

So if AI research is dual-use tech, would an AI research er be dual-use human, and get travel restricted because of weapons export controls. Dude is a weapon!

Are the humans working on current dual-use tech dual-use humans? The current ITAR-restricted algorithms are also developed by humans.

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

#175

Post by DonHopkins »

orochimaaru wrote: post #114
cma wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Permanent green card residents have been sent to El Salvador prisons without trial in the recent stuff. This incident does say it was with a court behind it though.

The FBI does not deal with immigration action.

You say that like Trump isn't president now. Maybe he said something mean about Elon Musk.

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

#176

Post by freeopinion »

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…

Are you suggesting that it isn't helpful or useful to speculate that he was an undercover FBI agent working to infiltrate US-based dark web crypto gangs and that the University's actions tipped off the gangs? So when he went missing the FBI kicked into high gear? Just making stuff up like that doesn't provide clarity?

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

#177

Post by trod1234 »

lolinder wrote: post #135
slg wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My first comment was not speculation. I only speculated in my second comment to highlight how your rather definitive "they haven't been "disappearing" people in the manner that would have to be happening here" was also in fact speculation.

Point taken. Better said: We have no evidence that they have been disappearing people in this manner. We also, clearly, have a large body of people who are on guard for any such possible evidence, so I would reasonably expect that if it were happening with any kind of regularity we would have seen it by now. There's a possibility that this is instance #1 and we see repeats. If we do see repeats, I will happily engage…

In fairness, there was no public evidence of the Nazi death camps up until they decided to turn the prison camps into that at the Wannsee Conference either.

It was only in retrospect that we learned the true horror of the Holocaust.

Given that period of history, and how it brought the world to the brink, any patterning closely similar to that (which we are seeing today) these things should be considered happening until it can be proven otherwise.

Complacency and a lack of accountability in the moment is how these things happen, and turn good people to sloth.

Saying "Trust us", just isn't going to cut it given the existing state of no credibility that is a consequence of over a half century of bad acting and abuse of authority, and the trusted news initiative (which is not trustable).

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

#178

Post by lazyeye »

runarberg wrote: post #144
CodeWriter23 wrote: post #104

Earlier 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…

Nah...exfiltration does sound like the most likely scenario (to anyone with commonsense).

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

#179

Post by weard_beard »

cluckindan wrote: post #133
01HNNWZ0MV43FF wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

I want to get off Mr. Bones' wild Haskell course.

Wait till everyone is in the streets and the power is out, the helis are up and the MRAPS roll in.

Nothing more exhillarating than the smell of napalm in the morning.

I say this somewhat tongue-in-cheek, but also not. I live in the residential neighborhood where the George Floyd uprising took place. We had the national guard in our local park. We had military helicopters buzzing our home for 3-4 weeks straight. Curfew. Fires.

Through it all I was struck by an exhilarating sense of community and it is life affirming, if frightening.

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

#180

Post by emmelaich »

formerly_proven wrote: post #148
genocidicbunny wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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".

You can become a police officer in California without being a citizen(*). So who knows? I doubt there's any official rule against this position regarding citizenship. Or dual citizenship.

(*) Albeit with full legal work authorization.

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