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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

#211

Post by runarberg »

this_user wrote: post #198
runarberg wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.…

Wrapping your conspiracy theories into pseudo-science based on wild guesses doesn't make them more likely. There is a long series of scientists in the US that were secretly working for the Chinese government. It is simply the most likely explanation that this is another instance of that. It also doesn't make any sense that the US government would secretly "disappear", as you put it, this individual while they are ope…

I did say the likeliest explanation is no government involvement, but that USA involvement is still likelier than China‘s involvement given recent pattern of conduct.

Chinese exfiltration is also a conspiracy theory. In fact chinese exfiltration requires a larger conspiracy than USA disappearance. If you want to apply Occam’s Razor (which you shouldn’t), you should actually favor disappearance over exfiltration (but really you should favor no government involvement).

> There is a long series of scientists in the US that were secretly working for the Chinese government.

If that is so, can you provide me with a list. That list would actually have to be pretty long to make exfiltration the likeliest hypothesis. Like there would have to be more than a couple of dozen cases this century.

EDIT: I did quick googling to find any sources which backs your claim. This NY Post article is the strongest one (https://nypost.com/2025/02/20/us-news/us-science-labs-face-g...) it is basically a propaganda piece citing far right US politicians who claim extraordinary numbers (like 8000 scientists) without any evidence. As we know extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.

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

#212

Post by bigiain »

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…

> if it were happening with any kind of regularity we would have seen it by now.

If the "unhinged conspiracy theories" turn out to be at least partially true, I'm sure we'll find out it's happening regularly, but only started within the last few weeks. This could easily be the first of the "we would have seen it" cases, not some unexplainable solitary incident.

> the known facts don't match a government disappearing program as well as they match other possible explanations.

Maybe? The known facts about the way he was removed from his university job and web presence with absolutely no explanation and being referred to the FBI when asked for reasons arguably matches better with a government disappearing program then any of the other possible explanations offered around.

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

#213

Post by dathinab »

RajT88 wrote: post #55

Hard to say what's going on, but if he was a spy that is a plausible response. I've known ex-govvie infosec folks who get calls periodically from their contacts in government about Chinese state-sponsored spies embedded in big tech companies. It's a thing. If this was just another "let's screw over an immigrant for saying something we didn't like", we'd have some clue as to the professor's politics. But of course, an…

> It's a thing.

so is China threatening, blackmailing and disappearing Chinese ethic people (and/or their children) even if the people in question have US citizenship and/or have not grown up in China at all

like we can't really say much about this case without additional information

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

#214

Post by dcrazy »

sureglymop wrote: post #186
fracus wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

I can only urge you to provide one or more good primary sources if you are making such a claim. It should be a given...

https://www.justice.gov/usao-edny/pr/new-york-city-resident-...

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

#215

Post by rolph »

Ar-Curunir wrote: post #155
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.

is it speculation to assume that knowing with precision, how to mitigate a problem also puts you in an expert position to facilitate said problem?

if you also look at this persons past research, and tenure, you will see this is not speculation, nor is it nonsense.

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

#216

Post by lolinder »

bigiain wrote: post #212
lolinder wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> if it were happening with any kind of regularity we would have seen it by now. If the "unhinged conspiracy theories" turn out to be at least partially true, I'm sure we'll find out it's happening regularly, but only started within the last few weeks. This could easily be the first of the "we would have seen it" cases, not some unexplainable solitary incident. > the known facts don't match a government disappearing…

Sorry to keep doing this to you, but it's a big thread and most arguments have already been made. Here's a link to the best guess I have, which accounts for the delay between university action and law enforcement action (which notably has no explanation in the government disappearing program version):

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43528036

As with everything, this is pure speculation, merely put forward as a possible explanation that accounts for all known facts. I've yet to see any other explanation account for the sequence and timeline.

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

#217

Post by lurk2 »

slg wrote: post #185
lurk2 wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

[flagged]

> Did you stop reading at the end of that sentence you quoted?

I read and ignored it because when I see people making claims like this it sounds conspiratorial. You have been here a while, though, so I’ll assume you know how the rank algorithm works, in which case I would say that the flame war detector you’re describing is the more likely explanation. There were six top-level comments flagged dead when I opened the thread.

These kinds of threads hit the front page every day, though, so I don’t get why people act upset that they get flagged when 90% of them don’t belong here.

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

#218

Post by vessenes »

vessenes wrote: post #16

FBI + Client Attorney present + University's data scrub + nothing on the public docket likely means FISA court, which is in theory reserved for espionage and terrorism in the US. Most University cryptographic research happens in public these days, so I have a hard time imagining a sequence of events strictly bounded by cryptography research + chinese origin that yields FISA court motions. The real thing to say here i…

past the edit window, but thanks for educating me. I think I was conflating Nacchio's long fight over Qwest's NSA requests with FISA.

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

#219

Post by facile3232 »

lolinder wrote: post #196
facile3232 wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It doesn't really matter if the perception is that the state is arresting arbitrary people for arbitrary things.

We here—those of us having a conversation on Hacker News—are capable of analyzing our perceptions and molding them to better fit the observed facts. We do not need to be victims of our own instinctive reactions. So whether or not it does matter if the facts don't line up with the speculation, it should matter.

Hacker news is not relevant to politics. I don't know why I should put effort into validating other people's perception of what is factual.

Notably, "observed fact" is an oxymoron. You mean observation of something you then produce a statement to lossily refer to. Especially if the "fact" is bound to floating signifiers.

Most of the terms of the alleged "facts" are floating signifiers. Good luck.

You'll find a lot more success appealing directly to peoples' emotions surrounding materially clear situations. Eg it's obvious ripping contributing members of society out of their homes and expelling them from the country is bad for us. But it's the validation of peoples' immaterial fantasies of being raped by immigrants that sustains this material violence. Leaning into analysis of floating signifiers just enables this societal dysfunction.

Facts are useful, but only if they're actually factual. You haven't grounded any of your factual assertions in material analysis. Any factual analysis of "disappearing" is impossible as this inherently relies on your expectations of the potential behavior of the government when the government never attempted to provide a material basis for the justification of violence to begin with.

That is, whether or not you consider "disappearing" to be a valid concept very much relies on whether or not you thought the government attempted to treat people in good faith to begin with. I personally think you're a moron if you trust the state to do anything but look after itself.

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

#220

Post by [deleted] »

tptacek wrote: post #21
vessenes wrote: post #16

FBI + Client Attorney present + University's data scrub + nothing on the public docket likely means FISA court, which is in theory reserved for espionage and terrorism in the US. Most University cryptographic research happens in public these days, so I have a hard time imagining a sequence of events strictly bounded by cryptography research + chinese origin that yields FISA court motions. The real thing to say here i…

No? FISA isn't an adversarial court that hears espionage cases; it exists solely to handle applications for surveillance. Espionage and national security cases are handled by ordinary federal courts.

[deleted]
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