Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

FBI raids home of prominent computer scientist who has gone incommunicado

arstechnica.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

311–320 of 517 posts

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

#311

Post by user3939382 »

dragonwriter wrote: post #51
user3939382 wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

FISA, our secret court with secret proceedings to deal with secret charges under secret laws with secret interpretations. What could go wrong?

The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, and the higher level Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court of Review (FISA is the law limiting government surveillance certain of whose provisions they enforce) don't deal with “charges” at all, and the statute they do enforce the warrant requirements for (FISA) isn’t secret.

Their interpretation of the statutes is secret thus we have secret law enforced by this court. The charges related to these warrants are secret if not adjudicated by the court. To be more direct, the existence of this court is an abomination in the context of a democracy.

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

#312

Post by sweetjuly »

snickerbockers wrote: post #244
CodeWriter23 wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Occam’s Razor suggest he was exfiltrated.

Wouldn't "murder victim" be the Occam's razor explanation? We know his wife is still living in the house. We also know that statistically speaking your spouse is the person most likely to murder you. I'm not going to say anything more than that because the obvious next statement would be one that is based entirely on speculation, but it takes a lot less speculation than all these ridiculous James Bond fanfics I'm see…

> We also know that statistically speaking your spouse is the person most likely to murder you.

This is slightly misleading. While it is true that the person with the highest probability of murdering you is your partner (at least, if you're a woman), it is more likely that the murder is a stranger to the victim than to be the spouse of the victim.

For example, in the FBI's 2011 dataset [1], of the 7076 murders by someone with a known relationship to the victim, 1295 were by a husband, wife, boyfriend, or girlfriend. This is compared to, of course, the 2700 murders committed by acquaintances and 1481 by strangers. From this, we can see ~18% of murders are by their partners and ~60% are by someone quite a bit further flung.

The reason why both statistics are simultaneously true is that most people have only a few partners (focusing the entire risk on a small group) where as there are many thousands of people in the latter categories (creating a very diffuse risk).

So, if you were to bet one which person murdered someone, you would do well to guess one of their partners. If you had to guess if the victim knew their murderer, you should bet that they did not.

[1] https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s/2011/crime-in-the-u.s.-...

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

#313

Post by sxde »

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...

I didn't know this before searching for it, but there's a wikipedia article with a list.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_police_overseas_servic...

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

#314

Post by endominus »

stevage wrote: post #301
lolinder wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 t…

He had students. The idea that the university thought they could suddenly pretend he never existed, and this would not become news, is not plausible.

One thing the Streisand effect illuminates is a certain type of person is not fully able to model the consequences of trying to keep information secret. It's absolutely plausible that someone in the university administration actually believed that they could tell the FBI "please keep this secret in order to protect our reputation" and that their request would outweight the agency's other duties. There exist people that are that self-important.

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

#315

Post by Lerc »

loeg wrote: post #241
Lerc wrote: post #194

So what's going on here then? https://github.com/wangxiaofeng7/wangxiaofeng7.github.io Someone making a homepage in the last few days, but to what purpose?

Do you have any reason to believe this brand new github account is the same person?

I think it was the bit that said

Dr. XiaoFeng Wang is the Associate Dean for Research and a James H. Rudy Professor of Luddy School of Informatics, Computing and Engineering, Indiana University at Bloomington and an ACM, IEEE and AAAS Fellow. At IU, he is also a Co-Director of Center for Security and Privacy in Informatics, Computing and Engineering, and was the Director of the Master of Science in Secure Computing (MSSC) program.

But maybe I'm reading too much into it.

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

#316

Post by KPGv2 »

Brian_K_White wrote: post #309
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…

"But yes, point taken: the extrajudicial actions of ICE recently are absolutely not helping people stay calm in the face of something like this." I find this kind of offensive and dismissive. 1, I don't see why stay calm is so appropriate. It's always more effective to persue any aim thoughtfully rather than thoughtlessly of course, but that's just "all else being equal" and not all else is equal. Another truth is th…

ICE is not the FBI. They aren't even in the same part of the federal bureaucracy (HomeSec vs DOJ). So it would behoove you not to conflate ICE's recent actions with the FBI's recent actions.

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

#317

Post by dralley »

mattmaroon wrote: post #297

"No one knows why..." "Xiaofeng Wang" I have an idea.

Eh. The FBI has made mistakes w/ unsubstantiated espionage accusations even during the last administration, and I have severe doubts that this one is less trigger happy.

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

#318

Post by Brian_K_White »

KPGv2 wrote: post #316
Brian_K_White wrote: post #309

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"But yes, point taken: the extrajudicial actions of ICE recently are absolutely not helping people stay calm in the face of something like this." I find this kind of offensive and dismissive. 1, I don't see why stay calm is so appropriate. It's always more effective to persue any aim thoughtfully rather than thoughtlessly of course, but that's just "all else being equal" and not all else is equal. Another truth is th…

ICE is not the FBI. They aren't even in the same part of the federal bureaucracy (HomeSec vs DOJ). So it would behoove you not to conflate ICE's recent actions with the FBI's recent actions.

I didn't conflate anything. I said ICE and others, because these things are not limited to either ICE or the FBI or this current specific incident.

And as long as we're presuming to correct each others reading comprehension, this comment was in fact in response to a comment about staying calm in the face of ICE actions.

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

#319

Post by DrillShopper »

bigiain wrote: post #228
lolinder wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, it's possible, but it's also speculation. You can't rationally use speculated possible hushed-up disappearances as evidence to fuel further speculation: there lies the road to totally unhinged conspiracy theories. If we see more cases like this one of someone disappearing without a trace and their disappearance getting documented but not explained, I'll accept this one as evidence to fuel future speculation. Un…

Here's a report of another similar incident: https://www.dailydot.com/debug/furry-hackers-fbi-raided/ Once is happenstance, Twice is a coincidence. But I'm way more suspicious of coincidences than I was even just a few months back.

> Once is happenstance, Twice is a coincidence.

Three times is enemy action

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

#320

Post by recursivegirth »

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...

This isn't some obscure conspiracy. This an open and known practice of the CCP.
Post reply on HN