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?user=pONu-5EAAAAJ&hl=en
[3] https://web.archive.org/web/20240930195057/https://homes.lud...
That sequence is better explained by the hypothesis that Wang vanished himself suddenly and the university called in the FBI to investigate things that they found in the aftermath. (Note that that's still pure speculation, but it's speculation that better accounts for all known facts.)
[0] https://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/more-details-on-situati...
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 actions of ICE recently are absolutely not helping people stay calm in the face of something like this.
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"?
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/latino/lawyers-advocates-say-48...
Again: still bad, still inexcusable, but not the same thing as what would have to be happening here.
Illegal immigrants aren’t “undocumented.” They are present in America without the consent of the American people, as expressed in immigration law.
As you acknowledge, the term embeds within it the premise that “the lack of enforcement of the law is also a kind of consent.” That is, illegal immigrants have America’s consent to be present in the country, because the government doesn’t try to hard to deport them. You can make that argument, but almost nobody would agree with your premise. So the term is smuggling an implicit premise that almost nobody would agree with if the premise were stated clearly (as you have done here).
"The allegations are undocumented."
In the context of immigration, one could say "she claims to face persecution in her country of origin, but this is undocumented."
That doesn't really apply to "undocumented immigrants," because it's usually not in doubt someone is an immigrant.
If their place of birth is unknown, and might be in the United States, you could use the phrase "undocumented immigrant."
I agree it's a propaganda phrase, and does not conform to clear English usage.
But "undocumented" does not mean something is sanctioned, it means it must be proven and has not been proven.
In 90% of cases somebody did. Somebody at the border talked to them. Somebody checked their passport or their documentation (at the border). So many "undocumented immigrants" are people who overstayed their visas, like Elon did.
They literally were documented but then they didn't keep up with the paperwork and thus became undocumented.
"Doccumented" status *is* literally just a case of keeping up with the paperwork.
Some people do sneak in but the *vast majority* come through legal ports of entry
They were then detained for days rather then be allowed to exit the country.
Assuming they're not in a biometric database and from a non cooperative country like Venezuela.
Source?
> How do we know it was the US government
We don't but its 100000x easier for the US government to disappear someone on US soil than it is for China to disappear someone on US soil.
I've heard of CCP affiliated Chinese nationals who essentially act as CCP police on foreign soil and force nationals to return to China.
The "CCP Police on foreign soil" aren't extracting people from the West so they can avoid persecution from the West. They're pressuring Chinese citizens to go back to China to face punishment for crimes China thinks they committed.
By the way, before you get yourself all worked up, I think the much more likely possibility is that he has disappeared for a mundane reason, such as murder, or else he has deliberately disappeared himself for some reason.
Spies do flee countries. People do get disappeared. The idea that China has a presence on US soil helping criminals evade the FBI is a *conspiracy theory*.
A bureau spokesperson issued a statement: “I can confirm we conducted court-authorized activity at the address in Carmel today.
Believe everyone can put together the type of events that cause sudden behavior changes like that. (Hint: money offers or family threats)
I don't know what motivated this guy's disappearance but you don't get quietly fired, scrubbed from public association and have the FBI raid your apartment when you're a victim of abduction. We know some sort of federal crime took place to justify the raid so my guess is the guy is not an abductee but a fugitive.
I am not saying that definitely happened, but it's a narrative which more or less fits the facts.
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. Until then, speculation used to fuel speculation is a dangerous path.
EDIT: Apparently my reference to conspiracy theories is pushing buttons? Unfortunately this is literally true: the logic of the conspiracy theorist builds upon itself, with as minimal reference to exterior circumstances as possible. The lizard people did it. How do we know? Because they did it before!
If we want to be different from conspiracy theorists, we need to cultivate an insistence on reasoning from documented facts, rather than building elaborate towers out of theories alone.
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 speculation that this is a pattern and the government may in fact be disappearing people.
Until then, the known facts don't match a government disappearing program as well as they match other possible explanations.
Isn't it evidence of "disappearings" that we know many people were transported to a prison in El Salvador but nobody knows who those people in fact are?
As far as I've seen from the press the government hasn't released any documentation about who they flew to El Salvador. Or have they?
If that is true then isn't it also true that this scientist in question might as well be in that Salvadorean prison, as far as we know?
https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/69741724/1/jgg-v-trump/
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.
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.
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).
There are plenty of things that they're doing that are documented that are evil. There's no need to waste energy and credibility speculating about things that aren't yet understood or documented, unless you personally have the means to investigate Wang's disappearance and shed light on what happened.
I can think of plenty of examples of shady things various official bodies in the US have done within the past century, but regular occurrences of "extrajudicial kidnapping without a paper trail" isn't one of them.
If you go through proper channels and leave a paper trail then regardless of whether or not you agree with what's been done it can't reasonably said to be "disappearing" someone.
Or, threatening to annex Canada and parts of Europe. Or, opening damm because there is fire in a place where water does not go.
Something not happening in the past is not a reason for it to not happen again.
Decision-making, and its related presumptions change when the threat becomes existential.
Deceivers with resources who abuse the public trust and its presumptions towards individuals, take advantage of societies understanding, towards destructive ends, and continue doing so regardless. They corrupt the systems meant to protect and keep destructive outcome dynamics in check usually for personal or political benefit.
The entities are not entitled to the same benefit of the doubt when they have a history of malfeasance, and lack of credibility.
This is true of anti-trust, government corruption, and government in general when you consider the many other things like Tuskegee, or what happened to the Inuit women who were involuntarily sterilized following eugenics programs in the late 60s early 70s, along with other indigenous peoples under the guise of beneficial programs promoting public health.
You can see just how well fines do in curbing corruption like JPM's silver manipulation over a decade, or Egg price fixing over the past 10 years, or medical equipment providers who have defects that kill patients, and then claim they fix them falsely (in bad faith).
There is a point where you cannot presume innocence, especially with regards to non-person entities (like corporations), who will pay the fine and continue business as usual passing the cost on.
Eventually you hit a critical saturation point where the presumption and benefit of the doubt must necessarily flip.
When related systems break enough, there is a point where people realize the rule of law has failed, and consider alternatives like the brass verdict, and act on it.
These are not good things, but they happen when the dynamics to correct fail as a whole. When people start objectively finding foundational violations, it becomes and is a societal existential threat and should be treated as such.
Failure to react from that point forward then becomes opting out of continued survival, which is well beyond any considered point of absurdity.
Evil is blind to the natural destructive consequences it creates, and sometimes evil needs killing just as it did with the Nazi's.
When the rule of law can no longer fulfill the obligations under social contract, and act as a non-violent conflict resolution, the alternative is natural law and chaos, and it is something that no good person would wish on anyone.
It's one thing to not trust some entity and say they do bad things a lot, or to assume they're being evil in certain areas where they have established motives and patterns.
It's quite another to be so general about it that if a single person flippantly accuses them of basically anything you start off believing it. That's going too far and leads to some ridiculous early conclusions.
There is no issue of people projecting bad intention into conservatives or Trump. There is opposite issue - people excusing them forever with increasingly implausible explanations.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guantanamo_Bay_detention_camp
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guant%C3%A1namo_Bay_files_leak
I doubt it. The original Holocaust denier was FDR. He didn't want Nazi attrocities to distract from the war effort.
If your main enemy is willing to participate in the coverup, that's a problem.
We regularly forget about the horrific prison camps and racial policies of North Korean, because we're more worried about them having nuclear weapons.
Same with religious persecution in Iran. If we can make a deal that keeps Iran and North Korea out of the nuclear club, and confined to their borders, it's best not to let their purely domestic attrocities get in the way.
If Hitler hadn't invaded Poland, what would have happened to German/Austrian Jews?
There is this design process called the separation of objectionable concerns, where the task roles are designed to promote complacency through information control, the Stasi perfected it, and its used everywhere today in sensitive positions.
The most objectionable and risk related roles and tasks will be assigned to the fewest number of people with no one else being the wiser.
All other roles involved are narrowly tailored towards specific parts supporting the whole without any knowledge of doing so.
A murky transfer to a foreign prison makes for a very plausible disappearance. This is how these things are done historically, and social media is heavily controlled.
It could easily happen given what happened with regards to China and the Uyghur population.
Why are we talking in hypotheticals when it literally is happening today?
All the saber rattling doesn't mean you were correct in implying there is no holocaust going on
I said the opposite, there are literally multiple genocides going on. They make a fair bit of noise. There is lots of evidence of them if you care to look. They all have well sourced Wikipedia pages.
It isn't possible to wipe out a people and not have others quickly notice what is going on.
"Berlin Radio broadcast the mass-execution of Jews in Bialystok and the burning of synagogues in July 1941"
> It was only in retrospect that we learned the true horror of the Holocaust.
https://www.timesofisrael.com/how-the-world-discovered-the-n...
The full scale wasn't known but there was enough evidence something was going on.
I'm really not seeing much similarity between that period of history and this period. Godwin's law is probably more applicable.
Unemployment ~30%, inflation/stagflation, and German industry being co-opted by multinational corporations laying people off. > Then US Unemployment 1 in 4 out of work, co-opted by corporations, laying people off and price fixing basic goods and services.
Reichstag Fire Attack blamed on the Communists. > January 6th followed by Assassination Attempt at a Rally; blamed on the left/communist/marxist and calling out Harris as being Marxist in the debates.
Hitler extolling the virtues of Hitler Youth for hours publicly. > US State of the Union address covering the Honorary SS agent, DJ Daniel, doing the same.
Propaganda Ministry by Reich Press Chamber. > Trusted News Initiative. "The sharing of bias and false news has become all too common on social media...." [Sinclair/Deadspin, 200 channels verbatim]
People disappearing, detained, moved, or killed residents (SS) > Unidentified Agents detaining people with video coverage (Tufts Student), Prisoners being flown elsewhere (El Salvador), residents being killed by police, etc (George Floyd + too many others).
Channeling Popular Anxieties and stoking fear of a communist uprising to eradicate civil liberties, and democracy. > Same
These are just a few. Its quite concerning how it looks like a failed subversion/communist takeover leads to the dynamics allowing fascism. People can't seem to agree on a set objective measure of when have they crossed the line too far, when they cross the line continually.
Its greatly concerning.
And some of the things you're listing are similar in scale while others are orders of magnitude different. A giant list like that is a mess.
SGS, Shadow Government Stats.
Their estimates include the "long-term discouraged worker" which was officially defined out of existence in 1994, which was coupled with the short-term discouraged worker (U6) from BLS to get a real unemployment rate.
https://www.shadowstats.com/alternate_data/unemployment-char...
Its followed reality far closer than the watered down stats and methodology the politician's have been using over the last two decades. Especially during 2008, and they don't break it down by industry. Tech right now and going back two years is being displaced massively with no metrics for optics.
I agree, lists are horrible on HN.
Overall labor force participation seems fine. https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/98/US_Labor...
And labor force participation is only down, what, 4% from 2000? Why does that correspond to a 14% increase in unemployment?
The alternative to no work is starving, and there are people where they have been starving and unable to find any gainful employment for years. The most common excuse is being overqualified.
I've a friend who was laid off about a year ago, more experienced than I in SRE, and has had no job offers and he's applied to everything available in and outside Tech.
You got signs everywhere saying "We're hiring", and force you to do a 1-2 hour LeetCode Interview or some other BS, and then within 20 minutes after completing it he'll get an automated reply through the portal saying they've gone with another candidate; they won't take the sign down though, and when he went in person they say "You're just too overqualified", or better yet "Not a good culture fit [pre-interview smacking of ageism]. There are also tax subsidies for businesses to hire discouraged workers, still it seems like no ones doing it.
You've got most places that say they need help when in fact they aren't hiring at all. If anything there are far more people who are not counted than those on just the U6. I wouldn't agree 1:1 shouldn't count.
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.
* The target was committing crimes which were documented prior to the raid.
* The target was able to and chose to reach friends and tell them what happened.
* The target went nonresponsive after informing their friends of what happened.
* The friends allege that the location was raided but don't even imply that the leader is in federal custody.
* The leader is pseudonymous, so we fully expect that if they decide to go offline and stop using that handle that they will disappear. That's not the same thing as a person with a stable real-world identity vanishing.
Three times is enemy action
This is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argument_from_ignorance and is also asking someone else to prove nonexistence of a situation. Both of these are inappropriate in a good faith discussion and I believe it would benefit you to consider how you reason about these situations if you want to come to well founded conclusions.
If you have evidence, or even plausible speculation as to the government "disappearing people" you should present it here so we can all understand and respond to this, as it is extremely important. If you are just assuming that the government 'must be' disappearing people, without any evidence or even a plausible theory which you can share then you are just being hysterical.
2) There are numerous cases of the current administration using its discretionary powers to enact its desired policies in ways that violate norms and are quite probably illegal.
3) The administration actively circumventing record-keeping requirements, likely in an attempt to avoid detection of illegal actions.
The federal government is unbelievably powerful. Because of the jobs it is expected to do, it must maintain capabilities to do many terrifying things. For that reason, the government does not get the presumption of innocence. It has to be able to prove exactly what it was up to, and where its resources are being spent.
The reason there are so many tedious and wasteful rule-making and record-keeping and due-process requirements is exactly because it would be trivial otherwise to do things like disappear law-abiding citizens off the street and cover it up.
So when someone says "I want do do crimes A, B, and C", and then you discover that they have in fact done crimes B and C, and taken steps to conceal the potential commission of crime A, it isn't a fallacy to infer that they may have committed crime A.
Can you name any cases in recent history where someone was "disappeared" or similar by the government (the only part of this we can objectively prove afaik) and then no evidence or other proof of the person's wrongdoing ever came about, and people just forgot about it?
I could be mistaken (and please correct me if I'm wrong) but I really don't think this is a thing that happens in modern times.
https://www.cbc.ca/news/world/most-guantanamo-detainees-are-...
Anyone taken prisoner must be given an opportunity to be heard, to be able to give evidence that they aren't the right guy.
(To be clear, there's no indication the subjects of this story have been so detained)
I am not saying there is a conspiracy going on, simply pointing out a case that appears to have been forgotten and perpetrated by the 1.0 version of the current administration.
https://www.npr.org/2020/07/17/892277592/federal-officers-us...
Of course there are people that nobody looks for
But everyone that has inquired so far has been able to figure out location
Given the ambiguous chronology here, it seems like this professor dipped out in advance and the FBI freaked out later. So he wouldn’t be in a system if that were the case
But of course it could be FISA court related
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 the the greater the injury the greater the reaction is still valid, defensible, appropriate, etc.
2, calmness is pretty orthogonal to assessment. You can be perfectly calm while judging extrajudicial actions of ICE and others as utterly outlandish and intolerable.
3, How calm are the ICE agents when they show up and you try to decline their offer? Why aren't they required to "let's just calm down and talk this out and see if we can resolve this with civility..."?
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.
From what I've seen, it mainly comes to public attention through family, or in a few cases, bystanders recording videos of the incident. It seems like families ask the authorities where their loved ones have gone and they don't get answers. There have been reports of people only knowing based on press photos of people sent to Guantanamo or El Salvador.
If someone doesn't have a lot of local family it seems easy for it not to be reported anywhere.
If this was simply a missing person case, wouldn't the local police be involved instead of the FBI? If it's still in the FBI's jurisdiction (odd), wouldn't they have something to say instead of nothing?
In this case, this was a professor working on cryptography stuff, which if you will recall was infamously treated as munitions by the US govt for a long time. And he is likely either a naturalized citizen or greencard holder who was originally from China, so there's both an international and potentially geopolitical aspect to it. I suspect that if the local police were involved, they very quickly handed that off to the FBI. There aren't many police forces in the US equipped to deal with that nexus of factors.
They used to have a Github.[3] But now it says "No public repositories".
Here's their NSF funding.[4][5] About US$3 million. Xiaogang (Cliff) Wang is listed as the principal investigator.
[1] http://nsf-cdcc.org/principle-investigators/
[2] https://web.archive.org/web/20250120221302/https://nsf-cdcc....
[3] https://github.com/CDCC-Project
[4] https://www.nsf.gov/news/nsf-announces-awards-advance-cybers...
[5] https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=2207231&His...
No, you are misreading the award abstract. Cliff Wang is the program manager at NSF who is the point of contact for the investigators.
Was NSF funding for the project cancelled?
(*) Albeit with full legal work authorization.
We don't know the identities of, or even how many people have been extrajudicially rendered to the Salvadoran prison. The administration claims they're not citizens, but how would we know?
To be clear, ICE does not require “judicial action” to remove aliens so using the phrase “extrajudicial action” makes no sense. See: https://www.americanimmigrationcouncil.org/research/expedite...
Note that even when expedited removal does not apply, deportation is handled by immigration courts which aren’t really courts at all, but instead Article I tribunals within the executive branch. And many decisions of these immigration “courts” aren’t appealable to the real judicial branch.
…
> when expedited removal does not apply, deportation is handled by immigration courts
And how many of these recent cases have gone before an immigration court?
Are immigrants entitled to any form of due process?
Should they be, based on your personal principles?
Immigrants are entitled to “due process”—but “due process” doesn’t mean “judicial process.” Due process is a flexible concept that depends on the nature of the legal right being asserted. Non-citizens have no constitutional right to be in the U.S. So in my view the only constitutionally required “process” is to verify whether someone is a citizen or not. And I think that can be done adequately within the executive branch.
Why were immigration courts created in the first place?
The government is blowing off judicial orders. Thats a crime. One you start down that path, you tend to keep going.
You know only about cases that journalists follow. If there is a case journalists do not follow, there is no way for you to know about it.
So whether or not it does matter if the facts don't line up with the speculation, it should matter.
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.
Not that we know about yet. Someone's got to be the first of that sort of government action to be discovered and come to the notice of more than just their friends and family, and it's highly unlikely to be discovered the very first time it happened.
I'm reasonably confident that if this news manages to get covered widely enough. there's going to be a bunch of "me too" reports of coworkers or family that have disappeared under similar circumstances in the last 3 or 4 weeks. I'll be curious to see what other nationalities and professions show up in those reports.
If you know where someone is being held (like Louisiana, for example) they weren't 'disappeared'.
> without a doubt
With HEAVY doubt, lol. At some point redefining buzzwords to engage in political hyperbole goes further than being intellectually dishonest and presses against the rules of this site.
From recent CNN publication on the matter. At this stage I have to assume you are arguing in bad faith / shilling for a fascist government. I can only hope you're being paid to do something this debased.
> For the purposes of this Convention, "enforced disappearance" is considered to be the arrest, detention, abduction or any other form of deprivation of liberty by agents of the State or by persons or groups of persons acting with the authorization, support or acquiescence of the State, followed by a refusal to acknowledge the deprivation of liberty or by concealment of the fate or whereabouts of the disappeared person, which place such a person outside the protection of the law.
Arresting Mahmoud Khalil and Rümeysa Öztürk is a violation of their first amendment rights, no one in the government has acknowledged this. In addition, moving people to another state in opposition to a judges orders because the judge in Louisiana is favorable to your cause is an attempt to place someone outside of the protection of the law.
Khalil was also denied his right to a phone call or legal council for (as far as I can tell) 4 days.
But also, the government is unambiguously disappearing people
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/trump-administration-ignored-or...
And can I add, trusting the government to tell you where the person they just kidnapped is, is a pretty naive way of looking at things. They're violating our first amendment rights and kidnapping people off the street while disguising their identities and refusing to identify themselves when asked directly. What happens if they also refused to tell you where they disappeared people to?
There are multiple news stories of them deporting US citizens and legal residents. Here's one[0].
If citizens don't have due process, then nobody does. All it takes is the government to declare you a non-citizen; there will be no due process for you to prove otherwise.
[0]: https://www.nbcnews.com/news/latino/deported-family-us-citiz...
Their lawyer isn't claiming citizenship or residency, but poor treatment and asking for humanitarian release back into the US to get medical care of their citizen children.
I agree it is a pretty fucked up situation, but it doesn't support what you quoted
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43528036
Again, pure speculation, as is everything right now.
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).
But the students do know. They are saying they can’t contact him, which is not the same as not knowing he’s on leave
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.
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.
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 when you take the entire government into account, not just one agency.
Atheists, black people, Hawaiians, Germans, Japanese- all of them have found themselves in court.
Even people who are clearly American can find themselves having to defend themselves apparently: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barack_Obama_citizenship_consp...
Is it typical for the media to write stories when spies surreptitiously sneak out of a country?
I speculate this guy was long gone before the feds kicked in his door. Assuming he and his wife were indeed spies of course. Right now we cannot confirm or disconfirm that, but the narrative fits it so far.
> Disappearing people is not something the US government is allowed to do.
Do you have any sources that this guy was vanned, besides the very reliable Ars Technica comments section crying about 'fascists' and random schizos on BlueSky?
I can show you sources that say DB Cooper existed but there’s no evidence of his disappearance by definition so… what do you think you are looking for exactly?
https://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/bizarre-turn-in-bizarre...
If a government was disappearing people they would not do it with police raids. The last thing they would want is to take responsibility for it.
I have lived in a country where journalists and others were being disappeared, and it was done by unidentifiable people in unmarked vans.
This literally happened 4 days ago to Rümeysa Öztürk
Or the "cops" who refuesed to identify themselves to Mahmood Khalil's wife?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Detention_of_Mahmoud_Khalil#Ar...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Detention_of_R%C3%BCmeysa_%C3%...
I am not saying it is the right thing to do, but it is a very very long way from someone being grabbed, bundled into an unmarked van by people who are never identified (either as individuals or who they work for), and turning up later dead - or never turning up at all.
I'm 100% sure the US government, most governments, have "disappeared" people in a Pinochet style, it's just more rare and likely involves deep state spycraft type things. Even in Guantanamo, people lived, and people were known to be there, and I think that is how people are using "disappeared" i.e. extrajudicial and illegal, but alive and known to be somewhere. It reminds me of people using "violence" to describe writing or speech that make people feel bad, and it's like, okay, if that's what violence means what's the word for getting punched in the face, what's the word for getting tossed off a plane.
> Even in Guantanamo, people lived, and people were known to be there, and I think that is how people are using "disappeared" i.e. extrajudicial and illegal, but alive and known to be somewhere.
So you're arguing that no one was disappeared to Gitmo because some information eventually came out about a few people? Or do you really believe everyone at Gitmo was publicly identified?
A quick google reveals that Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch don't agree with you.
For one, Bush admitted we were doing enforced disappearances
> In early September 2006, US authorities transferred to Guantánamo 14 men who had been held in secret CIA custody. President George W. Bush finally admitted that, in the “war on terror”, the USA has been resorting to secret detentions and enforced disappearance, which is a crime under international law.
https://www.amnesty.org/en/wp-content/uploads/2021/08/amr511...
Some of those men had been held incommunicado for 4 years at that point.
Or, here is a list of people who, at the time, were believed to be disappeared at Gitmo https://www.hrw.org/legacy/backgrounder/usa/ct0607/4.htm#_To...
So yes, people were absolutely disappeared at/to Guantanamo Bay and you using Gitmo as your example makes me really question your definition.
They are allowed to disappear people simply by virtue of the fact that no one is going to stop them
It’s not even clear this professor is in government custody. It sounds like he may have gotten wind of the investigation and escaped.
It sounds like such a meaningless right. But it creates a clear line between a legitimate detention and disappearance.
Bingo. Dude vanished well before his Uni was a aware and starting making a stink.
How do you mean? Is it that legally it's not allowed to, so it's obviously not what happened here -- it must be someone else or some other government or entity that "disappeared" him. Or, legally it's not allowed to, but they clearly did it and we should be alarmed?
In the past US government quite happily droned civilians, experimented on its own citizens, planned coup and coup in all kind of countries, engaged in torture and extra judicial detainment of people in Guantanamo for years.
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.
They also use various means to charge people. Lying to a federal agent is a serious crime. Almost any misuse of federal funds can a a serious crime.
https://www.theregister.com/AMP/2023/01/04/ge_turbine_china_...
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.-...
You've misused Occam's Razor.
That was known at the time of my post.
We now also know now at the time of his escape, Indiana University had terminated his Professorship. And has continued to disavow he and his wife.
I did not misuse Occam's razor, my knowledge of public facts simply exceeded yours.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principle_of_maximum_entropy
Occam’s razor is a rule of thumb which suggests that if several hypotheses explain the same thing, the simplest one should be favored. When we have a missing person with several unknown variables, until we see some evidence, any guess is as good as other. And no hypotheses should be ruled out.
On HN we also like Bayesian analysis, so instead of looking for the simplest explenation, we should be asking what we already know. What is the probability that this person was disappeared by the government, given that 3 other students have been disappeared by the government lately? Given that these 3 other students were also people of color? Etc.
If you're talking about the students I think you are, they're detained in Louisiana and Texas. They haven't been "disappeared" in any way.
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.
The obvious one being if the FBI is arresting a spy they would not be doing search warrants on his properties weeks after he goes missing. They do that stuff immediately.
Instead if we're speculating, this far more sounds like the FBI are playing catch up to circumstances that became suspicious after a few weeks.
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).
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 openly deporting thousands elsewhere, often based on flimsy evidence. Furthermore, if you are secretly getting rid of someone, you do it to avoid taking responsibility. Why would you send the FBI to raid their residence afterwards? That immediately connects you to the disappearance, thereby sabotaging your own scheme.
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.
Both the Chinese and USA governments engaged (or have been accused of engaging) in unlawful kidnapping of their own (and foreign) nationals from foreign countries over the last decades.
So I'm not sure how one can dismiss the possibility that this is indeed one of such cases.
It was a joke in a joke book, and has been taken entirely out of context by most people who use it to justify anything.
Murphy's Law Book 2, January 24, 1980 A book of jokes, meant to be humorous.
No previous literature related to it before then.
I can't help but laugh when people use it now, so I guess its still funny... in a way.
It says a lot about the character of a person that takes a joke and uses it in a way, that it was never intended to be used. Useful knowledge to keep in your back pocket if needed.
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.
Picture a small overturned wooden box that a person is standing on to yell to a crowd.
Has anyone checked Louisiana or El Salvador detention centres for him?
"FBI, Homeland Security agents search house on Xavier Court in Bloomington" - https://eu.heraldtimesonline.com/story/news/local/2025/03/28...
Our system allows for challenging the government’s right to execute a search after the search has happened. And it isn’t open to random interlopers who think they’ve spotted a government misstep—you must have standing to challenge a search. The architects of this system didn’t want justice to get caught up in the equivalent of a GitHub pull request war.
Eventually the warrant will become unsealed and we can all inspect it.
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.
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 destroyed.
What he did was public domain, unless he consulted for alphabet agencies. 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
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 a prominent figure in an area of research we all pay attention to. But given some kind of criminal investigation is in process, and that he has a lawyer, there's no signal to derive from the fact that we can't get quotes from him in the media; that could just be him being smart.
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.
He was either found innocent or the charges were dropped, which is very rare.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_police_overseas_servic...
https://news.stv.tv/west-central/chinese-secret-police-stati...
Given all this, why is it so odd for me to ask for more information here? Like, instead of discouraging me from asking for more information in the future, you could have listed the sources you feel are usable.
https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-e&channel=ent...
> A: makes a strong claim, suggesting it to be well known
> B: doubts
> [100 people provide credible sources]
Also congrats for being 1 of 10000 today i guess https://xkcd.com/1053/
It's weird to doubt something that's been in the news a bunch and is reported on by reputable sources though. Instead of expecting 100 people to do a basic search for them, they should have done their own search and only doubted if they didn't find anything.
This whole "do your own research" attitude is not good. It's easy to make any claim whatsoever without any basis of truth in this manner. Good for you if that is enough for you but for me that is not enough, logically speaking.
One may call me lazy but I think it was a valid request and I also believe that informing oneself is not quite as easy as it perhaps seems. I certainly don't think it's as simple as "googling the issue" when it comes to something like this.
"I don't understand" is a good way to foment discussion. "I don't believe you" usually isn't.
I just want to state for the record that I didn't claim to disagree with the comment nor am I a conspiracy theorist, nor a Chinese spy... I only asked for more information (which other comments have then provided).
Except US, AFAIK no other gov investigating has publically released evidence of foul play. Like there's arguments to close these stations are extra territorial setups, except as far as I'm aware, they're run by diasophra citizens of countries, not Chinese nationals. And LBH, anything pertaining to US actions vs China from last few years is indistinguishable from propaganda. There's some US court docs on the couple Chinese (US citizens) in NY being prosecuted for repressing dissidents on behalf of PRC gov, that's as close to primary source as you can get. This all without touching the founder of SafeGuard Defender, Peter Dahlin... history with PRC, first westerner to be charged for work undermining national security afer NGO reforms, arrested for a few weeks, deported, seperated from Chinese gf). Let's just say he's got bones to pick.
IMO accusations are borderline retarded, and unsurprisingly borderline retarded western msm and useful idiots in west believe it. Spend half a second thinking why PRC intelligence operations would coordinate under very public (and publically advertised) arrangements that gets comingled with civil activities. It's dumbest possible "front" to host these activities, especially for operation foxhunt tier work. Like Chinese spies, especially those with foreign citizenship,can get all sorts of cover work that doesn't directly linked back to official Chinese gov activities (as in terms of paperwork)... and they choose what, network of borderline extraterritorial consulate service arrangements?
E: The TLDR for me is western (really US led) propaganda associated with broad effort to dismantle PRC's United Front like work abroad, started with Chinese programs at various universities. Because again, Chinese intelligence so stupid and lazy (or bold) that they would setup in actual campuses. Which itself is response to PRC basically destroying US/Western NGO operations in PRC mid 2010s for subversive influence ops. Except Chinese don't really run large think tanks or well resourced NGOs as cover for their intelligence activities aboard. They don't need to, they have diasphora citizens everywhere already integrated. The few comparable arrangments that exist are United Front related setups in the west.
Its just racism.
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...
The current administration have proven they do not care about any of these things. Even natural born citizens are now under threat.
Still, the current administration's renewed call to revoke birthright citizenship was via executive order, promptly blocked by courts. Currently the case seems to rest with the Supreme Court.
Gay people
Doctors that provide abortions
Doctors that provide gender affirming care
Students protesting against Israel
Just to name a few
Perhaps, given you provided said categories, you'll be able to drill down and name a natural born citizen from them?
https://www.npr.org/2025/03/14/nx-s1-5327552/trump-takes-bir...
https://immigrationimpact.com/2025/02/07/breaking-down-trump...
I do wonder if you, or anyone, could focus on the question I actually asked instead of different ones they wish to answer.
legal concepts in other countries have absolutely _nothing_ to do with constitutional rights in the U.S.
Moreover, the US Bill of Rights is an extension of the English Bill of Rights 1689 and Magna Carta (the founders were British, after all). From Britannica's introduction to the US Bill of Rights[1]:
> The Bill of Rights derives from the Magna Carta (1215), the English Bill of Rights (1689)…
Wikipedia[2] adds:
> The concepts codified in these amendments are built upon those in earlier documents, especially the Virginia Declaration of Rights (1776), as well as the Northwest Ordinance (1787), the English Bill of Rights (1689), and Magna Carta (1215)
Both the Virginia Declaration of rights[3] and the Northwest Ordinance incorporate concepts found in the English Bill of Rights and Magna Carta, for example:
> Mason based his initial draft on the rights of citizens described in earlier works such as the English Bill of Rights (1689) and the writings of John Locke.
And where do you think they got habeas corpus from?
And finally, in the link I shared on jus soli[4], in the second line, it states:
> Jus soli was part of the English common law
I could go on but that seems enough. Not only is your claim completely erroneous, it's also not misguided to contrast the situation to show that it's not a strange or dangerous change.
Of course, if you - or anyone - were to address my actual question then you might have the beginnings of a point.
[1] https://www.britannica.com/topic/Bill-of-Rights-United-State...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Bill_of_Rights
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virginia_Declaration_of_Rights
While US law has its roots in English common law, and common law concepts were referenced by the Founding Fathers, it has absolutely no bearing on US constitutional law.
It's interesting from a historical perspective, but that's it.
Jus soli has nothing to do with the US constitution or US laws. Period.
The fact that they are even trying to remove the protections that natural born citizens have always had in the US, should ring alarm bells for you, but somehow they are not. Maybe you really aren't familiar with the concept of "First they came for...", but you'll find out how this plays out soon enough.
If you wish to make your points without addressing my question then you can simply comment directly on the article or respond to someone else, hopefully with more relevance to their comment than your slightly unhinged responses have had to mine.
This is my original comment. You are moving goalposts where you want them to be. My comment is specifically about how this administration is threatening natural born citizens by trying to remove protections they've always had, and here you are seeming to say they aren't because no natural born citizens have been deported yet. You're simply just being an internet troll.
If you can’t handle simple questions that undermine your claims then make better claims. Also, with your attitude I’m not sure this site is for you. Please refrain from the personal insults, it definitely lowers the overall tone of the board.
specific numbers from wikipedia(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/China_Initiative):
250 have been fired, 77 cases opened, 28 prosecutions, 8 got convicted.
Also, I suspect many cases were closed or not pushed because of change in president administration.
ICE is immune to prosecution for improper behavior so they've dialed that up to 11 this year
Who exactly is going to stop them? Courts just say "don't do that" and they nod
Someone else may be responsible for his disappearance in the first place.
Later
From the TPM follow-up link downthread: faculty at IU were notified more than a week before the raid that he'd been placed on leave, and it was at that point Wang's pages were zapped from the IU sites.
My only take here (besides the certainty that the shadowy hand of the FISA FISC court is not behind all this) is that it doesn't look like another ICE raid.
I don't think anyone, least of all OP, is suggesting this is what happened.
Everything is rank speculation at this point, but if I were going to speculate I'd speculate that Wang suddenly left the country of his own volition and the employer began investigating his disappearance and stumbled on things that led to them calling in the FBI.
That's still purely speculation, but it would account for the sequence of events and the manner of investigation way better than any ideas about him being "vanished" by the US government.
You don't know if its detained, you don't know if is in the territory of the USA, you don't know anything....If it's a US Citizen would be espionage because?
so you're saying he vanished...?
Yes, as far as we know he vanished, but as far as we know he did so under his own will before the university even put him on leave.
"Diplomats" routinely get declared persona non grata and just put on the next plane home. Neither the U.S. nor the other country wants to make a fuss.
In other words, they aren't the traitors, their agents are. And those agents are the ones who get tried in the media circuses we're all so familiar with.
The feds execute warrants every day without making the news.
Or they vanish themselves before they're caught and are never heard from again because they got away.
We don't know that anyone has Wang in custody. He was scrubbed from the University computer systems weeks before the FBI raided his house, which suggests that whatever happened started then and built up to this recent raid which finally drew media attention.
An expert in cryptography seems like someone theyd be keeping tabs on if they really do this.
Just spit balling here and dont mean to accuse the guy of anything.
Maybe another xenophobic red scare-type U.S. gov't overreaction will inadvertently export top talent to China a second time.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/apr/20/explainer-chin...
Let’s not spread misinformation. This could turn out to be a simple criminal case. He might even be a victim. Or it could be something bigger—maybe a spy case, or even something on the scale of Watergate. At this point, no one really knows.
For context:
Disagree: There are reasons to think the Indiana University leadership would willingly assist with something dodgy from right-wing politicians.
There was already a big controversy against the IU leadership enabling political censorship last year, which lead to an overwhelming no-confidence vote from faculty and students.
https://www.insidehighered.com/news/quick-takes/2024/04/17/i...
https://www.idsnews.com/article/2024/04/behind-the-vote-facu...
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?
>Two bills introduced by the Republican Party that passed the House of Representatives on September 11, 2024, have been described as reviving the China Initiative. The bills are part of "China Week", a House Republican-led effort to advance China-related legislation
>The China Initiative was a program by the United States Department of Justice to prosecute potential Chinese spies in American research and industry, in order to combat economic espionage. Launched in November 2018, the program targeted hundreds of prominent Chinese-American academics and scientists, of which an estimated 250 lost their jobs. Many more had their careers negatively impacted and the prosecutions also contributed to at least one suicide.
>According to a Bloomberg News analysis of the 50 indictments displayed on the China Initiative webpage, the program had not "been very successful at catching spies." Most of the cases listed by December 17, 2021, involved individual profiteering or career advancement by the accused, rather than state-directed spying. Despite this, many of these indictments portray the alleged crimes as for the benefit of China. Seton Hall University law professor Margaret Lewis described this as "a conflation of individual motives with a country’s policy goals" that has led to the criminalization of "China-ness."
The real thing to say here is that we will probably never know what's alleged, much less what's happened.
Interesting would be if he were a skilled enough cryptographic theorist to have gotten a backdoor into a NIST approved algorithm; new ideas in this field are almost always appreciated.
No, it doesn't. Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court proceedings are only warrant applications for surveillance that cannot be used on criminal trials; targets wouldn't be informed of or represented in proceedings.
Espionage or terrorism charges are handled by normal US District Courts, on the public docket (though certain documents and proceedings within those—or any other—cases dealing with classified evidence are handled under special procedures to preserve the secrecy of the evidence )
Federal criminal court in Maryland
Whoever, it wasn’t FISC, because FISC doesn’t have jurisdiction to do any trials.
> Federal Judge Richard D. Bennett was responsible for hearing handling the case, and initially set trial for June 2011
He then plead out
Their application of the statutes to facts that remain classified are generally classified, sure.
> The charges related to these warrants are secret if not adjudicated by the court.
There are no charges directly related to the warrants because they are not criminal warrants. If there are criminal charges indirectly related to them, they are not secret, and are pursued in normal US courts, by normal process.
> To be more direct, the existence of this court is an abomination in the context of a democracy.
There may be ways to improve the processes of these courts, but given the functions they deal with and the facts that in other democracies (as in the US prior to FISA) there is often no court oversight of foreign intelligence surveillance, I think their existence is actually a positive thing.
> to oversee requests for surveillance warrants against foreign spies inside the United States by federal law enforcement and intelligence agencies.
Secret courts that some say are unconstitutional[0].
[0]: https://www.aclu.org/documents/why-fisa-amendments-act-uncon...
These two courts are not “reserved for espionage and terrorism”, they are dedicated to assuring that limitations on impact on US persons of surveillance justified on foreign intelligence grounds are observed. They handle only warrant applications for foreign intelligence surveillance that has some US nexus, not charges/allegations of any kind, and no one targeted or impacted by such a warrant would ever get notice that proceedings were occurring, much less be represented, in these courts.
So far nothing there, but I created an alert for his name, and I’ll post here and to Dan Goodin (the author of the article) if anything pops up.
(Note, I have absolutely zero reason to believe this man is stealing Legos. This is just a hypothetical example of a slightly bizarre but not entirely implausible crime that has nothing to do with politics, geopolitics or computer science.)
Of course in this situation, being placed on leave by the university has thoroughly tipped him off that the cat is out of the bag, and it's only a matter of time until he's arrested. So he skips town before the police get involved.
Why's the FBI involved?
- (1) Maybe it's a FBI relevant matter (e.g. there's a whole Lego theft ring)
- (2) If he told his family where he went, the court system could force them to reveal that information to the police, under threat of jail time. It'd be safer for his family if he didn't tell them where he's going or why. So he ends up as a missing person, which triggers FBI involvement.
- (3) Maybe the FBI is just as confused as we are. They get involved it's thinking it might be national security related because of the international intrigue or cryptography research angles. They don't know it's merely an "ordinary" crime (or at least they didn't when they decided to get involved -- maybe they've investigated enough to figure it out by now.)
https://www.fbi.gov/investigate/counterintelligence/the-chin...
It would be very surprising. How many spies and 'double agents' are there?
so in a rough estimate, if you have 10 chinese coworkers around you, there is over a 50% probability that CCP is watching you
Talk to anyone who deals in sensitive matters and attends conferences and they will tell you the number of people trying to pry information is overwhelming.
So the answer to your question is lots. A tremendous number of people, especially in academia, feed information to foreign governments. Not only is it not rare, but it's obnoxiously common for those who have to deal with it.
In the absence of evidence and since the FBI is handling it, and with the secrecy, it seems more likely espionage-related.
Xaiofeng could had fled to China for all we know. It’s certainly important to question our government though.
https://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/more-details-on-situati...
https://bsky.app/profile/ncweaver.skerry-tech.com/post/3lljl...
Universities should stay neutral.
does not necessary predate FBI involvement,
a university "silently" scrubbing someone is most times due to there being something which could cause heavy reputational damage to tangentially related to that person (or secret orders/pressure from courts or other agencies)
for example someone gets caught doing something bad by the university but not yet outright criminal, the university puts the on leave and investigates further maybe informs police or FBI too, which then start investigation but not yet without any public actions. The person knows when put on leave that they likely will find more things and disappears themself (issue with that story is the woman at on of the houses and her being let go by the FBI and coming back with a lawyer and her being not identified as his wife, which just doesn't fit in at all)
https://fox59.com/news/iu-faculty-protests-firing-of-profess...
https://www.cnbc.com/2025/03/31/fbi-searches-xiaofeng-wang-h...
https://www.wthr.com/article/news/local/after-fbi-raids-on-h...
https://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/1jnl64l/fbi_rai...
Letter from his Union to the Provost of IU Rahul Shrivastav https://aaup.sitehost.iu.edu/reports/AAUP_March_31_Letter_Sh...
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
but US courts had done rulings which where basically like that
Please don't speculate from a position of ignorance.
if you also look at this persons past research, and tenure, you will see this is not speculation, nor is it nonsense.
[1] https://www.justice.gov/archives/opa/pr/harvard-university-p...
[2] https://abc13.com/fire-chinese-consulate-documents-being-bur...
https://github.com/wangxiaofeng7/wangxiaofeng7.github.io
Someone making a homepage in the last few days, but to what purpose?
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.
But I still hold its Nick Szabo
Hopefully in half a year this crops back up with more available then
And of course hoping everyone is safe and doing legal stuff
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, anything is possible.
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
that's true, so be careful, the child of your chinese coworker is likely kidnapped by CCP so that the chinese coworker has no other choice but to work for the CCP
Exclusive with more info on the timeline, but nothing substantive enough to clarify entirely.
TL;DR: Professor was placed on leave which was announced to colleagues around 3/14.
"What’s still unclear is whether the University investigation lead to the federal law enforcement actions or whether early stages of a federal law enforcement investigation led the University to place Wang on leave and take these other actions. What’s clear though, according to my information, is that the law enforcement searches two days ago did not lead to Wang being placed on leave."
"One additional detail, it’s not clear that Wang has been fired. That was not what colleagues were told in mid-March and there does not appear to have been any update on that front to the contrary to colleagues."
Both the university, the court, and the lawyer seem to not raising any fuss yet, signaling that whatever this is, it likely all legal and severe enough to warrant absolute silence.
The employer was likely contacted far in advance for detail not available to the public, and very likely they complied and realized there are serious issues that can tarnish the university's reputation, so they erased his name from their payroll. This indicated court order and sufficient evidences for multiple parties to be concerned.
So... best guess? National security matter. Like it or not, espionage is a thing and under this administration, all foreigner, naturalized or not, are under extra scrutiny. And the US is not above applying stereotypes.
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.
Many of them are basically refuges which did use their nogen to be able to escape the Chinese regime and find a home without technically being refuges at any point.
Some grew up in the US.
Many have family and children in the US, thus which very well might be US citizens.
For many they do not have a place to go, the US is their only home.
Even for thus which where involved in spying not all of them did so of their free choice. It's not a secret that China secret police is present in most countries with larger China ethnicity including the US and there had been more then one or two cases of them threatening and blackmailing ethnic Chinese people (including such with full US citizenship). Including e.g. kidnapping their children.
You are implying some of the China Initiative victims were spies. However, based on this wikipedia page[1], none of them are.
You hit the nail on the head. they clearly knew they shouldn't stay, but chose to remain here — most likely because they were on a secret mission
I'm genuinely surprised by the level of American delusion about what happening in the others parts of the world.
In China, their risks are much higher. Outside of the China, they would face a several times drop in their standard of living, which isn't worth tiny risk of something bad happened because of China Initiative. Especially in the case when this "something bad" most probably would be them losing their job and deported, something that your solution suggesting them to start from.
Repeatedly.
“America first” really means America alone.
Prof. Green also posted about the vanishing of Prof. Wang here on HN the other day,
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43518196
(That's where I first heard of it). But HN is an increasingly difficult place to discover such stories, what with the systematic flagging brigades.
What stories are getting flagged?
I also don’t want the site to become all politics, but it feels weird to me that stories like this with overt overlap with tech and SV still often get flagged.
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.
This story is on the front page and stories like it have been on the front page almost every day since last October.
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.
It might not be a conspiracy but these stories do get removed one way or another.
> Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, or celebrities, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. Videos of pratfalls or disasters, or cute animal pictures. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic.
It's like an alternate HN front page that sorts based on activity, and unlike the default front page, it does not suppress submissions that have been flagged. At this moment I see these flagged-but-very-active submissions:
[flagged] Trump says he is not joking about third presidential term https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43525860
[flagged] It's the hottest car company. You can't buy one in America https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43523797
[flagged] [dead] Trump suggests Tesla vandals should face 20 years jail, be sent to El Salvador https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43520632
[flagged] ICE Revoking Students' Immigration Statuses Without Their or the Uni's Knowledge https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43528356
> Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, or celebrities, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. Videos of pratfalls or disasters, or cute animal pictures. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic.
So he was missing for two weeks already and then the FBI raid occurred Friday? Who was the woman at the house if not his wife
And they are still bound by whatever who is in charge of the FBI wants. Always remember how the FBI was used in the Nixon era to target Black people and hippies [1].
[1] https://www.vera.org/reimagining-prison-webumentary/the-past...
I have an idea.
