FBI raids home of prominent computer scientist who has gone incommunicado | Hacker News Reader

FBI raids home of prominent computer scientist who has gone incommunicado

arstechnica.com

1,008 pointsJaimeThompson467 comments

This hasn't hit mainstream media yet. It should have by now. Disappearing people is not something the US government is allowed to do.

Here's Xiaofeng Wang's bio on the Indiana University site.[1]

Google Scholar.[2]

Archived version of home page at Indiana University.[3]

If anybody has a PACER account, please check there.

[1] https://alliance.iu.edu/members/member/8580.html

[2] https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=pONu-5EAAAAJ&hl=en

[3] https://web.archive.org/web/20240930195057/https://homes.lud...

What evidence do you have that they US government disappeared him? It's just as likely that he is an escaped spy and the university wants nothing to do with him.

Maybe OP is making an assumption based on recent events, it has been happening an awful lot.

Has anyone checked Louisiana or El Salvador detention centres for him?

I believe the term is "to John McAfee".

We have no evidence that Wang "was" disappeared. We know that he's nowhere to be found, that the university put him on leave weeks ago [0], and that the FBI recently searched his home. Notably, the university put him on leave weeks before the FBI searched his home.

That sequence is better explained by the hypothesis that Wang vanished himself suddenly and the university called in the FBI to investigate things that 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...

On the long list of problems caused by the government "disappearing" people (which they have objectively been doing lately) is that it destroys trust and therefore makes even valid legal proceedings seem more shady than they would in a world in which due process was a universal guarantee in practice. I don't fault anyone for jumping to conclusions implicating the government is in the wrong here rather than Wang.

> 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 actions of ICE recently are absolutely not helping people stay calm in the face of something like this.

>Even the most egregious cases, which are very bad, have left a paper trail for lawyers and journalists to follow.

How can you be confident in this? Is it possible that you are saying this because the only cases we know about are when they have happened to leave "a paper trail for lawyers and journalists to follow"?

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. 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.

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

Point taken.

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

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

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

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

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

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

I'm totally in favor of holding the current administration accountable for what they are doing and clamping down on all the authoritarian actions as much as possible. But I'm not in favor of compromising principles to do it.

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.

There is a point where "benefit of the doubt" is not appropriate though. Personal opinion is that point is past.

Benefit of the doubt is relative to both the item and setting though. What prior evidence do we have that would cause us _not_ to extend benefit of the doubt to the US government in the specific context of disappearing people?

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.

US did not used to do whole host thing it is doing now - like trying to destroy law companies that sued politicians. Or, removing security from former government family members while stroking hate. Or, illegally extraditing people because someone misrepresented a tattoo. Or, attacking judges the way current administration do.

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.

There is never a time where it's appropriate to give up benefit of the doubt in general toward an entity. If your starting position is that they most likely did any and every bad thing you can think of, you quickly reach absurdity.

You are wrong about that. You have never dealt with malevolent entities where that cannot be given.

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.

You didn't address my argument though, my second sentence.

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.

The same goes for extending infinite amount of benefit of doubt toward people who has shown who they are again and again and again. And this was going on for years here and very much empowered bad far right actors and their enablers.

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.

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

"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.

> I'm really not seeing much similarity between that period of history and this period.

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.

Where in the world did you get that unemployment rate?

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.

> Where in the world did you get that unemployment rate?

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.

I don't see an explanation of where these numbers come from. Also I would say that even within U6, someone that's forced to work part-time should not count 1:1 with someone that has no job at all.

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?

I disagree. Work is real scarce, the food stamp benefits also don't cover a full month of food, more like 1-2 weeks with grocery store price inflation (assuming you have a kitchen to prepare your food, many don't).

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.

There'd be a fair bit of noise if the Holocaust was happening today. It'd be more like Guantanamo Bay or the US's international program of black-bag kidnappings. You don't expect to know exactly what is going on but there is a wiki page [0] and regular leaks [1] even if only a relatively small number of people involved. Something like the holocaust couldn't fly under the radar in the age of the internet; there'd be leaks like no-one's business. They could get away with more radio silence in the 1950s by not having social media.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guantanamo_Bay_detention_camp

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guant%C3%A1namo_Bay_files_leak

I disagree.

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.

> There'd be a fair bit of noise if the Holocaust was happening today.

Why are we talking in hypotheticals when it literally is happening today?

The Uyghur thing has been fairly well discussed and I assume people know everything they care to. Wikipedia is pretty comprehensive on the current state of knowledge.

I was referring to the holocaust the US is currently aiding in

Gaza? You should spell things out. Regardless even more ink has been spilled on that and there doesn't seem to be any particular ambiguity on what is happening. It is major international news and South Africa are bringing court cases to the ICJ. Israel isn't doing anything subtle.

Wait... so you effectively said "there's no holocaust going on" and I pointed out one and you accidentally brought up another... and I'm wrong still? What? No.

All the saber rattling doesn't mean you were correct in implying there is no holocaust going on

> Wait... so you effectively said "there's 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.

Thanks for your patience, I clearly misunderstood your previous comments

> There'd be a fair bit of noise if the Holocaust was happening today.

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?

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

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

If you think the Holocaust was just what happened in the gas chambers, I'm afraid you haven't learned the true horror of the Holocaust either.

Approximately 2.7 million Jews[0] were killed in the death camps as part of the so-called Final Solution between 1941 and 1945.

This was preceded by the so-called Euthanasia[1] campaign, which killed approximately 300,000 people deemed "life undignified for life" (mostly people with disabilities) - although the exact numbers weren't known to the public at the time, the program became so widely known following a proclamation against it by the Holy See (after Catholic authorities in Germany generally supported it) that there were actual protests agianst it in Germany.

The total number of people killed by the Nazis between 1933 and 1945 in what were later considered crimes against humanity - excluding those who died from conflict, disease, etc (i.e. from WW2 or its circumstances/effects) - is approximately 17 million[2] - more than six times the number of Jews killed in the death camps alone. Of those, 6 million were Jews: 2.7 million in the death camps, about half that many additionally included among the Soviet Citizens and POWs and another 2 million non-Soviet Jews killed outside the death camps.

Note that this number doesn't include civilian victims of the war - the Nazis specifically went out of their way to carry out mass executions in Poland and elsewhere. Many of these were carried out by the Reserve Police[3], often voluntarily with no threat or punishment for refusal other than mild disciplinary action (e.g. latrine duty) and social ostracization by their colleagues for "letting them down". Many more were carried out by the Wehrmacht on their way through the Soviet Union in case you're wondering how the myth of the "innocent German soldiers" is holding up to scrutiny.

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

True, the full extent of the Nazi mass murders was hardly fully transparent at the time. But none of this happened out of the blue and there very much was a clear and obvious escalation visible to those who cared to see it - an escalation also easily predictable at several points throughout its course, by the way, except people (including foreign governments and foreign news organizations) very much did not want to acknowledge it for a number of reason from wanting to avoid being seen as alarmist or leftist to actively supporting parts of it and just hoping that the escalation will stop at the point where the outcomes are most personally beneficial to themselves.

The problem wasn't a lack of accountability. The problem was people rationalizing their own actions by wanting to be the good guy in their personal narrative. The Reserve Police didn't volunteer to execute civilians because of a lack of oversight, it did so because not doing so when asked seemed unconscionable when the alternative would have meant reevaluating all the horrors they had participated in up to that point.

We literally have testimonies of Reserve Police officers who participated in the killings saying they did nothing wrong and actually were the real victims for being put in such an uncomfortable position of having to carry out these killings - or in one case an officer stating that he had asked his colleagues to specifically let him kill the children as long as their mothers are killed first because then he could see it as an act of mercy to kill the orphaned children.

Hierarchical institutions are designed to create a culture of obedience. Obedience is how these things happen, not complacence or lack of accountability.

[0]: https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/at-the-kil...

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aktion_T4

[2]: https://www.statista.com/statistics/1071011/holocaust-nazi-p...

[3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reserve_Police_Battalion_101

> 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.

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.

> We have no evidence that they have been disappearing people in this manner

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?

Given that several of the individuals were named clients of the ACLU in the lawsuit, at least some of them are known.

https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/69741724/1/jgg-v-trump/

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.

If I'm reading this right, this is a case of the FBI raiding the location of the leader of a ring of hackers and that leader going offline after confirming that the raid had happened. Unless I'm mistaken on that reading, that leaves a few key differences from what's being alleged in this thread:

* 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.

> Once is happenstance, Twice is a coincidence.

Three times is enemy action

Everyone that’s been looked for has been found in some jail in Louisiana before further transport

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

It's clearly not true that everyone is properly documented.

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/latino/lawyers-advocates-say-48...

This article says that the communities are having a hard time figuring out which 48 people were arrested, which is a very different problem than having a specific person you're looking for and not knowing where they went to.

Again: still bad, still inexcusable, but not the same thing as what would have to be happening here.

Documentation is hard to do accurately when someone illegally immigrates with no documents.

The Department of Homeland Security is not an undocumented immigrant, nor is the court system. They are required to document what they do.

And many of the disappeared people were here either with valid asylum claims or temporary protected status and were following the laws to get their day in court -- at which time it would have been completely legal and appropriate to deport them if their claims were denied. Instead, we have secret police grabbing them off the street, immediately transferring them out of the jurisdiction they were picked up in and flying them out of the country to a notoriously violent prison in an unrelated country less than 48 hours after they were picked up... it's an absolute travesty and anyone who defends it should be deeply ashamed.

Some people had 100% valid visas that were revoked upon attempting to enter, at the (arbitrary) discretion of an immigration officer for years old non-criminal issues that had been resolved.

They were then detained for days rather then be allowed to exit the country.

How does homeland security know who they arrested if the individual has no documents?

Assuming they're not in a biometric database and from a non cooperative country like Venezuela.

That someone is not documented doesn’t mean you get to treat everyone that way. That someone is not documented doesn’t mean they have no rights for that matter.

I think in this case they are referring to the documentation of what happened to them, not their immigration status

The label “undocumented” is utterly dishonest. “Undocumented” implies that something has been permitted, but not documented. Like agreeing to let a friend live in your basement apartment without drawing up a lease.

Illegal immigrants aren’t “undocumented.” They are present in America without the consent of the American people, as expressed in immigration law.

The lack of enforcement of the law is also a kind of consent. The notion that a law as written alone represents 'people's consent' is a total non-starter in any kind of realistic system of governance, to build a claim of 'dishonesty' on top of that seems extra silly. You don't like the term, fine, you don't like the term. But let's not pretend that dislike is some kind of inevitable consequence compelled by Pure Logiks or whatever.

I don’t like it because it’s dishonest. The term “undocumented” implies that something has been agreed to or sanctioned, just not written down. But nobody agreed to allow illegal immigrants to come and stay here.

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 phrase "undocumented" is bureaucratic speak for "you can't prove it."

"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.

Does the court say that someone driving without a license is an 'illegal driver'? Nope, they say they are 'operating without a license' or 'driving illegally'. And guess what, that isn't because the courts are being dishonest.

> But nobody agreed to allow illegal immigrants to come and stay here.

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

Plenty of people agreed, especially the many, many businesses that happily employ them. Come back with this "consent of the people" stuff when we have mandatory E-Verify.

Does the law call someone who drives without a license an illegal driver or an unlicensed driver? Someone who practices medicine an illegal doctor or refer to them as unlicensed? Someone operating without a permit is not an illegal worker but an operator without a license.

You could certainly say they were driving, practicing medicine, or operating machinery illegally, or indeed working illegally if they don't provide valid documents.

Did you read my comment? They were driving illegally, not an illegal driver. Practicing medicine illegally, not an illegal doctor. Working illegally, not an illegal worker. See how the language of it works? They are in the US illegally, they are not an illegal person.

I don’t think these tendentious language games are winning as much support for your position as you think. Do you object to calling people felons, instead of saying they are people convicted of a felony? I know the idea is that by not calling someone a felon, you imply that some negative characteristic doesn’t define a person. But it’s been extended from diseases and mental illnesses, where the logic does make some sense, to legal categories, where I don’t think people ever had an issue keeping the two things apart. Also, progressives are hypocrites in that they are more than willing to call people racists instead of saying they’re merely people expressing racist thoughts or engaging in racist behaviors.

> Also, progressives are hypocrites in that they are more than willing to call people racists instead of saying they’re merely people expressing racist thoughts or engaging in racist behaviors.

FWIW that pattern of behavior has little to do with "being a progressive" and instead reflects the cultural norm. I'd even go so far as to posit that "progressives" are more likely to point out that, no, there's really not "a racist" but a person can hold a lot of extremely racist beliefs - the same way btw as there's really not "a progressive" but a person can hold a lot of progressive beliefs. A system can be "racist" in that it can be built on and to uphold racist attitudes or beliefs but a person can't be "racist" because racism isn't an intrinsic and immutable characteristic (neither is "progressive", "Catholic", "criminal" or "Republican", to name a few examples explicitly).

But precisely because you can't actually be "a progressive" but merely hold some progressive beliefs and opinions a lot of "progressives" uphold the same harmfully essentialist views as "non-progressives" who balk at being called out for racist opinions, views or actions by insisting "I'm not racist" regardless of whether the accusation is "you're a racist" or "you said/did something racist".

"Felon" is an obviously silly example as it's just a more specific form of "convict", i.e. someone convicted of a felony crime. It's often used in an essentialist way (but of course selectively so) but the more obvious example would be "criminal" because it is often used in a way that suggests an intrinsic essence of "criminality" even in the absence of sufficient evidence to make a legal case that would result in a conviction - or even the presence of an arguable crime at all. "Criminal" is thus distinct from "convict" in that a conviction is neither necessary nor sufficient for that label to be applied.

I don't give a crap about support of positions. A person can't be 'illegal'. They can be violating the law, but they are not illegal, unless we go back to Japanese internment camp style thinking, where the person themselves is the thing requiring incarceration.

Back when I was a libertarian they were pretty big on this argument, not progressives, as libertarians were the open borders people and progressives were off on some other cause.

The bigger comment is that these people are not documented or undocumented. To be either would require due process where such documents could be produced.

The scenario everyone here is hoping for, that he was absconded in the middle of the night in a red, white, and blue painted Cybertruck by men in suits and sunglasses, is also the least likely to have happened.

Someone else raised a similar point in another thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43524589

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.

In what now seems like test runs, we can look back to the summer of 2020 in the Northwest US where there were armed people in camouflage and armor putting people into unmarked vans and taking them somewhere else for a non-zero amount of time. (not charged with anything nor the masked people's government identities revealed.)

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.

Adding a link for context (too late to edit, was short on time earlier). Government admitted to doing the above and then, after the fact, named the agencies involved in tossing people into unmarked vehicles, taking them to undisclosed location, questioning them and later releasing them without charges or more information.

https://www.npr.org/2020/07/17/892277592/federal-officers-us...

Many cases during the GWOT. People in the wrong place at the wrong time accused of being terrorists, rendered, tortured, held without trial, or tried in secret courts with secret evidence.

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)

With all the speculation, how do we know the US government 'disappeared' him. He's originally from China. How do we know that the Chinese government didn't do this (which is known to happen) and now the FBI is involved to find out what happened?

Why would they tacitly admit to performing warrantless searches?

Did you read the article?

A bureau spokesperson issued a statement: “I can confirm we conducted court-authorized activity at the address in Carmel today.

Sounds like possible espionage. Chinese spies spook easily and flee the country long before the FBI gets its shit together.

Moreso than spying, sounds like a long time US-based researcher suddenly had a reason to commit immediate espionage.

Believe everyone can put together the type of events that cause sudden behavior changes like that. (Hint: money offers or family threats)

It's all the same to me but that's often how it goes. Everyone is a sleeper agent until compelled to act by whatever means. Israelis do the same thing under the sayanim program (appeal to loyalty). Malware agents are staged until called upon using the same strategy.

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.

Here's one possible way it went down: His wife kills him and hides the body. The university then fires him because he doesn't show up and won't respond to any messages. Eventually the university gets suspicious and calls the FBI. The FBI raids the apartment because they think it might be a crime scene. The reason its the FBI and not local cops is because the university mentioned that he was Chinese and working on sensitive research so the feds step in, due to them perceiving some possible espionage angle.

I am not saying that definitely happened, but it's a narrative which more or less fits the facts.

Isn’t it more likely that he was out when they raided his house, heard of the raid (perhaps from the woman on the phone when she emerged from the house on the phone) and fled to avoid arrest?

It sounds like he was “out” for weeks possibly, though? Seems like an overall very strange situation.

> How do we know that the Chinese government didn't do this (which is known to happen)

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.

Yes moving him to a different house would be an incredibly difficult thing for the Chinese govt to do. And of course, this would be something that he couldnt possibly do himself without some sort of secret govt involvement.

I'm sorry, are you arguing that he's in Chinese witness protection inside the US?

Obviously not. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_police_overseas_servic...

You clearly didn't read this Wiki (Wiki is not a source BTW) because it says basically the opposite of what you're implying. Same goes for everyone in this thread talking about Chinese police on foreign soil.

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.

You added the part about exfiltration from the country. It is possible he has been kidnapped by Chinese secret police in the country and remains in the country (at least until they manage to coerce him to return "willingly".) Anyway, nobody said anything about witness protection either, that part was your hallucination too.

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.

The witness protection thing was a joke to make it clear how absurd what you're proposing is. Clearly some people got the joke.

Y'all read "CCP Police stations" and your imaginations started going wild. There is no evidence nor is there even an accusation that these "police" stations are used to kidnap US citizens.

> You added the part about exfiltration

.... bro how are they going to coerce someone to leave the country "willingly" if the FBI is looking for that person? His passport is obviously going to get flagged.

And if your answer is "get him a fake passport" then congratulations, you just described exfiltration.

No I'm arguing that moving him from one house to another is something the Chinese govt could assist with.

So what's the end game? They're being hunted by the FBI I don't think Trading Spaces™ is going to get this guy out of trouble

Exactly...nobody knows what the actual end game is at this point. So all the hyperbolic speculation is ridiculous.

Hold up, let’s not pretend these ideas are all equally feasible.

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*.

Is it really that much more easier?

I've heard of CCP affiliated Chinese nationals who essentially act as CCP police on foreign soil and force nationals to return to China.

> How can you be confident in this? Is it possible that you are saying this because the only cases we know about...

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.

1) The current president has explicitly said that he wants to use violent force to enact his policies.

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.

I agree with everything you said here. Nothing you said disagrees with what I said. There's a fundamental difference from what you are saying, that there is a high risk, there's strong reasons to be concerned, and we need to stay on top of things and what OP said, which is that the government IS disappearing people, and the lack of evidence is actually evidence in favor of this. It's a ludicrous statement that if accepted undermines any attempt to know reality with any level of certainty. It is a fundamentally unhinged way of collecting information about the world.

> This case is notable because no one seems to know where this man has gone

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?

Not necessarily -- if there's evidence of the disappearance being across state borders, FBI might get involved because that's now federal jurisdiction. Similarly, if it's someone of high profile, or involved with a high-profile organization, the local police might also choose to hand that over to the FBI to deal with since they can probably get better access.

In this case, this was a professor working on cryptography 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.

The article claims his status is unknown ("Their resident status (e.g. US citizens or green card holders) is currently unknown."), but I doubt a non-citizen could be "Director of NSF Center for Distributed Confidential Computing".

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

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

(*) Albeit with full legal work authorization.

The main site of the Center for Distributed Confidential Computing[1] is up, and the chart of "principle investigators" still shows XiaoFeng Wang as the center director. But many other links on that site are broken and pages have been cut down, compared to an archive from last month.[2]

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...

If you know anything about that organization, please follow up. Did something happen to the organization? Did they somehow offend the administration?

> Xiaogang (Cliff) Wang is listed as the principal investigator.

No, you are misreading the award abstract. Cliff Wang is the program manager at NSF who is the point of contact for the investigators.

Ah. Wrong box on the form. XiaoFeng Wang is in the Principal Investigator box.

Was NSF funding for the project cancelled?

You're right, I've updated my comment to be less authoritative on the residency status.

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.

Politics is, to a great extent, a consequence of social interactions such as on HN. HN is a community of relatively wealthy, well-educated, and influential people - not often the most influential, but people who are hardly powerless.

> Notably, they haven't been "disappearing" people in the manner that would have to be happening here.

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.

I replied to this argument in response to a sibling. I'll link my reply instead of repeating myself:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43527605

How do you know? Do we have a complete list of the people shipped to Guatemala? Or Gitmo?

The government is blowing off judicial orders. Thats a crime. One you start down that path, you tend to keep going.

> Even the most egregious cases, which are very bad, have left a paper trail for lawyers and journalists to follow

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.

And the cases we don't know about? When the highest powers, and some random empowered billionaires, do what they want to erode, ignore and subvert constitutional, judicial and civil right processes what sane person can say this sort of thing isn't happening?

“Not helping” is the fucking understatement of the year. That it is happening is /THE/ worst thing happening right now.

"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 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..."?

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.

> have left a paper trail for lawyers and journalists to follow

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.

Could this be survivorship bias? Those are the cases we know about, but what are the odds that the cases we've seen just happened to be the only cases happening? Some random student being disappeared from campus hitting the news indicates to me that MANY people are being disappeared. I don't know what the rate of disappeared vs left paper trail is but I can't imagine it's a good yard stick for "close enough to be useful for approximating a count of all of the cases"

> the extrajudicial actions of ICE recently are absolutely not helping people stay calm in the face of something like this

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.

> ICE does not require “judicial action” to remove aliens

…

> 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?

To be clear, immigration “court” decisions aren’t “judicial action” either. Immigration courts are entities within the executive branch, which can’t exercise judicial powers. They’re a procedural device for the executive branch to control how it exercises its discretion. The immigration laws provide very limited judicial review of immigration court decisions—even where someone appeals an immigration court decision to a real court, the government can still deport that person during the legal challenge.

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.

> 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?

What's to stop ICE from declaring anybody they don't like an alien and rendering them to the Salvadoran prison? We already know they're inventing false pretenses to classify people as gang members. There is no functional oversight of what they're doing.

> Even the most egregious cases, which are very bad, have left a paper trail for lawyers and journalists to follow.

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?

I understand why people are tempted, but I worry that jumping to such conclusions is counterproductive. If everyone who gets in trouble with federal law enforcement is considered "disappeared" in the public imagination until they make a public statement about it, we're going to end up with a lot of justified cases bundled in with the unjustified ones. The source article quotes two professors at other schools who rightly note that this story is very abnormal, but nobody in particular seems to be saying that they've lost contact with Mr. Wang. (The neighbors told local news that they rarely saw and never spoke to him in the first place: https://www.heraldtimesonline.com/story/news/local/2025/03/2...)

Is there a site that keeps track of these government abductions? Are you talking about American citizens? Can you name five occurrences within the last 18 months, or whatever you mean by "lately"?

> the government "disappearing" people (which they have objectively been doing lately)

If you know where someone is being held (like Louisiana, for example) they weren't 'disappeared'.

If they were abducted by plainclothes agents and moved across state lines (countermanding a judges lawful order) to a facility where their legal representation has no access they were, without a doubt, disappeared.

Okay, so ignoring a lawful order is unlawful. It's still not 'disappearing' someone if you know where they are. There are also some people you could argue are being disappeared because their whereabouts aren't published. That's assuming media outlets simply just aren't reporting on their whereabouts to then create that narrative. Surely US media has never done that in recent history. It's all case-by-case and it's clear that ICE is probably breaking the law at a large scale. Still:

> 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.

"A representative of the Turkish consulate went to ICE offices in Burlington, Massachusetts, and was informed that Ozturk was not in that office and ICE could not provide further information about her whereabouts"

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.

Those actions are shitty, but irrelevant to the argument. If you know where someone is, then they haven't been disappeared.

except, relevant people didn't know where she was. It took the Turkish consulate getting involved to even make progress on the matter, and the people who took her said they didn't know where she was when asked by a representative of the Turkish consulate. You don't think that's disappearing someone? It doesn't matter that she was later 'found' after media attention got too hot. It is clear as day what was attempted.

Wrong.

> 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?

The government isn’t “disappearing people.” It’s deporting illegal aliens. You don’t need a press release every time you do that.

> It’s deporting illegal aliens.

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...

There was no forced deportation of US citizens or legal residents in that article. Two illegal residents chose to take their citizen children with them when deported.

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

You should probably notify THEM when you revoke their legal residency.

Doesn't the sequence of events read more like the University found something grave enough to put him on leave and contact the FBI, and for both the teacher and school to keep it quiet?

No, not really. That wouldn't explain the gap of weeks.

Yes. If (in this hypothetical) the university found something worth contacting the FBI about before Wang knew he was made, we'd expect to see FBI action first and university action second, even if the university acted immediately after. The FBI would absolutely not allow the university to tip a suspect off weeks in advance of their planned raids.

Wouldn't the FBI need some time to digest the accusations made by the University and then build a case to pursue an investigation? Hearing the University has been captured by a right wing agenda and having an adversarial relationship with its teachers and students, I'm starting to think any conspiracy is plausible at this point.

> the university put him on leave weeks

but then why did his students not know about it?

if normally a professor or similar is put on leave there are procedures about informing students in affected courses, replacement professors being found or courses being cancelled etc.

the fact that this procedures seem to not have been followed is strange and looks like someone wanted this to go over without much attention

that his wife seems to be affected too is even more strange

that no even vague reason is told even now is also supper strange

I mean thing about it especially given how much it has blown up there is no reason for them to not at least give a vague reason, if they don't it's because they can't (e.g. court order) or they have a good reason to not want to (which is strange by itself).

> but then why did his students not know about it?

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 sequence is better explained by the hypothesis that Wang vanished himself

That probably isn't correct given that IU has scrubbed him from their web pages. That alone makes this look like disappearing him and his wife.

The feds unconstitutionally "disappearing" this couple doesn't exactly fit either, but based on the article, that's what fits best.

> That probably isn't correct given that IU has scrubbed him from their web pages. That alone makes this look like disappearing him and his wife.

Why?

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

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

---

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

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.

You're assuming that the hypothetical university personnel responsible for the cleanup of the mess thought the whole thing through clearly and weren't in hardcore firefighting mode and reacting in ways that would seem to make sense at the time but didn't take all the facts into account. I see no reason to assume that level of intentionality.

Do we even know that he's "nowhere to be found"? "Not answering Dan Goodin's requests for quotes", or even "not responding to his grad students" is not the same thing as that.

No, and that's a good call-out.

Your hypothesis definitely doesn't account for the university scrubbing him from their website.

It accounts for it substantially better than the government whisking him away. I laid out the hypothesis in full here:

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

Again, pure speculation, as is everything right now.

That is the way it works, there is no "evidence of being disappeared", as there is no negative probe. This already happened in Argentina in the 70's, there were no record, in many cases until several years after, or never.

This Wang looks suspicious.

If he vanished himself why did the university remove him from the web pages?

Unlike the other recent disappearances and deportations to the concentration camp in El Salvador, this one does say it was with a court order.

Great! Can you provide a link to the court order so we can see?

The article author attempted to get the court order but could not find one. This is common when the order is made as part of an ongoing investigation, or else criminals could just watch for their names in PACER to know when to fire up the shredders.

So how do we know there is a court order?

We don't know 100% for sure, just from their claim. In the other high profile cases recently it was a different agency and they were open that there was no amount of due process.

You seem to be coming from the assumption that checks and balances requires granting random outsiders full transparency into the court docket during the investigation phase. That’s not how it has ever worked, because it would tip off those being investigated.

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.

Okay, so I'm not allowed to see the court order because I'm a random outsider, got it. What about the family of the person? What about their lawyer? Why can't they see the court order, or if they have seen it why can't they say so?

It would be especially detrimental to the pursuit of justice if the friends, family, and lawyers of a suspect could find out whether or not a warrant has been issued for them or their stuff before it is executed.

Our system works on “trust but verify”. If the cops show up with a warrant they claim they is valid, you trust the warrant is valid, let them do the search, and later verify the warrant is real and that it was issued legally. Doing otherwise is a crime (obstruction of justice).

Occam’s Razor suggest he was exfiltrated.

Seems like the most likely explanation to me. If he were arrested for being a spy, presumably the DOJ would want to showcase it.

Think like a Bayesian. How many spies have been caught lately? of them, how many did the DOJ showcase?

Wikipedia has a list of imprisoned spies in the USA. It is pretty sparse, the last spy to be convicted in the USA was in 2016. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_imprisoned_spies

Searching the DOJ homepage with the search term “spy” (to see which they have showcased) gives us 209 results, including a bunch of news around the 2009 conviction. The most resent news I found was from 2022 (https://www.justice.gov/archives/opa/pr/five-individuals-cha...) a very vague news which is actually more about harassing private citizen (presumably piggy-banking out of the anti-asian hate following Covid). The most resent news about actual spying against the US government was from 2020 (https://www.justice.gov/archives/opa/pr/former-cia-officer-a...) Alexander Yuk Ching Ma. He was actually found guilty in may 2024 (so he is missing from that Wikipedia list). The DOJ article about the conviction doesn’t use the word spy, so it is missing from my search, but here it is: https://www.justice.gov/archives/opa/pr/former-cia-officer-s....

Given the above, I think it is safe to bet that if he was arrested for being a spy, the DOJ would indeed want to showecase it. However, spies are very rare, and the likelyhood of OP’s case being a spy is very low. It is much more likely that he disappeared for other reasons.

A guy was arrested for being a PRC spy, stealing sensitive documents from GE Vernona. 2-3 years ago. I remember it because he was using stenography to embed documents in landscape photos sent via email.

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.

how did they catch that?

IIRC, he was sending pictures of the sunset on his jog every day, and the pictures were unusually large.

https://www.theregister.com/AMP/2023/01/04/ge_turbine_china_...

There’s 3 soldiers arrested this year.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3LOP645eW-M

Sounds like entrapment or he was heavily induced (by whatever) into whatever they got him for. Maybe he'll get pardoned like Ulbricht.

I know this is HN and we love these simplistic universal laws here (Hanlon's razor being another beloved law) but Occam’s razor isn’t really applicable here, or at the very least, it isn’t very helpful, and it certainly isn’t conclusive. That he was exfiltrated by the Chinese government also requires the same number of variables as that he was disappeared by the American government. So Occam’s Razor actually suggests nothing here.

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.

> When we have a missing person with several unknown variables, until we see some evidence, any guess is as good as other.

Really? So that he was abducted by aliens is also on the table and has the same probability?

Obviously there can be some prior information that makes „he was exfiltrated by Chinese intelligence services“ more likely than „he was disappeared by US intelligence services“.

I’m not saying there is, but philosophically, you don’t need to know anything more than „A person with relations to china disappeared“ to be able to determine one hypothesis as the most likely one.

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

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

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

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 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.

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.

I feel that the word conspiracy is not helping to bring clarity to the discussion. Covert operations are by definition conspirations but that's not what people generally mean when they use the word conspiracy so let's just avoid using a word that might muddy the discourse unnecessary.

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.

> 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"

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.

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

Just an FYI, you do know that Hanlon's Razor isn't a law, or even a rule of thumb.

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.

haha, I did not know that. The first time I saw it, it was actually used against my point here on HN.

I didn't either at first, I went and looked it up after enough people started using it to nullify/discredit what I had to say in serious conversation.

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.

> 3 other students have been disappeared by the government

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.

There are no published facts aside from this guys missing, so there can be no adequate accounting of the facts.

You've misused Occam's Razor.

Yeah, good example of the maximum entropy principle, [0] in which "the selected distribution is the one that makes the least claim to being informed beyond the stated prior data, that is to say the one that admits the most ignorance beyond the stated prior data", a.k.a. the most entropy. Occam's Razor must still be constrained to known facts, and you cannot construct a "simplest answer" out of data you simply do not have.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principle_of_maximum_entropy

There's plenty of other public information. The FBI was searching his house for undisclosed reasons, so most definitely they have some kind of investigation open on him. And his degrees were issued by universities in Nanjing and Shanghai, China, strongly suggesting he is a Chinese National, perhaps naturalized to the United States.

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.

You have a vivid imagination. The facts do not necessarily support what you claimed.

Occam's razor requires an adequate accounting of the facts, not speculation.

All you have mentioned is speculation, and the facts you have mentioned don't support this narrative, neither when you first mentioned it, nor now.

You misused it, and trying to falsely justify that you didn't is deluding yourself.

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 seeing.

> 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.-...

> Disappearing people is not something the US government is allowed to do

Since when? Been happening for a long time, here is just one recent-ish (2021) report:

> FFI documented 698 enforced disappearances of immigrants in Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) custody between 2017 and 2021

https://www.freedomforimmigrants.org/news/2021/8/30/detained...

Has to be countless more that aren't documented, especially when you take the entire government into account, not just one agency.

lets also not forget how the US has a history especially in the recent ~decade or so to redefine all kind of things as "domestic terrorism" and then use it to remove very fundamental rights from people which at most are activists

These are not people that HN/Academia identifies with and thus they are not considered people with full rights. See how the goals moved from rights for every single person, to rights for documented migrants, to rights for citizens only. We are now moving faster to rights for people similar to you but make no mistake this will end up with rights for no one but the king.

The US has always been very divided on who is considered a US citizen.

Atheists, black people, Hawaiians, Germans, Japanese- all of them have found themselves in court.

> 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...

> This hasn't hit mainstream media yet. It should have by now.

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?

You're asking someone for sources, after accusing someone of espionage with no sources?

Tons of people above are suggesting he was "disappeared" with no sources (and no real cases of this really happening otherwise, recent cases have all had paperwork). Seems fair to ask and suggest a more likely alternative.

How does one provide evidence/sources for a disappearance?

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?

>Disappearing people is not something the US government is allowed to do.

They are allowed to disappear people simply by virtue of the fact that no one is going to stop them

"FBI searches two homes belonging to IU Luddy professor and library analyst" - https://www.idsnews.com/article/2025/03/iu-professor-bloomin...

"FBI, Homeland Security agents search house on Xavier Court in Bloomington" - https://eu.heraldtimesonline.com/story/news/local/2025/03/28...

Sure, they "disappeared" him, then forced the University to take down his profile, email address, and office phone. Having scrubbed him from the faculty listing index, he has effectively been removed from history. He's a ghost. Never mind this Ars Technica article, or all of the other information about him on the web. I mean, I get all my news from university phone directories, how about you?

> Disappearing people is not something the US government is allowed to do.

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.

> Disappearing people is not something the US government is allowed to do.

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.

> 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?

They were not disappeared (the links below say we know where they went), and they were arrested by people who do have legal powers of arrest.

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.

Exactly, I get a little bit uneasy with people throwing around "got disappeared" - it lands as politically charged. What that means to me is something like Khmer Rouge, or Pinochet throwing thousands of people off planes into the ocean (no parachute), tentatively it means gulag, but even with gulag, you're not disappeared, you find out this person is in a gulag somewhere (though is likely to die), having myself read the Gulag Archipeligo.

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.

The US has definitely been involved in disappearing people in other countries - and in providing support to people like Pinochet https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Condor

You guys are taking my previous comment out of context but that's less interesting than the fact that you have a strange definition of "disappeared".

> 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.

What do you mean by “disappearing people?” We had a foreign spy arrested at my kid’s school (she and her husband sold Navy secrets to China). For obvious reasons, arrest warrants don’t need to be made public. Nor is the FBI required to issue a press release when it arrests someone.

It’s not even clear this professor is in government custody. It sounds like he may have gotten wind of the investigation and escaped.

Is there a news article about the spy at your kid’s school?

> It’s not even clear this professor is in government custody. It sounds like he may have gotten wind of the investigation and escaped.

Bingo. Dude vanished well before his Uni was a aware and starting making a stink.

This is why habeas corpus is so important. An attorney goes before the court, and demands the client be produced, and a justification be given for their detention.

It sounds like such a meaningless right. But it creates a clear line between a legitimate detention and disappearance.

New developments:

https://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/bizarre-turn-in-bizarre...

> Disappearing people is not something the US government is allowed to do.

Allowed by whom?

That's always been the problem with the (especially American) idea of a separation of power or checks and balances being sufficient to stop bad actors. The legislative passes laws, the judicative applies those laws, the executive carries them out, okay. But at the end of the day out of those three the executive is the ones with the guns. Combine this with unitary executive theory and now a single person gets to call the shots (literally, if necessary) while the other two branches become legal window dressing.

Under Trump the US has literally deported people and revoked green cards for their alleged affiliations alone - not criminal ones either as that would have had to be decided by a court, instead the pure suspicion is sufficient.

Keep in mind that having processes isn't inherently better. The Soviet Union made sure to use mock trials and coerced confessions because it desparately wanted to maintain an appearance of legitimacy. While in Hitler's Germany or Mussolini's Italy the state might have literally just killed you without a trial, the Soviets went to great lengths to create a paper trail for a legalistic justification before killing you (or sending you to a forced labor camp to die of "natural causes").

Institutions don't protect you. Institutions are just other people. If your system of governance depends on the people at the very top acting in good faith on the powers they are granted, it's really just built on wishful thinking.

The fact pattern doesn't fit well with ICE, because Indiana University cooperated with the investigation (and struck him and his wife from their pages).

The track record of espionage investigations against people of Chinese origin is not great, so it's not a defense of this investigation to say that that the details rhyme with that rather than immigration.

Spies don't get "vanished," at least not historically. They're caught, imprisoned and tried in huge public media-heavy trials. The USSR even did huge public trials for American spies, because there's no incentive to forgo the nationalist boost to public opinion when collaborators would be aware of the disappearance either way.

Media-heavy espionage cases are the exception, not the norm.

"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.

That's generally because those diplomats can't be tried for their activities in the host nation, and also because said diplomats are running spies, not stealing secrets themselves.

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.

Media circus doesn't appear until the trial, which hasn't happened in this matter yet either.

The feds execute warrants every day without making the news.

Being removed from your employer's web pages isn't "being vanished"; we don't even know if Wang is in custody. All I'm saying is, in the fact pattern where this is another unhinged ICE raid, IU doesn't strike a tenured faculty member in an endowed chair position from all their websites. I've got nothing past that.

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.

It's also pretty clear that this isn't matching the pattern of an espionage case, since they gave everyone more than a week of advance notice that something was to happen.

Who knows? The "advanced notice" (I'm assuming here you're referring to IU's decision to place him on leave, remove him from their web pages, and notify his colleagues, more than week before the raid) makes this look less like some extrajudicial ICE-type thing, not more. But nobody knows anything right now! We know he has legal representation, from the story, and competent legal representation is going to tell you to shut the absolute hell up in a situation like this, so there's not much to learn from the fact that Goodin can't raise him for a quote.

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.

Sure, I mean, the FBI's involvement makes it not look like another department's case. I am saying that on top of that, an arrest of any kind would (normally) go differently than whatever happened to this professor. The idea that the FBI would call the employer of a suspected spy, inform them that something was going to happen, that all of his colleagues would be informed, and then after a week they'd search his home, stands out as not a full explanation.

> The idea that the FBI would call the employer of a suspected spy, inform them that something was going to happen, that all of his colleagues would be informed, and then after a week they'd search his home, stands out as not a full explanation.

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.

> It's also pretty clear that this isn't a normal espionage case,

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?

> we don't even know if Wang is in custody

so you're saying he vanished...?

There's an enormous semantic distinction between "Wang vanished" and "Wang was 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.

Maybe the Chinese disapprared him brcause his cover was blown :/ The Chinese are alleged to havr their own secret police in the United States keeping tabs on important citizens..

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.

A lot of "spies" seem to be falling off the window/balcony /stairs lately.

> Spies don't get "vanished," at least not historically. They're caught, imprisoned and tried

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.

They all get “vanished” before the media-heavy trials. You normally find out at the end not when they’ve been arrested.

what if your "employer" vanishes you?

Some spies in the USSR did just get vanished, especially low-level domestic spies. Yeah the American dude running around and being caught for spying would probably get the media circus, but the mid-level manager he gave some cigarettes and money to in exchange for information about the production levels at the factory the manager worked to might instead find himself quietly arrested one evening, tried and sent off to the gulag by the early hours of the morning. You didn't really want or need to make a spectacle of those kinds of spies, since everyone already sort of had an idea of what happened.

Being American right now makes this whole episode feel like a 1950s McCarthyism/Qian Xuesen-type situation.

Maybe another xenophobic red scare-type U.S. gov't overreaction will inadvertently export top talent to China a second time.

This has zero to do with ICE. FBI does counterespionage investigations (among other things,) but doesn’t have anything to do with immigration.

I have a problem with any of this being secret one way or another. If someone is detained the public has a right to know about the case. Otherwise it's all abductions as far as I'm concerned.

We don't even know that he's been detained!

Or who has taken him. We rolled up cells of the Chinese security services who would disappear (or worse) Chinese nationals on foreign soil.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/apr/20/explainer-chin...

This isn’t immigration. He’s a tenured professor and already has permanent residency at the very least. He is most likely a US citizen.

FBI is most likely dealing with an espionage angle. His research field of cryptography and using it to protect genomic data probably has something to do with it.

The US govt track record on stuff like this is quite abysmal with several researchers having their career and livelihood 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

(For what it's worth, at the time I wrote the comment, the rest of the comments on this story were about ICE raids).

Nobody knows anything about this story. He might be in custody, he might be in Indiana, he might be abroad, he might be about to get charged, he might not be, he might keep his positions at IU, he might have lost all his positions at IU.

It's an interesting story worth paying attention to because he's 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.

Does he have a lawyer? It wasn’t clear who retained council, it sounded like it was just a woman living at the Carmel house, which could have been a rental tenant…

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

Uh, yea, this isn't useful. This a top researcher in his field. He isn't shitposting for lulz on discord undercover, lol.

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

The FBI does not deal with immigration action.

Yes it does. It's always had Title 8 authority, and several recent executive orders have directly expressed support for such action.

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...

That's the DHS authorization. It deals with immigration issues as a part of its investigations (for all federal agencies). But immigration action is not its primary role. They won't come looking for you because you broke immigration laws. But they will enforce them if it's found that you broke immigration laws while investigating something unrelated.

Not only is that whole different set of claims from "The FBI does not deal with immigration action," but the new set of claims are also incorrect, which you can see from the links I've already provided.

That's moving the goalposts. You initially stated that they do not deal with immigration action. Now it's that immigration action is not its primary role. Those are mutually exclusive arguments.

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

ICE has and is arresting US Citizens

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

Read the article. It's the FBI in this, not ICE.

FBI is after the fact follow up.

Someone else may be responsible for his disappearance in the first place.

Maybe, maybe not. It does follow a pattern of how FBI handles espionage though. https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/spy/spies/fou....

Fascism tends to pervert every institution it touches. What the FBI was before 2025 is no longer valid.

> 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...

Sure. https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/ottawa/rcmp-chinese-police-st...

Thank you! Reading this, it seems to be unclear/unspecified in the text exactly who or what group was involved in this or whether there was affiliation to the Chinese state. That's the part I'm really interested in though.

It was very clear.

I read through the linked text twice. Where?

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

Here you go, you can pick one of the several hundred articles written about the topic over the past 3-4 years from the world's oldest, more reputable and foremost news gathering/journalism organizations.

https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-e&channel=ent...

One was shut down in Glasgow, Scotland and other UK cities:

https://news.stv.tv/west-central/chinese-secret-police-stati...

https://www.sbs.com.au/news/article/china-allegedly-has-two-...

What's a primary source in this context? The Chinese government?

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...

Very interesting, thank you!

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

Which should make it easier to provide a source. Other comments have already done so, I was able to read up on it.

This is one of those things that's so well known, with plenty of sources, it's kind of odd to have to ask for one. Any search should have been full of these results.

I don't think it is odd and I disagree with you. First, if you find too many search results, that is just as bad as not finding any. Secondly, when it comes to this specific issue, the quality of information can range from unusable to thorough based on what article about it you read. Given that "Secret overseas Chinese police force" is such a good headline, there are many many websites and lower tier news sites publishing about this. There seems to be no one catalyst publication that broke this story first. This makes it hard to establish any objective facts about it (for me). On top of all this, there may also be personal bias involved when reporting about it.

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.

people seem downvote you, but I think this is a good example of how discussions SHOULD work.

> 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/

I didn't downvote the comment, but I would have done so. If we want to talk about how discussions should work then the commenter should have first spent two minutes researching and/or explained why sources like the Associated Press (my first result when copying and pasting the comment in DuckDuckGo) aren't reliable.

"I don't understand" is a good way to foment discussion. "I don't believe you" usually isn't.

I believe the Associated Press is a reliable source, I'm not sure where I stated otherwise...

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).

Yes. I didn't doubt the claim. But I was able to read a lot about the topic and inform myself better by visiting the links in some of the responses.

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.

> B: doubts

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.

You may have read a different comment then. I didn't doubt this claim, I only asked for more information about it. And no, one should never be discouraged from doing so, even if a "basic search" (not exactly well defined either) leads to many results.

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.

Primary sources exist(ed?) on Chinese web, i.e. provincial gov websites advertising these "overseas service centres" used for diaphora services like renew PRC drivers license, which western western MSM regurgitating "Safeguard Defender" propaganda turn into overseas "police stations". Services also entail liasing with PRC law enforcement, i.e. if Chinese tourist gets robbed, they can refer to service centres for guidance, but it's largely PRC public security telling them how to work with local authorities due to language barrier (see drama of Italian police patrolled with Chinese police). These setups exist because PRC tourists/diasphora everywhere now (and thus targetted everywhere), but most places haven't brought up Chinese competency in public services.

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.

This rings true, except for the part where Western media and police are intelligent or competent enough that you should call it, "propaganda".

Its just racism.

A while back there was a bad arrest of an NYPD officer for working at one of these illegal "police stations."

He was either found innocent or the charges were dropped, which is very rare.

> The US govt track record on stuff like this is quite abysmal with several researchers having their career and livelihood destroyed.

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.

>He’s a tenured professor and already has permanent residency at the very least. He is most likely a US citizen.

The current administration have proven they do not care about any of these things. Even natural born citizens are now under threat.

Can you name one?

Trans people

Gay people

Doctors that provide abortions

Doctors that provide gender affirming care

Students protesting against Israel

Just to name a few

Perhaps my question was unclear. I responded to "Even natural born citizens are now under threat." I asked to name one natural born citizen, not categories of people.

Perhaps, given you provided said categories, you'll be able to drill down and name a natural born citizen from them?

Trump himself has said he wants to end birthright citizenship. EVERYONE in the US is at risk. If you think you're safe, you aren't. This is what fascists do.

https://www.npr.org/2025/03/14/nx-s1-5327552/trump-takes-bir...

https://immigrationimpact.com/2025/02/07/breaking-down-trump...

Jus soli[0] and and jus sanguinis[1] are well known legal concepts for citizenship, and jus soli is rare outside of the Americas, it’s not controversial to move to jus sanguinis as the norm, except in the way that it’s a change from the longstanding way of things in the US. To a European, jus soli seems crazy. Almost as crazy as people using caps in their posts.

I do wonder if you, or anyone, could focus on the question I actually asked instead of different ones they wish to answer.

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jus_soli

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jus_sanguinis

I'm sorry that you think your goalposts are the only valid goalposts. I can assure you that the fascists in power don't care about your goalposts. For me the only goalpost that matters is trump trying to remove these protections. If you don't think he'll start removing natural born citizens after asking to do so, then I'm not sure there's anything point continuing this conversation.

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.

I asked a straightforward question, à la the Socratic method, in order to allow the one making the claim to justify their position, à la Russell's Teapot. If you were not willing to answer the question from the beginning then you shouldn't be responding to me and wailing about "moving goalposts". My "goalposts" have been consistent since my first question - answer that question, please.

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.

>The current administration have proven they do not care about any of these things. Even natural born citizens are now under threat.

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.

Using the Socratic method, especially on HN is not “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.

Your question did not "undermine my claims" at all. I never claimed that a natural born citizen had been deported - I only claimed that this administration seeks to remove that barrier, and as we've already seen, they have been extremely authoritarian and don't care much for laws or rules. If you can't see where this is heading, then you're blind with your head in the sand. Your comment is absolutely a "moving goalposts" troll, and I'm not the only one calling you out on that.

You aren't required to keep feeding the trolls.

Argumentum ad populum, especially on contentious political matters, isn't persuasive. Nor on people who seek to avoid answering simple questions - you could've written "I cannot", or "I never claimed that a natural born citizen had been deported - I only claimed that this administration seeks to remove that barrier" and saved yourself the gnashing of teeth and personal insults.

HN needs to add a green ink font.

Maybe you should work on your reading comprehension.

My reading comprehension is enough to see an argument destitute of substance.

For there to be a threat there should be evidence of a threat. Your aspersions, which you are so keen on casting against anyone who doesn't share your views, are not evidence of anything but hyperbole and irrational panic.

If you cannot name a single person who is a natural born citizen that has been deported or has been threatened with deportation - or even anyone in power who has mused for a second upon deporting natural born citizens, via this legal change - then you have nothing.

If someone can show that the legal change you're warning about does not have the consequences you claim, e.g. all of Europe, then you have nothing.

You should get used to answering questions, it'll help you sharpen up your argument, that's why I ask simple questions[1]. Now, *please desist from your blatant and explicit rudeness*.

[1] https://www.britannica.com/topic/Socratic-method

> jus soli is rare outside of the Americas,

legal concepts in other countries have absolutely _nothing_ to do with constitutional rights in the U.S.

Firstly, that isn't true. The US is a common law system, that common law being English common law, and because common law systems still share many features, they can use decisions and case law from other common law jurisdictions in their own decisions.

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

[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jus_soli

> Firstly, that isn't true. The US is a common law system, that common law being English common law, and because common law systems still share many features, they can use decisions and case law from other common law jurisdictions in their own decisions

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.

Bare assertion isn't a strong argument, especially when the constitution has been changed several times to add things that could also be said to have "nothing to with the US constitution of US laws". The president wants to change it, maybe it'll happen. Europeans will shrug, they've got their own immigration woes.

Wong Kim Ark. Granted, that's old. 1898.

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.

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c7vdnlmgyndo

Very interesting[0]. However, he's not under threat;) so I'm still waiting (and will keep waiting, according to the person I originally asked).

I wonder what the strategy is, given that (in my view) it's unlikely the Supreme Court will agree with the Trump admin. Is it performative or will they use it to pressure legislators, and how do they see a route to winning there?

Still, the Wiki does show that it's certainly arguable, so we'll see.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Wong_Kim_Ark

>The track record of espionage investigations against people of Chinese descent

For context:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hsue-Chu_Tsien

We don’t know whether Xiaofeng is a U.S. citizen, a Chinese national, or holds some other status. He’s been in the U.S. for at least 20 years. He hasn’t been arrested, but it’s unclear whether he’s been located or is currently missing.

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.

> The fact pattern doesn't fit well with ICE, because Indiana University cooperated

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...

Green card holders are now subject to arbitrary revocation of that status, lengthy detention and deportation.

His old website: https://web.archive.org/web/20240415075438/https://homes.lud...

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?

App YouTube channel is still up: https://www.youtube.com/@appguardian6684

It sounds like the China initiative is back:

>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."

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

Yes, it’s not surprising, considering the Alien Enemies Act of 1798, which is significantly more severe, is also being revived.

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 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? 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.

What kind of court was Drake tried in?

I have no idea, but nobody is "tried" at FISC. FISC has no jurisdiction over any criminal case and is strictly ex-parte.

Drake who?

Whoever, it wasn’t FISC, because FISC doesn’t have jurisdiction to do any trials.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_A._Drake

So, he wasn't tried at all, he was convicted on a guilty plea, and the case was in the United States District Court for the District of Maryland, not the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (which, as previously stated, doesn't handle criminal cases.)

> In April 2010, Drake was indicted by a Baltimore grand jury on the following charges: Willful Retention of National Defense Information 18 U.S.C. § 793(e) (5 counts) (793(e) is a modification of the Espionage Act of 1917 made under the McCarran Internal Security Act of 1950), Obstructing justice 18 U.S.C. § 1519 (1 count), Making a False Statement 18 U.S.C. § 1001(a) (4 counts)

> Federal Judge Richard D. Bennett was responsible for hearing handling the case, and initially set trial for June 2011

He then plead out

https://sgp.fas.org/news/2010/04/doj041510.html

Federal criminal court in Maryland

It could be that it wasn't an adversarial attack but a discovery, either of a weakness or an intentional flaw. Regardless, the crypto power gradient changes and that is concerning.

What's a FISA court?

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

> 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...

FISA is a special process set up, partly by the Church Committee, in the last 1970s in order to oversee foreign signals intelligence. It's staffed by federal Article III judges, and its purpose is to handle paperwork applications for surveillance of communications pertaining to foreign nationals where any leg occurs on domestic soil.

One of exactly two courts—the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) that handles initial applications for surveillance warrants under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) and the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court of Review (FISCR) which can handles reviews of denials of applications by FISC.

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.

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.

> Their interpretation of the statutes is secret

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.

The person in question is not a cryptographer, but rather works more broadly in computer security. He has not contributed to NIST standards AFAICT

> FBI + Client Attorney present + University's data scrub + nothing on the public docket likely means FISA court

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 )

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.

I run CourtListener.com, which aggregates Pacer data.

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.

OK, here's the first thing popping up in court about this. There's a motion to unseal search warrants filed by a security researcher at Stanford that was just filed:

https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/69834044/in-re-motion-t...

This doesn't mean there are search warrants, necessarily, but this case might be the next place something pops up. If anybody wants to follow the case, you can do so with this link. :

https://www.courtlistener.com/alert/docket/new/?pacer_case_i...

This doesn't have to be geopolitical or cryptography-related. He could have committed some ordinary crime -- say, he had a hobby stealing Legos -- then someone at the university said "Why is this closet in your lab stuffed with hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of Legos?" University isn't the police, so he's not arrested -- he's just put on leave until they figure out WTF is going on with this bizarre situation. Removing contact information might be SOP for any university employee placed on leave for this type of investigation.

(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.)

If it turns out that he was somehow repatriated to his home country under compulsion that would not be terribly surprising. Nor would it be surprising if he was a "spy" or even a double agent. The FBI raiding his home suggests that he was somehow implicated either as a foreign agent or as a compromised intelligence asset, and one side or the other wanted him back.

> Nor would it be surprising if he was a "spy" or even a double agent.

It would be very surprising. How many spies and 'double agents' are there?

> It would be very surprising. How many spies and 'double agents' are there?

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.

Even “friendly” and “allied” nations spy on each other.

That doesn't tell us about the proportion of spies in the population.

I meant to simply imply: “more than one might commonly assume”

Many, many, many.

> Approximately 7% of Chinese people are registered CCP members

so in a rough estimate, if you have 10 chinese coworkers around you, there is over a 50% probability that CCP is watching you

20% of US people are registered Republican members. If you have 10 US coworkers around you, there is over a 90% probability that GOP is watching you.

This is some of the worst use of statistics I have ever seen on this site. Genuinely something the John Birch Society or McCarthy would have said.

Maybe the USA is finally cracking down on China's "thousand talents" program.

https://www.fbi.gov/investigate/counterintelligence/the-chin...

https://www.idsnews.com/article/2025/03/iu-professor-bloomin...

https://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/more-details-on-situati...

https://bsky.app/profile/ncweaver.skerry-tech.com/post/3lljl...

From bsky, he is the Chair of ACM Special Interest Group on Security, Audit and Control (SIGSAC)

https://www.sigsac.org/

People here keep claiming he was disappeared but what evidence is there?

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.

FBI might have their reasons and they are doing their job, so no objections there. But the university data scrab is stupid, you can't undo history.

Universities should stay neutral.

The university scrub precedes the FBI raid by two weeks.

predates known FBI actions

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)

Two weeks isn't much. The government could have been working on this issue and talking to the university for much longer than two weeks.

https://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/more-details-on-situati...

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."

This is good stuff and is probably a better link for the story than Dan Goodin's Ars story, much as I like Dan.

Seems like it'd be difficult or legally troublesome to fire someone (in his role) who has been afk for a couple of weeks.

if you look around, you can find, reconstruct a c.v.

this guy is someone you dont want the badguy to get ahold of.

AI research in an adversarial context is dual purpose tech, and could easily awaken ITAR

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

in a manner of speaking that is a feasible concept [e.g. paperclip]

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

you might try to make a joke

but US courts had done rulings which where basically like that

A popular T-shirt among computer scientists featured the RSA algorithm, along with the label "WARNING: This shirt is classified as a munition and may not be exported from the United States, or shown to a foreign national."

...then there's the tattoos of rsa lines that were non-exportable (ITAR)

His public papers are mostly white hat focused so it would stand to reason that he has lots of black hat research that is not published.

That's not how it works in academic computer security research. If a researcher has good attack papers, there are plenty of top venues that would accept them.

Please don't speculate from a position of ignorance.

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.

So what are you saying exactly?

im saying, that if someone got wind he was about to be kidnapped, or suddenly realized the extent of his expertise, he should be protected, maybe involuntarily, least he be captured an exploited. i dont say that lightly. locking someone away, to secure specialized expertise, is quite dark karma.

Charles Lieber [1] or Houston Chinese Consulate vibes [2].

[1] https://www.justice.gov/archives/opa/pr/harvard-university-p...

[2] https://abc13.com/fire-chinese-consulate-documents-being-bur...

https://www.idsnews.com/article/2025/03/xiaofeng-wang-aaup-i...

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...

Clearly Satoshi was doxxed and is now on the run

Glad to see I wasnt the only one thinking of this angle.

But I still hold its Nick Szabo

Seems like you're getting downvoted but I remember a paper that suspected Satoshi was from Indiana.

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.

His original page on the university's site (since taken down, archive links in a different comment here) also uses the "7" suffix.

Either Xiaofeng Wang is a common Chinese name or there is a lot of well poisoning going on.

The South China Morning Post reports that he was fired by Indiana U after letting them know that he was moving to Singapore in the summer.

https://www.scmp.com/news/china/science/article/3304767/us-c...

So he gets fired, goes away on a vacation or whatever, and the govt starts investigating him of malfeasance?

Picking flowers, making honey

https://www.aspi.org.au/report/picking-flowers-making-honey

Perhaps they left and are already in mainland China ???.

No direct evidence that he was "disappeared" yet, but that won't stop the America haters from spreading their propaganda.

Lots of blanks left in this story.

Hopefully in half a year this crops back up with more available then

And of course hoping everyone is safe and doing legal stuff

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, anything is possible.

> 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

Yes, China operates covert ‘Police Stations’ internationally

> China threatening, blackmailing and disappearing Chinese ethic people (and/or their children)

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

Either espionage for China or he criticized Israel.

This is the plot for ‘Prime Number’ on Apple TV.

Did you mean 'Prime Target'?

https://www.apple.com/au/tv-pr/originals/prime-target/

Sound scary but when looking at the facts, it is probably reasonable.

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.

Know little about this case, but given what happened with China Initiative in Trump I, I’m genuinely surprised there are still Chinese professors not leaving or preparing to leave US.

200+ lost jobs, at least one suicide, if that still not ring alarm for these Chinese-born professionals, their IQ may not match up the tenure I assume.

It's not easy to leave a tenured position you worked half your life to get to I suppose...

From what I understand the PRC tries pretty hard to provide a lot of incentives to academic returnees. I do wonder if they have a tenure match program, where if you have tenure at an American university of a given calibre you are automatically granted tenure at a Chinese university of a similar calibre if you return to China. They probably should.

If that's true, then that seems to be the simplest explanation for what happened here? (Honestly asking.)

It is extremely bad form to leave your students stranded and move to another university with no communication. It also wouldn't warrant FBI action; plenty of people have moved back to their home countries from academic positions in the US.

Oh, no. I'm not talking about alleged espionage, I'm talking about people moving universities. Moving university doesn't mean disappearing off the face of the Earth.

but where to leave to?

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.

> Even for thus which where involved in spying not all of them did so of their free choice.

You are implying some of the China Initiative victims were spies. However, based on this wikipedia page[1], none of them are.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/China_Initiative

>I’m genuinely surprised there are still Chinese professors not leaving or preparing to leave US.

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.

> I’m genuinely surprised there are still Chinese professors not leaving or preparing to leave US

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

- "None of this is in any way normal," Matthew Green, a professor specializing in cryptography at Johns Hopkins University, wrote on Mastodon. He continued: "Has anyone been in contact? I hear he’s been missing for two weeks and his students can’t reach him. How does this not get noticed for two weeks???"

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.

I’m missing the chronology here

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

The woman was at their second home, which I am guessing she was renting as a tenant.

> But HN is an increasingly difficult place to discover such stories, what with the systematic flagging brigades.

What stories are getting flagged?

A lot of stories with a political angle get 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.

I don't think this story is overtly political.

Well, neither do I. My (obviously biased) take is that there seems to be a large contingent of supporters of the Trump administration that feel any discussion of its incompetence is just political bellyaching.

You can see it on this story. It was in the top 3 on HN as of a few minutes ago and now is already down to #20 on the front page. Although this could also be potentially blamed on the flamewar detector, but I'm not sure if the specific cause matters in this instance since the primary complaint is the lack of visibility these stories get.

It also seems like perihelions's comment likely received some flags as it went from being the top comment to being buried down at the bottom near a bunch of fully flagged comments.

> 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.

[flagged]

2 stories about ICE were in the top 5 yesterday and within 60 minutes one of them was at #80, the other I could no longer find.

It might not be a conspiracy but these stories do get removed one way or another.

They get flagged because they have nothing to do with the forum’s subject.

> 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.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Check out https://news.ycombinator.com/active

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

Interesting, I had never seen this view before. All but one of those submissions, however, appear to be off-topic; they are being flagged because they are not pertinent to the forum’s subject.

Problem is, with things as they are now in USA, when you see stuff like this first question is : is this the ongoing, developing oppression, or is there is a real issue here?

While the question is not unreasonable, it is worth remembering that the FBI is not just a criminal investigation department. They also are the nations internal intelligence - I.e. anti foreign intelligence- leads.

> They also are the nations internal intelligence - I.e. anti foreign intelligence- leads.

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...

You aren’t wrong but there is no evidence of that here, at least for now.

Let's wait for further details to emerge before jumping to conclusions.

"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.

Oh yeah, certainly wasn't saying the government was right. I have no idea. But we can take a guess as to what they're raiding him for.

Jumping to conclusions with just a name is crazy. Everyone from Southeast Asia with Chinese-sounding names should really change them asap

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