from Hacker News

FBI raids home of prominent computer scientist who has gone incommunicado

by JaimeThompson on 3/30/25, 7:50 PM with 467 comments

  • by Animats on 3/30/25, 8:41 PM

    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...

  • by tptacek on 3/30/25, 8:05 PM

    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.

  • by generationP on 3/30/25, 9:33 PM

    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?

  • by Fricken on 3/30/25, 8:48 PM

    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

  • by vessenes on 3/30/25, 8:13 PM

    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.

  • by mlissner on 3/31/25, 3:05 AM

    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.

  • by csense on 3/30/25, 11:11 PM

    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.)

  • by ctrlp on 3/30/25, 10:08 PM

    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.

  • by sitkack on 3/30/25, 8:11 PM

  • by runjake on 3/31/25, 5:27 AM

    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.

  • by nothrowaways on 3/30/25, 8:16 PM

    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.

  • by refulgentis on 3/30/25, 8:15 PM

    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."

  • by rolph on 3/30/25, 8:17 PM

    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

  • by rglover on 3/30/25, 9:05 PM

  • by sitkack on 4/1/25, 1:52 AM

  • by brcmthrowaway on 3/30/25, 11:05 PM

    Clearly Satoshi was doxxed and is now on the run

  • by Lerc on 3/30/25, 10:14 PM

    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?

  • by thewileyone on 4/2/25, 1:22 AM

    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?

  • by lazyeye on 3/30/25, 10:08 PM

  • by tibbydudeza on 3/30/25, 8:23 PM

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

  • by inverted_flag on 3/31/25, 5:12 PM

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

  • by Havoc on 3/31/25, 12:04 AM

    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

  • by RajT88 on 3/30/25, 8:29 PM

    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.

  • by yahoozoo on 4/1/25, 7:43 PM

    Either espionage for China or he criticized Israel.

  • by sagarpatil on 3/31/25, 3:31 AM

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

  • by jillyboel on 3/30/25, 8:57 PM

  • by tomohelix on 3/30/25, 8:08 PM

    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.

  • by jimmydoe on 3/30/25, 8:53 PM

    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.

  • by perihelions on 3/30/25, 8:15 PM

    - "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.

  • by casenmgreen on 3/30/25, 8:13 PM

    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?

  • by mattmaroon on 3/31/25, 1:12 AM

    "No one knows why..." "Xiaofeng Wang"

    I have an idea.