Here's Xiaofeng Wang's bio on the Indiana University site.[1]
Google Scholar.[2]
Archived version of home page at Indiana University.[3]
If anybody has a PACER account, please check there.
[1] https://alliance.iu.edu/members/member/8580.html
[2] https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=pONu-5EAAAAJ&hl=en
[3] https://web.archive.org/web/20240930195057/https://homes.lud...
That sequence is better explained by the hypothesis that Wang vanished himself suddenly and the university called in the FBI to investigate things that they found in the aftermath. (Note that that's still pure speculation, but it's speculation that better accounts for all known facts.)
[0] https://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/more-details-on-situati...
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).
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.
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.
If a government was disappearing people they would not do it with police raids. The last thing they would want is to take responsibility for it.
I have lived in a country where journalists and others were being disappeared, and it was done by unidentifiable people in unmarked vans.
This literally happened 4 days ago to Rümeysa Öztürk
Or the "cops" who refuesed to identify themselves to Mahmood Khalil's wife?
They are allowed to disappear people simply by virtue of the fact that no one is going to stop them
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?
https://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/bizarre-turn-in-bizarre...
It’s not even clear this professor is in government custody. It sounds like he may have gotten wind of the investigation and escaped.
It sounds like such a meaningless right. But it creates a clear line between a legitimate detention and disappearance.
Bingo. Dude vanished well before his Uni was a aware and starting making a stink.
"FBI, Homeland Security agents search house on Xavier Court in Bloomington" - https://eu.heraldtimesonline.com/story/news/local/2025/03/28...
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.
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.
You've misused Occam's Razor.
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 track record of espionage investigations against people of Chinese origin is not great, so it's not a defense of this investigation to say that that the details rhyme with that rather than immigration.
FBI is most likely dealing with an espionage angle. His research field of cryptography and using it to protect genomic data probably has something to do with it.
The US govt track record on stuff like this is quite abysmal with several researchers having their career and livelihood destroyed.
What he did was public domain, unless he consulted for alphabet agencies. The Chinese govt also has a pretty nasty track record of pressuring erstwhile Chinese citizens to engage in espionage by making life hard for family back in china
Nobody knows anything about this story. He might be in custody, he might be in Indiana, he might be abroad, he might be about to get charged, he might not be, he might keep his positions at IU, he might have lost all his positions at IU.
It's an interesting story worth paying attention to because he's a prominent figure in an area of research we all pay attention to. But given some kind of criminal investigation is in process, and that he has a lawyer, there's no signal to derive from the fact that we can't get quotes from him in the media; that could just be him being smart.
China also has a history of establishing "police" stations in foreign countries with the mandate to harass and control expats. They did this in Canada at least, surely they did in the US too.
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.
The current administration have proven they do not care about any of these things. Even natural born citizens are now under threat.
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
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.
"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.
Or they vanish themselves before they're caught and are never heard from again because they got away.
We don't know that anyone has Wang in custody. He was scrubbed from the University computer systems weeks before the FBI raided his house, which suggests that whatever happened started then and built up to this recent raid which finally drew media attention.
An expert in cryptography seems like someone theyd be keeping tabs on if they really do this.
Just spit balling here and dont mean to accuse the guy of anything.
Maybe another xenophobic red scare-type U.S. gov't overreaction will inadvertently export top talent to China a second time.
Let’s not spread misinformation. This could turn out to be a simple criminal case. He might even be a victim. Or it could be something bigger—maybe a spy case, or even something on the scale of Watergate. At this point, no one really knows.
For context:
Disagree: There are reasons to think the Indiana University leadership would willingly assist with something dodgy from right-wing politicians.
There was already a big controversy against the IU leadership enabling political censorship last year, which lead to an overwhelming no-confidence vote from faculty and students.
https://www.insidehighered.com/news/quick-takes/2024/04/17/i...
https://www.idsnews.com/article/2024/04/behind-the-vote-facu...
An app he wrote: https://web.archive.org/web/20240304061200/https://sit.luddy... or https://web.archive.org/web/20240727022112/https://homes.lud...
A news (probably PR) article about it: https://web.archive.org/web/20220622001223/https://www.compu...
None of these sites is available any more. This looks suspicious, even given the regular bit rot of American college servers. The app is supposedly downloadable at https://apkcombo.com/app-guardian/edu.iub.seclab.appguardian... . Anyone around with a disassembler and too much time?
>Two bills introduced by the Republican Party that passed the House of Representatives on September 11, 2024, have been described as reviving the China Initiative. The bills are part of "China Week", a House Republican-led effort to advance China-related legislation
>The China Initiative was a program by the United States Department of Justice to prosecute potential Chinese spies in American research and industry, in order to combat economic espionage. Launched in November 2018, the program targeted hundreds of prominent Chinese-American academics and scientists, of which an estimated 250 lost their jobs. Many more had their careers negatively impacted and the prosecutions also contributed to at least one suicide.
>According to a Bloomberg News analysis of the 50 indictments displayed on the China Initiative webpage, the program had not "been very successful at catching spies." Most of the cases listed by December 17, 2021, involved individual profiteering or career advancement by the accused, rather than state-directed spying. Despite this, many of these indictments portray the alleged crimes as for the benefit of China. Seton Hall University law professor Margaret Lewis described this as "a conflation of individual motives with a country’s policy goals" that has led to the criminalization of "China-ness."
The real thing to say here is that we will probably never know what's alleged, much less what's happened.
Interesting would be if he were a skilled enough cryptographic theorist to have gotten a backdoor into a NIST approved algorithm; new ideas in this field are almost always appreciated.
No, it doesn't. Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court proceedings are only warrant applications for surveillance that cannot be used on criminal trials; targets wouldn't be informed of or represented in proceedings.
Espionage or terrorism charges are handled by normal US District Courts, on the public docket (though certain documents and proceedings within those—or any other—cases dealing with classified evidence are handled under special procedures to preserve the secrecy of the evidence )
> to oversee requests for surveillance warrants against foreign spies inside the United States by federal law enforcement and intelligence agencies.
Secret courts that some say are unconstitutional[0].
[0]: https://www.aclu.org/documents/why-fisa-amendments-act-uncon...
These two courts are not “reserved for espionage and terrorism”, they are dedicated to assuring that limitations on impact on US persons of surveillance justified on foreign intelligence grounds are observed. They handle only warrant applications for foreign intelligence surveillance that has some US nexus, not charges/allegations of any kind, and no one targeted or impacted by such a warrant would ever get notice that proceedings were occurring, much less be represented, in these courts.
So far nothing there, but I created an alert for his name, and I’ll post here and to Dan Goodin (the author of the article) if anything pops up.
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...
(Note, I have absolutely zero reason to believe this man is stealing Legos. This is just a hypothetical example of a slightly bizarre but not entirely implausible crime that has nothing to do with politics, geopolitics or computer science.)
Of course in this situation, being placed on leave by the university has thoroughly tipped him off that the cat is out of the bag, and it's only a matter of time until he's arrested. So he skips town before the police get involved.
Why's the FBI involved?
- (1) Maybe it's a FBI relevant matter (e.g. there's a whole Lego theft ring)
- (2) If he told his family where he went, the court system could force them to reveal that information to the police, under threat of jail time. It'd be safer for his family if he didn't tell them where he's going or why. So he ends up as a missing person, which triggers FBI involvement.
- (3) Maybe the FBI is just as confused as we are. They get involved it's thinking it might be national security related because of the international intrigue or cryptography research angles. They don't know it's merely an "ordinary" crime (or at least they didn't when they decided to get involved -- maybe they've investigated enough to figure it out by now.)
https://www.fbi.gov/investigate/counterintelligence/the-chin...
It would be very surprising. How many spies and 'double agents' are there?
so in a rough estimate, if you have 10 chinese coworkers around you, there is over a 50% probability that CCP is watching you
Talk to anyone who deals in sensitive matters and attends conferences and they will tell you the number of people trying to pry information is overwhelming.
So the answer to your question is lots. A tremendous number of people, especially in academia, feed information to foreign governments. Not only is it not rare, but it's obnoxiously common for those who have to deal with it.
In the absence of evidence and since the FBI is handling it, and with the secrecy, it seems more likely espionage-related.
Xaiofeng could had fled to China for all we know. It’s certainly important to question our government though.
Universities should stay neutral.
does not necessary predate FBI involvement,
a university "silently" scrubbing someone is most times due to there being something which could cause heavy reputational damage to tangentially related to that person (or secret orders/pressure from courts or other agencies)
for example someone gets caught doing something bad by the university but not yet outright criminal, the university puts the on leave and investigates further maybe informs police or FBI too, which then start investigation but not yet without any public actions. The person knows when put on leave that they likely will find more things and disappears themself (issue with that story is the woman at on of the houses and her being let go by the FBI and coming back with a lawyer and her being not identified as his wife, which just doesn't fit in at all)
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 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
if you also look at this persons past research, and tenure, you will see this is not speculation, nor is it nonsense.
but US courts had done rulings which where basically like that
[1] https://www.justice.gov/archives/opa/pr/harvard-university-p...
[2] https://abc13.com/fire-chinese-consulate-documents-being-bur...
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...
But I still hold its Nick Szabo
https://github.com/wangxiaofeng7/wangxiaofeng7.github.io
Someone making a homepage in the last few days, but to what purpose?
Dr. XiaoFeng Wang is the Associate Dean for Research and a James H. Rudy Professor of Luddy School of Informatics, Computing and Engineering, Indiana University at Bloomington and an ACM, IEEE and AAAS Fellow. At IU, he is also a Co-Director of Center for Security and Privacy in Informatics, Computing and Engineering, and was the Director of the Master of Science in Secure Computing (MSSC) program.
But maybe I'm reading too much into it.
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?
Hopefully in half a year this crops back up with more available then
And of course hoping everyone is safe and doing legal stuff
I've known ex-govvie infosec folks who get calls periodically from their contacts in government about Chinese state-sponsored spies embedded in big tech companies. It's a thing.
If this was just another "let's screw over an immigrant for saying something we didn't like", we'd have some clue as to the professor's politics. But of course, anything is possible.
so is China threatening, blackmailing and disappearing Chinese ethic people (and/or their children) even if the people in question have US citizenship and/or have not grown up in China at all
like we can't really say much about this case without additional information
that's true, so be careful, the child of your chinese coworker is likely kidnapped by CCP so that the chinese coworker has no other choice but to work for the CCP
Both the university, the court, and the lawyer seem to not raising any fuss yet, signaling that whatever this is, it likely all legal and severe enough to warrant absolute silence.
The employer was likely contacted far in advance for detail not available to the public, and very likely they complied and realized there are serious issues that can tarnish the university's reputation, so they erased his name from their payroll. This indicated court order and sufficient evidences for multiple parties to be concerned.
So... best guess? National security matter. Like it or not, espionage is a thing and under this administration, all foreigner, naturalized or not, are under extra scrutiny. And the US is not above applying stereotypes.
200+ lost jobs, at least one suicide, if that still not ring alarm for these Chinese-born professionals, their IQ may not match up the tenure I assume.
Many of them are basically refuges which did use their nogen to be able to escape the Chinese regime and find a home without technically being refuges at any point.
Some grew up in the US.
Many have family and children in the US, thus which very well might be US citizens.
For many they do not have a place to go, the US is their only home.
Even for thus which where involved in spying not all of them did so of their free choice. It's not a secret that China secret police is present in most countries with larger China ethnicity including the US and there had been more then one or two cases of them threatening and blackmailing ethnic Chinese people (including such with full US citizenship). Including e.g. kidnapping their children.
You are implying some of the China Initiative victims were spies. However, based on this wikipedia page[1], none of them are.
You hit the nail on the head. they clearly knew they shouldn't stay, but chose to remain here — most likely because they were on a secret mission
I'm genuinely surprised by the level of American delusion about what happening in the others parts of the world.
In China, their risks are much higher. Outside of the China, they would face a several times drop in their standard of living, which isn't worth tiny risk of something bad happened because of China Initiative. Especially in the case when this "something bad" most probably would be them losing their job and deported, something that your solution suggesting them to start from.
Prof. Green also posted about the vanishing of Prof. Wang here on HN the other day,
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43518196
(That's where I first heard of it). But HN is an increasingly difficult place to discover such stories, what with the systematic flagging brigades.
What stories are getting flagged?
I also don’t want the site to become all politics, but it feels weird to me that stories like this with overt overlap with tech and SV still often get flagged.
It also seems like perihelions's comment likely received some flags as it went from being the top comment to being buried down at the bottom near a bunch of fully flagged comments.
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
And they are still bound by whatever who is in charge of the FBI wants. Always remember how the FBI was used in the Nixon era to target Black people and hippies [1].
[1] https://www.vera.org/reimagining-prison-webumentary/the-past...
I have an idea.
