The key point of the article: The government discovered that the head of Temple's physics department had transferred to China schematics for a 'pocket heater', which is used for semiconductor research and for which he had signed some sort of NDA (I don't know with whom). The FBI arrested him, handcuffed him, led him away; and the U.S. attorney charged him. You can imagine the effect on his job, reputation, etc. We pick up the story here:
But months later, long after federal agents had led Dr. Xi away in handcuffs, independent experts discovered something wrong with the evidence at the heart of the Justice Department’s case: The blueprints were not for a pocket heater.
Faced with sworn statements from leading scientists, including an inventor of the pocket heater, the Justice Department on Friday afternoon dropped all charges against Dr. Xi, an American citizen.
My concern is, do heads roll at the FBI and U.S. Attorney's office after a failure like that? Is there accountability?
The key point of the article, to me, is really not in the article at all but in one of the comments.
Tobin Worcester 22 minutes ago
Once again, the government is demonstrating that we
cannot trust it to wisely use the evidence that it is
collecting on us.
It just goes to show how we as private citizens are accountable to our government, but the reverse is never true. Rest assured no heads will roll over this. No lawsuits will be won or even be permitted. No elections will be lost, no careers ruined. The prosecutor's office will continue to run 100% open-loop, as usual.
That's because you'll continue to vote for the same party that's responsible for it. You can blame the government all you want, but almost everybody in America is to blame for either voting for it or not voting for anyone else.
I suspect you've never tried to be involved in politics.
It's actually pretty easy to effect change, especially at a local level, because so few people put in the time to try it; it's a lot easier, I guess, to sit around on the internet posting about "ammo box" recourse.
Try volunteering on a campaign in your home town, you'll be surprised at the people you meet and the outcomes you can play a role in.
I've helped with, and seen others fight for, various local political causes, none of which went the way any of us wanted. You can effect change, but only if the change you want is already going to happen anyway, and your opposition will vandalize your property and slander your name.
The surveillance state machinery has been a long time building, under the aegis of both parties. I think the Republicans push this with more vigor than the Democrats, but Democratic administrations such as the current one keep the machinery running.
This is not a greater debate about the vague idea of a surveillance state, it's about a very concrete case the federal government could either choose to prosecute or choose to drop. The current administration chose to prosecute.
That decision was a decision entirely up to the executive branch, which is entirely up to the electorate. Making (not well supported) assertions about "republican adminstrations pushing a surveillance state" does not change those facts.
So which party or candidate has made dismantling the DoJ their key issue? Because a president really only gets one or two Big Things plausibly accomplished.
The Democrats clearly won't do it, and we can rest assured the Republicans will busy themselves with abortion and warmongering with Iran.
Then vote third party, and when your friends tell you to vote for Hillary! explain to them exactly why you're not doing it: that she will do nothing to tear down the Bush/Obama surveillance state that went after people like Xi and Schwartz, and indeed will probably expand it.
Third parties do change things, even if it's just the major parties co-opting their positions after getting a scare in the election. "Hey, Party X took ten percent of the vote simply by opposing mass surveillance. Maybe we should get some of that action."
It would have likely gone the same way with any other administration.
My CEO doesn't watch what I do on a daily or ever basis. I have my assignments and my evaluation criteria, and that criteria does not change when the CEO changes.
Personnel at the working level don't change much with new administrations, and the personnel rules and evaluation criteria likely don't change at all. Agents have to investigate and arrest, prosecutors have to prosecute and win.
I'm sure the President and AG had no hand in deciding whether to start and continue this investigation.
Both parties are bad on DoJ operations because both parties' insiders and base voters like an abusive DoJ. Vote for Rand Paul or Bernie Sanders in the primary and -- if enough fellow Americans agree -- you could change that. If candidates like that start getting votes, others will follow along on better DoJ operation.
It is entirely the responsibility of intellectuals and opinion leaders -- including ordinary smart people like HN readers -- that Americans haven't been educated to care and vote on the issue. We appear ready to continue voting for it to get worse.
Law enforcement does have politics involved, but individual administrations don't have as much control over it as you describe. The Justice Department's priorities transcend election cycles, because not everybody -- in fact, hardly anybody, all told -- is replaced every term. A person can work their entire career for the Feds; there are multigenerational traditions and political momentums operating there that no President can counteract.
Sure, but the people who work for the US Attorneys, where do they come from? And what is the pool of people from which the president chooses US Attorneys? This is an organizational/cultural thing.
Are you sure it was a partisan comment? Which party was he talking about? Maybe he was talking about the party, the Republican/Democrat establishment? (I don't know, but that's possible)
Those good people who want to change the system in a big way seem to get assassinated or wait until the end of their term to voice the concerns they've had to the public - though couldn't touch the policy for. Alternatively they don't get into power because the for-profit systems can pay much more to lobbies and then the better way people don't have the same marketing power.
>>My concern is, do heads roll at the FBI and U.S. Attorney's office after a failure like that? Is there accountability?
There should be a minimum $500k USD awarded to anyone who's arrested by USgov but then found innocent. Of course the problem this will cause is that if USgov arrests you... they will try their hardest to find any kind of violation on you. And as we know, the law is so complicated that chances are if USgov looks hard enough they can find dirt on anyone. So... as much as I wish they were held accountible, the pain they'd put you through to make sure they're not found in the wrong makes me hesitant to levy anything on them.
I want it to be much easier for them to admit being wrong than going forward with pressing charges.
"Of course the problem this will cause is that if USgov arrests you... they will try their hardest to find any kind of violation on you."
No the problem with that is tax payers are punished for shitty government official decisions. The officers and officials don't have to pay, they have "endless" funds. Individual actors need to be held accountable. The DoJ is now focusing on criminally charging executives at companies, not just the companies themselves, for breaking laws. Government officers and officials should also be held accountable.
Guess who is ultimately responsible for shitty government decisions in a representative democracy... If the people are technically the source of government power, the people as a whole should bear the responsibility of ensuring that good government is elected. Punishing the taxpayers broadly ensures accountability from the top (the people).
> Of course the problem this will cause is that if USgov arrests you... they will try their hardest to find any kind of violation on you.
So require them to pay you for everything they charge you with but don't convict you of. At a minimum it would put a good sized dent in prosecutorial overcharging.
I think this would incentivize people who don't make anywhere close to $500k USD to make themselves appear shady in a gamble to later get off years later with the payout.
A small change I would make would be to allow appellate courts to ban prosecutors and police officers. A ban meaning they can't bring cases before the court or testify. Bans could be temporary or permanent.
> My concern is, do heads roll at the FBI and U.S. Attorney's office after a failure like that? Is there accountability?
Never worked in the FBI, but just based on how rabid the US govt appears to be over prosecuting and winning, threatening people with ruin so that they can get any win ...
No, not a single head will roll. At most, relevant supervisors will console the investigators and prosecutors. "Well, bad break kid, the guy was innocent."
I really don't think it's about enforcing the law, or protecting the public or the Constitution, it's about annual reviews and advancement.
Nothing will roll. In fact, Dr. Xi won't even receive an apology or acknowledgement that something wrong happened here. He probably can and should sue in this case, as they destroyed his reputation over a "mistake". The government either a) brought these charges due to extreme negligence, or b) brought the case in bad faith, knowing that their case was fatally flawed from the beginning and were looking to use the charges to extort Dr. Xi into cooperating against his Chinese counterparts. Either way, the government is liable for the damages its actions caused.
I can understand Temple's decision to put him on leave, but stripping away his chairman title seems like too far. Either Xi resigns or appoint an interim chairman until the end of the trial would be a better option IMO. So far, I haven't seen statement from Temple.
By the way, there is another charge against another Chinese-born U.S. professor (http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3227518/Renowned-U-S...). In this case the "evidences" so far seems very strong against the professor from the public opinion, at least raising suspicious. Of course, his fate remains unknown until the court decides.
I'm guessing that since he was a) Chinese-American and b) working on a high-tech research project involving classified information, the FBI was already suspicious of him and monitored his email and other communications.
What classified information? The article says it was "sensitive" and that he had "signed an agreement promising to keep its design a secret". That sounds like an NDA. How many techies have signed an NDA?
The FBI isn't typically allowed to do that without a warrant, which would require probably cause. They or the NSA could do it anyway, but the evidence would never be let into court.
The most likely answer if they got emails from whoever they were sent or forwarded to.
Chinese spies looking for this information would, presumably, pose as experts or students and get involved in academic discussions at conferences and email chains/listseves.
So hypothetically the FBI could bust a real spy, then see emails from Dr. Xi sending technical information and they suspect the worst.
The FBI could have even infiltrated these groups themselves directly, which doesn't require a warrant or any oversight.
One other way I just thought of is that public school employees, like Temple, don't own their work email. A regular person can use FOIA to get professors emails. I wonder if the FBI is allowed to use FOIA.
> The FBI isn't typically allowed to do that without a warrant, which would require probably cause. They or the NSA could do it anyway, but the evidence would never be let into court.
At least some law enforcement has a track record of acquiring evidence one way and, once they know what the resulting evidence should be, reconstructing it in a court-admissable way.
I agree. My university had a Chinese full professor who was leading a large center with multi-million funding. My roommate was his student. FBI knocked his door because he had talked about something sensitive over the phone. I guess there was nothing serious because nothing happened except that FBI agents gave a talk to all the faculty members about keeping secrets. The professor, after a couple of years, took a job offer from a Chinese university.
This should be an important topic of conversation in technology. Similar to other real threats to U.S. companies and citizens, Chinese espionage is the real deal.
It's unfortunate that Mr Xi was caught in the crossfire. But, it's not like he was held in prison without justice. In this case, the justice system worked itself out, and Xi was shown to be innocent. He was not, as far as I can tell from reading the article, deemed guilty until proven innocent. He was suspected of a crime, the evidence showed that he had not committed a crime, and the charges were dropped.
But, generally, I think the U.S. is much too lax in its patrolling of Chinese espionage. Things have been out of control for many years, at least for the couple decades that I've worked in research and development. Too often, at conferences and trade shows, have I seen the roving groups of Chinese with their video cameras and notebooks, blatantly stealing ideas and IP. Several times, I've witnessed suspicious Chinese citizens coming to work for tech companies, straight from China, being overly interested in details of IP, then mysteriously quitting, without a trace. It's a real problem.
Not really. This wasn't a speeding ticket. Serious money was spent on this investigation and equally serious money was spent by the accused on his defense. The worry is best expressed by the Dr. Xi's lawyer...
"If he was Canadian-American or French-American, or he was from the U.K., would this have ever even got on the government’s radar? I don’t think so,” Mr. Zeidenberg said."
The implication is that investigators are targeting Chinese-americans under the assumption that Chinese-american's are sending information to china and so must be scrutinized. That sort of thinking leads to dark places. Imho money a far greater motivation than family history or racial affiliation. That should be the focus.
What lack? National solidarity is a big thing for Americans. I think they assume everyone is innately loyal to their birth country. This in turn causes them to distrust those many Americans born elsewhere. Ted Cruz (born in canada) was pushed into having the canadian government renounce his potential citizenship, something unheard of in immigration law.
I don't think the Ted Cruz case is that odd. Same thing happened in Canada with the Governor General. She had gotten married and gotten French Citizenship through her husband. She was asked to renounce it and she did.
She was to be the Queen's representative, effectively the head of state. That's a rather special circumstance.
And another point: The entire concept of renouncing citizenship is strange. Citizenship isn't something you own, it's also a duty. Most countries do not allow their citizens to walk away. China and the US famously believe that everyone remains a citizen wherever they go in life. You cannot walk away from US citizenship (the draft, Vietnam etc) anymore than you can decide to move to canada and stop paying US taxes. That made Ted Cruz's request even more odd.
"Persons who wish to renounce U.S. citizenship should be aware of the fact that renunciation of U.S. citizenship may have no effect whatsoever on his or her U.S. tax or military service obligations (contact the Internal Revenue Service or U.S. Selective Service for more information)."
You may give up the right to vote, but you are still subject to taxation rules and/or military service, both of which can change at any time. You sometimes hear of Canadian celebrities in the US (there are lots of them) debating whether or not they should become US citizens: short v long-term tax advantages.
The really outside case is treason charges. A renounced US citizen can still be charged as a traitor for acts committed overseas, whereas a non-citizen would have to commit the acts within the US for treason to be an option.
The fine print is that the IRS and US military are not happy about people renouncing citizenship expressly for the purpose of dodging their current tax bill or avoiding the draft, for obvious reasons.
If neither of those applies to you (that is, there wasn’t a military draft, and you properly paid your taxes including a possibly hefty final “exit tax” bill to expatriate yourself), then after renouncing your citizenship, the IRS or Selective Service isn’t going to hunt you down later.
The people the IRS goes after are rich people who didn’t pay all their past taxes or otherwise failed to comply, and then renounce their citizenship and skip town.
His ethnicity is a red herring. The important point is that he seems to have had a lot of correspondence with other Chinese, in China.
I have worked with many Chinese-Americans. Many of them have no ties to China. Many of them, being 2nd or 3rd generation Americans, don't even know Chinese. I truly doubt that they'd be targets of investigations just because they were ethnic Chinese. On the other hand, if the person was Canadian-American and had significant correspondence with China, they probably could be considered suspicious.
I think you'd agree that the U.S. Justice system is an imprecise system. Some innocent are convicted. And, some guilty go free. It's a delicate balancing act to find the sweet spot in the middle where most criminals are punished and all innocent are untouched. This is an ongoing challenge.
The problem would be if there was a systematic bias in the system that unfairly targeted particular groups of people. Although Mr Xi's case is unfortunate, a sample size of one doesn't prove a systematic bias.
Are any Apple execs under investigation? They certainly have loads of communication in and out of china, own lots of property in china, send money to chinese businesses daily and communicate directly with countless government officials. If suspects are selected based on "significant correspondence with China" then lots of people at big tech companies should be under constant surveillance.
He received large punishments before the case was even tried. He was stripped of his post at the university and lost 3 months of his life due to baseless allegations. (Not to mention court fees, lawyer fees, bail bond fees.)
Merely getting charged with a crime in this country can easily ruin your life. This seems like a much bigger problem than Chinese espionage. Most of our hardware is built in China anyway.
He should have his lawyers paid for and reasonable compensation.
This doesn't mean Chinese espionage is not a problem. Just because your iphone/android is made in China doesn't mean there isn't plenty of sensitive tech mot made in China.
> it's not like he was held in prison without justice
This article must have skipped the part where he was compensated for his time spent in jail, loss of job, loss of professional reputation, money spent to defend himself, and any other damages. Surely if he received justice, then he was made whole after this ordeal.
"Too often, at conferences and trade shows, have I seen the roving groups of Chinese with their video cameras and notebooks, blatantly stealing ideas and IP."
What in the world? What about the non-Chinese people who take notes and videotape at conferences? In what America are sensitive national secrets or company IP put on display at public conferences?
I think most people here are open to rational arguments, but some people try a little bit too hard to conjure the Chinese bogeyman.
I have been to conferences where presenters from large US companies ask the audience to refrain from videotaping/photographing during their presentations. And I agree the premise is silly, you go to a conference because you have something to share.
Consider what it would be like if your house was raided by armed people, and they walked off personal goods with them, combed over your private life, arrested and handcuffed you, told the world you were a criminal, and had you and your family in fear your career was over and you were going to prison.
Whatever the outcome, if I were innocent I don't think I would be sanguine about the functioning of the system of justice.
So many obvious questions are unanswered in the article:
1. What does a pocket heater do in general terms? (Saying that it has something to do with "coating one substance with a very thin film of another" is pretty thin.)
2. Why did they target him, and how did they get his emails?
3. So the blueprints weren't of a pocket heater. Then what were they blueprints of?
The story would be much better if they explained those. If the New York Times doesn't know, they should at least say something like, "We asked the prosecutors, but they refused to tell us".
Yes unanswered, and as you suggest later, even unasked... if even the NYT is this pathetic then that just underscores that journalism is still ripe for disruption.
Also it's bizarre they don't mention the case of Wen-Ho Lee, who earlier became a scapegoat for leaks at US nuclear sites, in part due to shoddy reporting by the NYT itself, which they later unwound in a still misstatement-ridden long article: http://www.nytimes.com/2001/02/04/us/the-making-of-a-suspect...
That's the high quality NYT for you… I hope we see more high quality investigative journalism like this on HN!
/sarc
I think the only good thing about these type of whitewash pieces on HN (of which I don't even bother to click on) are the comments here that do the work of the journalists… but NYT history is pretty suspect when it comes to things surrounding corporate and government reporting so that's not surprising.
I agree with you about the quality of this article, but I find it odd that for many people here and in SV culture, the moment anything in any industry behaves in a way which you don't approve of or don't understand it's immediately "ripe for disruption". Maybe journalism is just genuinely hard and there are plenty of very smart people working hard at NYT but it isn't always perfect, and "disrupting" the industry -- a weasel word which means nothing except "I am a libertarian and I support new things so long as they completely exterminate a non-libertarian established power structure" -- isn't smart, possible, helpful, or in fact any of the three.
> * if even the NYT is this pathetic then that just underscores that journalism is still ripe for disruption.*
As far as I can tell, "disruption" is about doing things faster, punchier, shinier, on tighter margins and with a shorter turn-around time. Do you think that's going to produce better journalism?
There are worse things that the sometimes-slipshod NYT. I'm frightened of what comes next for journalism.
Having had a very up-close view of some stories NYT covered, I'd say they are doing horse-trading with the government in selected cases, where they pull certain punches in exchange for access. This is the kind of thing I would expect from them, but not from a player like firstlook.org / The Intercept, for example. Sure they are a special case because they have some deep pocket backers, but that's at least one example of better.
I don't think this was racism, just fear, ignorance and bureaucracy. We happen to be in a low-grade technology/security conflict with China at the moment, so that's where investigators and prosecutors are going to pick up their annual review points at the moment.
I think the same thing could have happened with a white or Chinese Russian-American professor.
But maybe not with a white or Chinese Canadian-American professor.
And all of the BS from my co workers, classmates, and random people in public places. Oh yes, so much ignorant, racist BS. The odds of racism is much greater now. Because of the racism I have experienced and witnessed, the benefit of the doubt is rarely deserved.
A few random cases including some older guy who spray paints a few building with "no Chinese" and then is charged with a felony and held on $200k bail. Hardly sign of a "racism growing"
Yes, racism is much, much worse in other countries. We are probably the best at handling race issues, but we still have a long ways to go.
What about the Jews? They earn even more therefore anti-semitism must be a myth. Furthermore, a large percent of 1st and 2nd generation Asian Americans benefit from class privilege. Ironically class privilege is the first thing ignorant people turn to when trying to discredit white privilege.
Racism impacts my family, my friends, and me directly. This is not going overboard. This is another case of ignorant people refusing to believe people of color. Business as usual.
"What about the Jews? They earn even more therefore anti-semitism must be a myth."
Why would that be? When did I say there is no racism? Is there anti-semitism in the US? Sure. But little and inconsequential in the everyday lives of Jews.
Asians are the US's so-called "model minority". Whites love to tell blacks and latinos -- "Look at the AZNs! See no racism. Maybe you should beat your children to respect authority like I read tiger moms do!"
Of course, whites legally kill blacks in broad daylight. Race isn't monolithic; oppressions intersect. Oppression isn't going to be applied evenly to minorities. Even whites have their own oppressions; certainly most are wage-slaves. Half suffer from misogyny.
Not particularly. I'm not making a point about Jews or genocide. I'm just saying, you seem to think that if an ethnic groups is relatively affluent, there can't be substantial racist attitudes against them. History suggests that you're mistaken.
I used to work in the same research field as Xi. A very nice guy, did some very excellent work. It's outrageous what's happened to him.
You might be asking, what's the FBI looking at his emails for?
So here's a random fact. Xi was a Professor of Physics and Materials Science and Engineering at the Pennsylvania State University up to 2009. Guess who was a graduate student in the Materials Science and Engineering at the Pennsylvania State University from 2006 to 2008, had Xi on his thesis committee, and attracted a huge amount of attention from the FBI. Yep. Ross Ulrecht. https://etda.libraries.psu.edu/paper/9710/4335 The idiots at the FBI must have been looking for Chinese links to Silk Road! Because isn't that in China?
A lot of damage comes from society's tendency to make the following synonymous: "accused of" = "guilty", "being investigated for" = "guilty", "was arrested" = "guilty", "currently on trial for" = "guilty", and so on. It infuriates me how this is done over and over again with the media's help.
For starters it should NOT be public knowledge that someone has been arrested. Sweep that under the rug, let the trial happen, make it illegal to announce anything but guilty VERDICTS.
Secret trials ensure no protests. The proper solution to this is to not have these misadventures (as unlikely as that solution is). Personal damage notwithstanding, society has an intense interest in following justice from start to finish.
The guy went on to lead China's missile and aerospace program, but it was almost certainly because he had his life destroyed in the US first.
The 50th Secretary of the US navy, Dan Kimball said, "it was the stupidest thing this country ever did. He was no more a Communist than I was, and we forced him to go."
It's obviously political, eh? The US federal government's human resources tracking IT system is thoroughly pwned by a state actor (according to the NYT), under the noses of all the black-budget unregulated and expensive federal police forces.
So those same federal police have to try to show the public they're not completely impotent. Gosh, we might insist on seeing, and even, cutting, those bloated black budgets. To prove themselves they go after expatriate intellectuals from the same state who pwned them.
Blueprints? Really? has anybody seen an actual blueprint machine in the last generation?
> A spokeswoman for Zane D. Memeger, the United States attorney in Philadelphia who brought the charges, did not elaborate on the decision to drop the case.
We seriously need to put protections in place that force prosecutors to pay for the suffering they cause as a result of their efforts.
109 comments
[ 4.6 ms ] story [ 139 ms ] threadBut months later, long after federal agents had led Dr. Xi away in handcuffs, independent experts discovered something wrong with the evidence at the heart of the Justice Department’s case: The blueprints were not for a pocket heater.
Faced with sworn statements from leading scientists, including an inventor of the pocket heater, the Justice Department on Friday afternoon dropped all charges against Dr. Xi, an American citizen.
My concern is, do heads roll at the FBI and U.S. Attorney's office after a failure like that? Is there accountability?
Sorry to be the one to tell you - the only boxen left are the ammo box and the s-box.
It's actually pretty easy to effect change, especially at a local level, because so few people put in the time to try it; it's a lot easier, I guess, to sit around on the internet posting about "ammo box" recourse.
Try volunteering on a campaign in your home town, you'll be surprised at the people you meet and the outcomes you can play a role in.
Something clearly does not scale up.
A major point to the rule of law is to protect assorted minority interests from the majority. The larger the group, the stronger the groupthink.
The Attorney General is nominated by the president. They decide who the federal government prosecutes. It is absolutely political.
That decision was a decision entirely up to the executive branch, which is entirely up to the electorate. Making (not well supported) assertions about "republican adminstrations pushing a surveillance state" does not change those facts.
The Democrats clearly won't do it, and we can rest assured the Republicans will busy themselves with abortion and warmongering with Iran.
Third parties do change things, even if it's just the major parties co-opting their positions after getting a scare in the election. "Hey, Party X took ten percent of the vote simply by opposing mass surveillance. Maybe we should get some of that action."
My CEO doesn't watch what I do on a daily or ever basis. I have my assignments and my evaluation criteria, and that criteria does not change when the CEO changes.
Personnel at the working level don't change much with new administrations, and the personnel rules and evaluation criteria likely don't change at all. Agents have to investigate and arrest, prosecutors have to prosecute and win.
I'm sure the President and AG had no hand in deciding whether to start and continue this investigation.
It is entirely the responsibility of intellectuals and opinion leaders -- including ordinary smart people like HN readers -- that Americans haven't been educated to care and vote on the issue. We appear ready to continue voting for it to get worse.
But if you point that out, you get told to move to Somalia if you don't like it.
There should be a minimum $500k USD awarded to anyone who's arrested by USgov but then found innocent. Of course the problem this will cause is that if USgov arrests you... they will try their hardest to find any kind of violation on you. And as we know, the law is so complicated that chances are if USgov looks hard enough they can find dirt on anyone. So... as much as I wish they were held accountible, the pain they'd put you through to make sure they're not found in the wrong makes me hesitant to levy anything on them.
I want it to be much easier for them to admit being wrong than going forward with pressing charges.
No the problem with that is tax payers are punished for shitty government official decisions. The officers and officials don't have to pay, they have "endless" funds. Individual actors need to be held accountable. The DoJ is now focusing on criminally charging executives at companies, not just the companies themselves, for breaking laws. Government officers and officials should also be held accountable.
Which would hopefully motivate the tax payer to hold their government officials accountable while helping restore those harmed. Hopefully...
> Individual actors need to be held accountable.
Agreed.
So require them to pay you for everything they charge you with but don't convict you of. At a minimum it would put a good sized dent in prosecutorial overcharging.
Who's going to hold them accountable? Those who fund them have no choice in the matter, so it's naive to expect accountability in the first place.
Never worked in the FBI, but just based on how rabid the US govt appears to be over prosecuting and winning, threatening people with ruin so that they can get any win ...
No, not a single head will roll. At most, relevant supervisors will console the investigators and prosecutors. "Well, bad break kid, the guy was innocent."
I really don't think it's about enforcing the law, or protecting the public or the Constitution, it's about annual reviews and advancement.
We are resources for law enforcement.
By the way, there is another charge against another Chinese-born U.S. professor (http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3227518/Renowned-U-S...). In this case the "evidences" so far seems very strong against the professor from the public opinion, at least raising suspicious. Of course, his fate remains unknown until the court decides.
> About a dozen F.B.I. agents, some with guns drawn, stormed Dr. Xi’s home in the Philadelphia suburbs in May, searching his house just after dawn...
How did they see the emails? Was it mass surveillance or did someone complain to the FBI?
Arrests based on the mass surveillance of millions of people is far scarier than arrests based on sincere accusations from concerned citizens.
The most likely answer if they got emails from whoever they were sent or forwarded to.
Chinese spies looking for this information would, presumably, pose as experts or students and get involved in academic discussions at conferences and email chains/listseves.
So hypothetically the FBI could bust a real spy, then see emails from Dr. Xi sending technical information and they suspect the worst.
The FBI could have even infiltrated these groups themselves directly, which doesn't require a warrant or any oversight.
One other way I just thought of is that public school employees, like Temple, don't own their work email. A regular person can use FOIA to get professors emails. I wonder if the FBI is allowed to use FOIA.
At least some law enforcement has a track record of acquiring evidence one way and, once they know what the resulting evidence should be, reconstructing it in a court-admissable way.
It's unfortunate that Mr Xi was caught in the crossfire. But, it's not like he was held in prison without justice. In this case, the justice system worked itself out, and Xi was shown to be innocent. He was not, as far as I can tell from reading the article, deemed guilty until proven innocent. He was suspected of a crime, the evidence showed that he had not committed a crime, and the charges were dropped.
But, generally, I think the U.S. is much too lax in its patrolling of Chinese espionage. Things have been out of control for many years, at least for the couple decades that I've worked in research and development. Too often, at conferences and trade shows, have I seen the roving groups of Chinese with their video cameras and notebooks, blatantly stealing ideas and IP. Several times, I've witnessed suspicious Chinese citizens coming to work for tech companies, straight from China, being overly interested in details of IP, then mysteriously quitting, without a trace. It's a real problem.
"If he was Canadian-American or French-American, or he was from the U.K., would this have ever even got on the government’s radar? I don’t think so,” Mr. Zeidenberg said."
The implication is that investigators are targeting Chinese-americans under the assumption that Chinese-american's are sending information to china and so must be scrutinized. That sort of thinking leads to dark places. Imho money a far greater motivation than family history or racial affiliation. That should be the focus.
And another point: The entire concept of renouncing citizenship is strange. Citizenship isn't something you own, it's also a duty. Most countries do not allow their citizens to walk away. China and the US famously believe that everyone remains a citizen wherever they go in life. You cannot walk away from US citizenship (the draft, Vietnam etc) anymore than you can decide to move to canada and stop paying US taxes. That made Ted Cruz's request even more odd.
Sure you can:
http://travel.state.gov/content/travel/english/legal-conside...
"Persons who wish to renounce U.S. citizenship should be aware of the fact that renunciation of U.S. citizenship may have no effect whatsoever on his or her U.S. tax or military service obligations (contact the Internal Revenue Service or U.S. Selective Service for more information)."
You may give up the right to vote, but you are still subject to taxation rules and/or military service, both of which can change at any time. You sometimes hear of Canadian celebrities in the US (there are lots of them) debating whether or not they should become US citizens: short v long-term tax advantages.
The really outside case is treason charges. A renounced US citizen can still be charged as a traitor for acts committed overseas, whereas a non-citizen would have to commit the acts within the US for treason to be an option.
If neither of those applies to you (that is, there wasn’t a military draft, and you properly paid your taxes including a possibly hefty final “exit tax” bill to expatriate yourself), then after renouncing your citizenship, the IRS or Selective Service isn’t going to hunt you down later.
The people the IRS goes after are rich people who didn’t pay all their past taxes or otherwise failed to comply, and then renounce their citizenship and skip town.
I have worked with many Chinese-Americans. Many of them have no ties to China. Many of them, being 2nd or 3rd generation Americans, don't even know Chinese. I truly doubt that they'd be targets of investigations just because they were ethnic Chinese. On the other hand, if the person was Canadian-American and had significant correspondence with China, they probably could be considered suspicious.
I think you'd agree that the U.S. Justice system is an imprecise system. Some innocent are convicted. And, some guilty go free. It's a delicate balancing act to find the sweet spot in the middle where most criminals are punished and all innocent are untouched. This is an ongoing challenge.
The problem would be if there was a systematic bias in the system that unfairly targeted particular groups of people. Although Mr Xi's case is unfortunate, a sample size of one doesn't prove a systematic bias.
"Just" jail until he posted a $100K bond. If you have any evidence the other injustices against Mr Xi were righted, I could use the pick-me-up.
Merely getting charged with a crime in this country can easily ruin your life. This seems like a much bigger problem than Chinese espionage. Most of our hardware is built in China anyway.
This doesn't mean Chinese espionage is not a problem. Just because your iphone/android is made in China doesn't mean there isn't plenty of sensitive tech mot made in China.
This article must have skipped the part where he was compensated for his time spent in jail, loss of job, loss of professional reputation, money spent to defend himself, and any other damages. Surely if he received justice, then he was made whole after this ordeal.
What in the world? What about the non-Chinese people who take notes and videotape at conferences? In what America are sensitive national secrets or company IP put on display at public conferences?
I think most people here are open to rational arguments, but some people try a little bit too hard to conjure the Chinese bogeyman.
Whatever the outcome, if I were innocent I don't think I would be sanguine about the functioning of the system of justice.
1. What does a pocket heater do in general terms? (Saying that it has something to do with "coating one substance with a very thin film of another" is pretty thin.)
2. Why did they target him, and how did they get his emails?
3. So the blueprints weren't of a pocket heater. Then what were they blueprints of?
The story would be much better if they explained those. If the New York Times doesn't know, they should at least say something like, "We asked the prosecutors, but they refused to tell us".
Also it's bizarre they don't mention the case of Wen-Ho Lee, who earlier became a scapegoat for leaks at US nuclear sites, in part due to shoddy reporting by the NYT itself, which they later unwound in a still misstatement-ridden long article: http://www.nytimes.com/2001/02/04/us/the-making-of-a-suspect...
/vent
/sarc
I think the only good thing about these type of whitewash pieces on HN (of which I don't even bother to click on) are the comments here that do the work of the journalists… but NYT history is pretty suspect when it comes to things surrounding corporate and government reporting so that's not surprising.
As far as I can tell, "disruption" is about doing things faster, punchier, shinier, on tighter margins and with a shorter turn-around time. Do you think that's going to produce better journalism?
There are worse things that the sometimes-slipshod NYT. I'm frightened of what comes next for journalism.
I don't think this was racism, just fear, ignorance and bureaucracy. We happen to be in a low-grade technology/security conflict with China at the moment, so that's where investigators and prosecutors are going to pick up their annual review points at the moment.
I think the same thing could have happened with a white or Chinese Russian-American professor.
But maybe not with a white or Chinese Canadian-American professor.
Yes, there is a logical explanation. Maybe this single incident is just bad luck. No racism.
I would say the odds are 99% bad luck and 1% racism.
But it isn't the first time a Chinese scientist ran into bad luck. Do you remember this high profile case?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wen_Ho_Lee#Indictment.2C_impri...
Now it's more like 89% bad luck and 11% racism.
There is also strong anti-Asian sentiment in general.
http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB113236377590902105
http://www.sfgate.com/crime/article/Vandalism-hate-crime-cha...
http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2015/09/10...
59% bad luck vs 41% racism.
Not to mention the countless stereotypes.
http://www.bustle.com/articles/106467-jeb-bush-donald-trumps...
49% vs 51%.
And all of the BS from my co workers, classmates, and random people in public places. Oh yes, so much ignorant, racist BS. The odds of racism is much greater now. Because of the racism I have experienced and witnessed, the benefit of the doubt is rarely deserved.
And please do not discredit the experience my family, my friends, and I have been through.
Is 5% of China or Japan of European or African decent? No.
This is not to say there is no racism but lets not go overboard.
Saying what you posted doesn't make your case isn't discrediting whatever you or your family has been through.
What about the Jews? They earn even more therefore anti-semitism must be a myth. Furthermore, a large percent of 1st and 2nd generation Asian Americans benefit from class privilege. Ironically class privilege is the first thing ignorant people turn to when trying to discredit white privilege.
Racism impacts my family, my friends, and me directly. This is not going overboard. This is another case of ignorant people refusing to believe people of color. Business as usual.
Why would that be? When did I say there is no racism? Is there anti-semitism in the US? Sure. But little and inconsequential in the everyday lives of Jews.
Of course, whites legally kill blacks in broad daylight. Race isn't monolithic; oppressions intersect. Oppression isn't going to be applied evenly to minorities. Even whites have their own oppressions; certainly most are wage-slaves. Half suffer from misogyny.
A lot of Jews made pretty good money in Germany in 1930. Too much money, some people felt.
You might be asking, what's the FBI looking at his emails for?
So here's a random fact. Xi was a Professor of Physics and Materials Science and Engineering at the Pennsylvania State University up to 2009. Guess who was a graduate student in the Materials Science and Engineering at the Pennsylvania State University from 2006 to 2008, had Xi on his thesis committee, and attracted a huge amount of attention from the FBI. Yep. Ross Ulrecht. https://etda.libraries.psu.edu/paper/9710/4335 The idiots at the FBI must have been looking for Chinese links to Silk Road! Because isn't that in China?
For starters it should NOT be public knowledge that someone has been arrested. Sweep that under the rug, let the trial happen, make it illegal to announce anything but guilty VERDICTS.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qian_Xuesen
The guy went on to lead China's missile and aerospace program, but it was almost certainly because he had his life destroyed in the US first.
The 50th Secretary of the US navy, Dan Kimball said, "it was the stupidest thing this country ever did. He was no more a Communist than I was, and we forced him to go."
So those same federal police have to try to show the public they're not completely impotent. Gosh, we might insist on seeing, and even, cutting, those bloated black budgets. To prove themselves they go after expatriate intellectuals from the same state who pwned them.
Blueprints? Really? has anybody seen an actual blueprint machine in the last generation?
We seriously need to put protections in place that force prosecutors to pay for the suffering they cause as a result of their efforts.