U.S. Drops Charges That Professor Shared Technology With China

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?

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?

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".

> 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.

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."

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.

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.

We seriously need to put protections in place that force prosecutors to pay for the suffering they cause as a result of their efforts.

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?

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.