Statement by Professor Xi on the Dismissal of the Federal Indictment | Hacker News Reader

Statement by Professor Xi on the Dismissal of the Federal Indictment

xiaoxingxi.org

112 pointsgluejar69 comments

It's still not entirely clear to me why or how Xi was being investigated in the first place. There was a mention in an earlier post on HN that he had some incidental contact with Ross Ulbricht of Silk Road.

However, the indictment gives a couple hints on this topic. There are multiple mentions of FISA and CIPA, US laws dealing with national security and spying. Perhaps the US was spying on the people Xi was communicating with?

You can read the indictment here: https://cryptome.org/2015/09/xiaoxing-xi-files.pdf

All of this seems like overkill for what was supposedly a violation of an NDA.

You do wonder if there is some internal university politics going on as well certainly being forced out of his job instead of being put on paid leave smells bad

If you read his statement, you will see that he thanks the university for standing behind him and treating him as "innocent until and unless proven guilty", as they should. I think you're barking up the wrong tree with this theory.

"taking away his title as "chairman of the physics department" doesn't strike me as fair.

And he's obviously he playing nice with his employer - to try and stave off any retaliation.

You do know the famous quote "University politics are vicious precisely because the stakes are so small."

Taking away his title is far removed from firing him and washing their hands of him, as was implied. Based on what he wrote it's fair to assume that he's been talking with the university during the process, the talks have been productive and positive, and it's possible he will be reinstated.

We won't know for sure until he publishes "his side" as he put it, so it's all conjecture at this stage, including on my part.

It seems to me that "chairman of the physics department" is a real job with real work and you want someone there who is able to do it. Do you think he was able to do that job properly with this hanging over his head? If not, he should have moved on.

But it should not happen when your on administrative leave.

Can you imagine a physics department where the chair is on administrative leave?

Easily, with an interim acting chair. Upheaval under all contingencies is minimized with this solution.

Yes why is it any different to any other job - the deputy does the job,

Can you imagine a physics class taught by a grad student?

Half the job of the chair is to manage the human side of the department's priorities, including resolving disputes between faculty. You need moral authority, which a grad doesn't have.

The scale is about the same, and as someone else mentioned near here, the deputy chair would take over.

Compared to the university going through the hoops to fire a tenured professor, it's reasonably fair. A lot of physics departments do work with outside companies and the government as well; a chair arrested for espionage isn't conducive to those sorts of relationships. I'm surprised that the university was willing to refrain from throwing him under the bus, all things considered.

No one liked being the chairman of the math department when I was studying there. It's a bureaucratic job that gets in the way of what professors usually want to do: research. It's a big, important job, and you want someone doing it who isn't dealing with the fed :)

Exactly. In every science department I have been in, being chair is not seen as a privilege, but as a burden. Attitudes mostly range from "hell no, I'll quit if you try to make me chair" to "okay, I'll do it, but only if you can't find anyone else, and for a single 3-year term, and you better not ask me again for the next 12 years".

In my current department, we were lucky to have someone who liked doing it, so they were given the job repeatedly. When they went on leave and it was time to find a replacement, we had to beg someone to step up to the job.

Faculty who want to be chair eventually shift to administration. The remaining faculty want to do research and/or teach, not be chair.

I believe this at least partially driven by internal politics. Dr. Xi was very, very unpopular. The reaction to his indictment on the Temple University subreddit was very indicative of this.

https://www.reddit.com/r/Temple/comments/36w3df/cst_dean_mik...

The comments on that reddit link are so vicious.

Yet also so vague. That was a weird thread.

This entire affair seems to be an exercise in telling half the story and seeing how different people react. We're never told what set the Feds on Xi's trail in the first place, and that might be important.

There is only one reddit user in that thread that said his students hate him. I hope you have other sources that shows he is "very very unpopular".

Before we make allegations about someone personally, I think we should have better evidence than a Reddit thread.

I imagine after the OPM hack the government started looking at lot more closely at communications between Chinese citizens and China, just like they did with the muslims after 9/11. Why would they do that when the attack was likely to have happened remotely anyway and would have nothing to do with Chinese residents? Who knows. Maybe just because "they can", once they have such powers.

> All of this seems like overkill

Did they really burst into his home, armed -- arms drawn? -- and handcuff him in front of his children? Was that necessary?

I don't know enough about the case to speak to the charges themselves -- and I'm confident that, regardless of Xi's individual circumstances, there is plenty of espionage going on [1] -- but I have to wonder at yet another incident that appears to insist upon storm trooper tactics -- followed I presume by a publicity motivated perp walk.

[1] And why don't we pursue further all the production agreements where the Chinese use their economic leverage (politically prescribed and enabled cheaper production costs) to coerce domestic production as a condition of participation in their domestic sector and trade, whereupon they examine and copy the relevant technology, including supposedly restricted high technology components, wholesale.

Who's knocking on the door of e.g. the CEO of Hughes?

Who's publicly displaying those who've grossly mismanaged compromised high value information systems?

Each case like this just further disillusions me with respect to what increasingly appears to be primarily the Federal government's ongoing dog and pony show of law enforcement.

Back to the SWAT teams and perp walks. I no longer see quiet competence on display. Rather, more and more political grandstanding.

Armed raids help destabilize families, do profound psychological damage including PTSD, cause property damage, can render your home uninhabitable, lead to evictions, and consume resources that could otherwise be spent defending yourself, all before you ever see a judge. Bonus points for being able to directly punish the children and loved ones of the person you don't like, in some cases burning them with stun grenades, breaking limbs, telling them you're "going to fucking kill them", or otherwise causing them hardship in order to affect an emotional response in your primary suspect. If I were a sociopath trying to destroy lives extrajudicially and win/plea-bargain as many cases as I possibly could, all to further my career regardless of the person's true guilt, I'd do the same. We're fucking animals.

Not to mention the clichéd SOP, which might actually be SOP, of shooting the dog on sight.

Why is the government acting on what is a contractual matter between Xi and "US company"?

All governments have technology that they monitor and restrict in the UK this is called List X.

I remember buying some computer kit and it came with about 20 pages of legal docs saying who we where not allowed to re export to and what the legal penalties where

That's not what he was charged with.

For those of you unfamiliar with the story, this New York Times piece describes how this all happened in the first instance. One more datum on federal incompetence: http://www.nytimes.com/2015/09/12/us/politics/us-drops-charg...

> carrying a maximum of 80 years in prison

It boggles the mind that it's even possible to manufacture such a charge. In most European countries you would get the highest sentence for the biggest crime, which although wouldn't be "accurate" either, it's a whole lot closer to what the punishment should be than stacking the sentences up.

And please spare me the "but he would never get this sentence anyway!" argument. If you were in his position and the government would tell you you're risking 80 years in prison unless you fully cooperated with it, you'd shit your pants, too, and you'd probably give up any rights you have just to not risk getting anywhere close to that sentence, or you would even settle and plead guilty to avoid that.

IIRC the federal government really doesn't offer plea bargains, right? And federal sentencing is pretty rigid, so he probably would have served ~80 years.

That's correct the USSG pretty much makes plea agreements non-viable because it doesn't allow the prosecutor to offer any substantial leniency on sentencing, mandatory minimums on pretty much every federal crime also make plea agreements pointless.

On the local level plea agreements are used to make prosecuting people cheaper, if you don't agree to it they'll pretty much fuck you up intentionally just to prove a point which is probably even worse than not having the ability to offer them in the first place.

> That's correct the USSG pretty much makes plea agreements non-viable because it doesn't allow the prosecutor to offer any substantial leniency on sentencing, mandatory minimums on pretty much every federal crime also make plea agreements pointless.

You are very wrong.

First of all, the majority of federal crimes do not have mandatory minimums. http://famm.org/Repository/Files/Chart%20All%20Fed%20MMs%202... is an exhaustive list of federal crimes with mandatory minimums. It's only a fraction of the total number of federal crimes.

More importantly, the effect of the Sentencing Guidelines was that it removed sentencing discretion from judges and gave it to prosecutors. That's because the sentencing range given by the guidelines is influenced by what charges the prosecutor brings, and the details of those charges such as quantity of drugs or amount of property damage. This gives the prosecutor enormous influence over the sentence.[1] (Edited to add: In the same way the prosecutor can influence whether a statutory minimum is triggered.)

Consequentially, the plea bargain rate in federal cases is about 97% whereas in states it is somewhat less.

See http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2014/nov/20/why-inn... for a federal judge's take on the situation.

[1] Technically, since U.S. v. Booker in 2005, the sentencing guidelines are only "advisory" so the judge can ignore them, but judges still mostly sentence according to the guidelines.

There's some real interesting ones in that mandatory minimum doc. For example, "Refusal to operate railroad or telegraph lines " which was created in 1888. You know there's an interesting story behind that one.

> IIRC the federal government really doesn't offer plea bargains, right?

Quite the contrary - in 2013, 97% of federal cases that weren't dismissed ended in a plea bargain: http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2014/nov/20/why-inn...

> And federal sentencing is pretty rigid, so he probably would have served ~80 years.

No - in fact there's no way the Sentencing Guidelines would have given a sentence anywhere near 80 years: http://popehat.com/2013/02/05/crime-whale-sushi-sentence-ele...

This.

The fact is that "pleading not guilty" is statistically the "biggest" crime you can commit in much of the US (meaning the one you are likely to be punished for most severely). Which of course makes a mockery of most of the protections of the law.