Comment by basilgohar | Hacker News Reader

Comment by basilgohar | Hacker News Reader

As an American that has received his fair share of indoctrination and with no deep love for a lot of China's domestic as well as foreign policy, I am curious about a few things, sincerely:

1. Are these as egregious as we are led to believe? 2. Are these really a sign of deep foreign influence? 3. Can it be that these are actually just minor oversights of a large number of individuals without needing to jump to the worst conclusion of these scientists being spies (as one other comment has already asserted)?

I am not trying to water down what may be a serious case of foreign influence, but if this is something common and/or easy to fall into, it's possible this is an overreaction and may cause harm to the research community. The article is worded in a way that doesn't clarify if the focus was only on Chinese influence or if this was broadly designed to capture any foreign influence.

I ask these questions to broaden the discussion because oftentimes research and academic centers can have overly broad requests on disclosure which can be very invasive and, truth be told, if everyone answered fully and clearly, a lot of people would probably be excluded, and that begs the question if these are essential or not in my humble opinion.

To be clear, I am very much for limiting foreign influence on domestic policy, whether it's via research or otherwise, but I think it bears practicing greater skepticism when something may just be a proxy for "action" rather than sincere positive results.

I didn't see any specific proposed punishments in the article other than some people no longer being allowed to review articles for some journals.

Having gotten grants and attended the "if you lie about using US money it is a felony" mandatory in person talk...

Well, it's not necessarily that they had foreign grants, though it is possible that would have made them ineligible for something. But not disclosing stuff like that is really bad.

I don't know why they didn't, the reasons might be innocuous in which case I doubt there would be harsh punishments.

Or maybe they got two grants from different governments paying for the same research (big no) or maybe they were simply given money by a foreign asset that now can blackmail them into disclosing secret research that the US funded.

The article doesn't really give that level of detail so I can only say it ranges from "mistake on your taxes" bad where the repercussions are mostly financial penalities and "stole money and gave nuclear missile designs to a foreign country because of the influence of their money".

If I were to bet: they either didn't keep good track of things, are the kind of people that simply don't care about the rules enough to know they broke them (even though they don't intend harm it's definitely their fault), or they would have been ineligible for funding if they disclosed the foreign source and were too greedy to take a pass on it.

The answer is that nothing of this seems to be a crime, and scientists are not in the business of filling reports, but doing research. If you get money from the USA, there is no law saying that you cannot get money from China. The science is the same and the money is the same. What the US is trying to do is to stop innovation and criminalize the collaboration with Chinese institutions.

You are obfuscating the point. This issue is not about researchers receiving funds from China. Its about failing to disclose that this funding has been received. The US is trying to ensure transparency in how the research that is being funded in part by the American tax payer is ultimately paid for. Should US citizens not know this? Does transparency in research funding not matter?

Please edit personal swipes out of your comments here. If another comment is wrong, it's enough to provide correcting information.

Your comment would be fine without the first sentence. (It might be even better with the last sentence, which is redundant and starts to feel like a cross-examination, but that one is not a big deal.)

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

So are you a hacker news moderator? Your comment history seems filled with comments on other peoples comments. If so can your account be labelled as such? Does hacker news support this type of labelling?

Dang and Scott Bell are the two moderators here. I don't know Scott's username but Dang is pretty well known. It confused me at first too but he's been pretty active lately so I think they just don't tag is because it is such a small community and pretty much everyone knows who Dang is.

Yes, as godelski explained. We don't mark moderator usernames as different on this site. Partly that's because the site creator (pg) never did so, and partly because we don't want to create divisions between ourselves and the rest of the community. We're community members too, indeed were that long before we ever became moderators. It would feel weird to go around with special hats on.

At the same time, I know it leads to confusion sometimes, and I'm sorry about that.

Thanks for the call out. Snark can distract from the conversation.

>scientists are not in the business of filling reports

The primary task of a PI these days is to write grant applications.

The crime is signing the form saying that what you reported is true when you accepted federal money.

That's what makes it a possible felony.

If they disclosed the funding source it is possible they wouldn't have access to as many grants. But they can just... not take money that they aren't eligible for.

I'm finding it hard to drum up much sympathy for signing documents that state things you should have known weren't true.

There are valid excuses that make it more a paperwork oversight than industrial espionage for sure. But this article didn't give enough detail to know what percentage were oversights versus knowing deception.

Don't lie on paperwork you send to the feds.

"scientists are not in the business of filling reports, but doing research."

You obviously have never worked in science.

"If you get money from the USA, there is no law saying that you cannot get money from China."

The USA does not give money to you. The NIH does. Darpa too and many others. This government institutions have their own rules and regulations.

"The science is the same and the money is the same. What the US is trying to do is to stop innovation and criminalize the collaboration with Chinese institutions."

The US is trying to control the hemorrhaging outflow of US taxpayer funded research.

How is it hemorrhaging, if it's scientific research that usually gets published in public journals? Or are we talking about top-secret atomic research?

There’s a whole lot of science that happens in the area between “published in a public (free/open access?) journal” and “top-secret atomic research.”

The vast majority of research fits between those camps, in fact.

I see, that's probably more of an issue in medical sciences than in fundamental physics where I'm coming from. My experience with "top-secret" research is that it's usually a c r a p.

If we're talking about fundamental physics I'll mention fusion research. If you go to the DOE Chinese citizens are highly restricted around locations like NIF. You don't need any kind of clearance to work at NIF, but people have different restrictions. Same is true for CERN. China doesn't have full access to everything that happens at CERN, which is a fairly open lab.

Most research isn't classified, but that doesn't mean most research is open.

The article, probably because it's how the government decided to spin it, is conflating paperwork errors with everything from industrial espionage (i.e. professor tells the company paying them about research done in their lab for another company or paid for by public funds) to actual spying by sharing classified documents.

I am pretty sure it is intentionally vague so that people assume it's worse than it is since they could have just reported the numbers of people they uncovered to be doing something sinister if it fit the narrative.

But I'd lean the exact opposite direction and say that this article has nothing, on its face, to do with hemorrhaging, industrial espionage, or state espionage.

As others have mentioned about different levels of research having different levels of secrecy let me tell you about some of the research I've done.

I work in HPC and people are getting into machine learning now. Lots of papers are getting published that do not contain enough information to reproduce the work and source code is held tight. That's not uncommon is a lot of the sciences. Results are public, but how to get the results are not exactly. I've also been in the engineering and physics fields. Papers there are really not reproducible. They may detail a high level overview of how to do the experiment but they leave out all the "secret sauce". This gives them an edge.

So with the other post that made the front page, just the other day, it detailed how someone got stopped at the border for lying on the visa and that that person was sending pictures and very low level detailed explanations about the lab and its setup. This is essentially the "secret sauce" we're talking about here. If these researchers want to turn their results into a company (say you invent a new drug) you can only do this if you don't tell everyone every detail (which you can't reasonably do in a 10 page journal paper).

This all is especially true for medical work and semiconductor work. The US government is funding many of these labs because they actually want them to do the low level research, make a product, and market it. You can think of it as angel investing (except you don't have to give up shares of the company). But they want it to be a US company that builds and makes the product because that helps the US economy. If the US does the "angel investing" and then the product is created in China by a Chinese company, then that investing was not nearly as useful.

Yeah, from the article:

"Lauer also presented data on the nature of the violations that NIH has uncovered. Some 70% (133) of the researchers had failed to disclose to NIH the receipt of a foreign grant, and 54% had failed to disclose participation in a foreign talent program. In contrast, Lauer said, only 9% hid ties to a foreign company, and only 4% had an undisclosed foreign patent. Some 5% of cases involved a violation of NIH’s peer-review system."

So sounds like ~90% of the 189 violations maybe just not checking a box. It's not clear to me what the violations were for the 54 people who were fired.

From where I sit, science espionage from China certainly sounds plausible (And should be dealt with), but ginning up negligible issues to get rid of the wrong kind of people is a completely plausible move from the current administration.

Enforcement might deter ( is this proper English? ).

It seems technically valid (maybe?) but it's pretty hard to parse. You should at least add another word or two to indicate what it would deter.

Slightly ambiguous because I think the GP actually meant something like "enforcement may decline (to penalize or press charges)" which is definitely true and likely the case if 90% of these are paperwork errors.

There are definitely paperwork errors I can imagine, but it's difficult to imagine it being as simple a mistake as not checking the box that says "you have a job". More likely would be a grant office not being fully aware of a professors' funding sources or miscategorizing their funding in such a way that the grant office person helping with the paperwork marked it wrong and the professor didn't check carefully.

That I would consider to be an "honest mistake" that gets corrected by moving money around and a strongly worried letter.

Other stories I've heard go as far as two married professors who took their grant money and used it instead to move to an island resort for three months or something like that and didn't actually do the project at all. That was definitely a crime, but largely only because it involved the federal government. If they'd gotten a grant from a private company and didn't do what they promised it would likely be a civil lawsuit unless it rose to the level of actual illegal fraud.

It's probably even dumber than that.

1) Trump or someone else in the WH becomes convinced that the NIH is full of Chinese spies

2) Some poor flak winds up with the job of producing some spies to fire, or else

3) We wind up with this weak sauce

You know who would have absolutely none of these paperwork gaps? An actual spy.

This is not about Trump and this is worst mis-direction tactic to derail the conversation and inquiry on this subject.

.. it's a political situation involving the executive branch?

I'm not sure what you mean by mis-direction.

As an outsider it is extremely hard to see how this is disconnected from Trump.

It's a political decision, entirely. Meanwhile, Trump has been escalating the treatment of China as a spying, cold-war-style enemy (and thus rehabilitating Russia from that role).

> So sounds like ~90% of the 189 violations maybe just not checking a box.

Like when you file you taxes and your only mistake is to forget to check that box that says you had a job?

The Talents program comes with a lot of perks, some of which would be a pretty big deal to lie about. Like committing for 1-2 months in the summer in China, then telling the NIH you are available full-time in the summer also.

It's sad to see a situation like this in the scientific community. The larger part of international chinese researchers are probably worried if this is spreading to non-US countries. Most of researchers I know returned to China in these programmes simply wanted a secure/easier/family life, which probably means they won't be outputting much research as the new environment won't be as creative and competitive as in the U.S /European research fields. I'm shocked to find these alleged espionage cases which seem to paint the opposite picture.

These kinds of laws aren't really written for people making mistakes. They are about having a reason to stop someone that is suspected of something, but there is not enough evidence yet for an official arrest, from leaving the country. Think Capone getting arrested for tax violations and not for distribution of alcohol (actually there are laws on the books explicitly for this, because tax evasion is easier to prove). It's the same reason there's questions on the visa application like "do you intend to commit a crime while visiting" or "do you have connections to a terrorist organization". Obviously if people do, they are going to answer no. But if your cousin is a terrorist you might answer no. If you are leaving right after a terrorist attack committed by the group your cousin was in the US may want to stop you for questioning. They will use this law to stop you. From there they can ask more questions and find out if you were actually linked to the attack or not (in this hypothetical you weren't, so you are just let go). That doesn't mean it can't be abused, but that's what these questions are there for and why the articles are explicitly vague. These people were stopped (you have to have a reason to keep them in the country!) and being investigated. If they didn't do anything they will be let go (well are supposed to).

The answer to all of your questions is "it depends". I can say with certainty that no one is going to be able to provide an accurate answer without looking at each case individually.

Generally speaking:

- It's typically okay to receive money from foreign companies and foreign-owned businesses/organizations. Both culturally and legally. E.g., the government explicitly black-lists instead of white-lists.

- Forgetting to report small amounts of money (low five figures at a time) can be chalked up to sloppiness, even if the total amount adds up to six figures over a long period of time. E.g., just as a graduate student I received mid five figures worth of travel grants and honorariums from a half dozen different funding agencies, many of them foreign-owned. As a more senior researcher I now keep track of every penny in and out of my group, but many of my colleagues do not. And that's reasonable -- they effectively run small consulting shops with seven figure annual budgets and were never taught how to run a small business! Don't get me wrong, they should be way more serious about these things (and most people now realize this), but there's lots of failure to report that IMO doesn't rise to the level of fraud or criminal conspiracy.

- Forgetting to report larger funding streams (six figures/yr for multiple years, or any funding stream that adds up to more than maybe a half million) is either fraud or at least such inexcusable oversight that firing is perhaps not an unreasonable action.

- This all gets more complicated if the funding was received "on the side" (i.e., not through the university). Note: it is 100% Ok and even normal for professors to do consulting/advising on the side. To be clear, they still need to report this funding. But, again, it's super believable that someone could forget to report or not know they were supposed to report for a side gig.

- Similarly, this all gets more complicated if the funding was received many years ago and was not a huge sum. E.g., did I receive any money from <insert random European country> while doing my PhD or the first couple years afterward? No fucking clue, that entire time of life was a whirlwind and no one trained me to keep track of such things.

Scientists and their organizations have an obligation to identify and mitigate conflicts of interest. If scientists are receiving funding off the books without disclosing, they're either actively or "accidentally" preventing that.

Further, they likely breached their ethics policy which is usually the part of their contract, employment agreement, etc

^ These apply regardless of the source.

Now considering the source, you have to investigate if they disclosed or were asked to disclose information on the policies, studies, etc they came in contact with.

Alternatively, did they adjust or were they asked to adjust their positions, policies, studies, etc that they were involved in?

^ Turns out those apply regardless of the source too.

In the most charitable explanation, they were incredibly sloppy multiple times in multiple ways. In the worst explanation, they committed espionage and/or damaged the entire process. The answer is likely somewhere in between.

I don't think there's any debate over whether or not these scientists did something wrong.

The question is the nature of the wrongness. Was it some trivial clerical error being painted as treason by insane anti-China zealots? Or did what they do actually rise to the level of fraud/treason? I.e., is this communist witch hunt v 2.0, or did these scientists really deserve to be fired/face criminal charges?

And, again, I don't think an answer to that question is possible without looking at each case individually. Anyone claiming to have an answer without going case-by-case is in over their head.

The rest of your post is wild speculation about the nature of the foreign talents program and level of involvement in that program of particular individuals.

Forgetting to report even a small amount of money if done deliberately can usually be prosecuted as a felony.

> if done deliberately

Right. And even unintentionally is quite bad. But also not even close to uncommon.

I don't think the question was "was what these people did bad?" I think the question was "is what these people did really _that_ bad?"

If you look into the news reporting on the individual cases, some look bad (emails documenting attempts to cover up, smuggling lab materials out of the country) and some don't (despite not including it on the grant form, researchers acknowledged the funding in published papers and didn't try to hide it).

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