Comment by neltnerb | Hacker News Reader

Comment by neltnerb | Hacker News Reader

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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.

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