In the end, you're treated like a spy, says MIT scientist | Hacker News Reader

In the end, you're treated like a spy, says MIT scientist

nytimes.com

336 pointsbobbiechen446 comments

> The son of two mathematics teachers who were sent to teach on farms during China’s Cultural Revolution, Dr. Chen grew up without any hope of becoming a scientist. His parents, the descendants of landowners, had a “bad classification” from the Chinese government, and were viewed suspiciously. His father warned him he would probably spend his life as a farmer. But then Mao Zedong died.

Chen moved to the US to experience the American equivalent of this.

Indeed. A former colleague married a Chinese lady whose parents had suffered badly through the Cultural Revolution. He told the story, how she went off to the US for her PhD and how her parents drove her to the airport and told her never to return to China.

How things have changed within just a generation!

Can you elaborate how exactly? Was your former colleague sent to kill sparrows in rice fields too?

(It was the colleague's wife's parents.) Obviously I never got the full story, but from what I heard, the parents were academics who had their house vandalized by the Red Guards and were sent to work the countryside.

Did her parents ever leave China?

I don't know.

You're confusing the Cultural Revolution with the Great Leap Forward. If you read a little bit about the Cultural Revolution the connection will be obvious.

Deaths

Hundreds of thousands to millions of civilian, Red Guards and military deaths

Still not obvious.

You posted that response literally three minutes after my comment. That's barely enough time to read the introduction section of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultural_Revolution. I suggest you spend more than three minutes learning about a thing before complaining that things are not obvious to you about it. Three hours would be reasonable. You could spend the first hour or two just reading that article, or start with https://www.gwern.net/reviews/Cultural-Revolution, which is only about ten or twenty minutes of reading and better written, but of course much less objective. Either of those two starting points will give you plenty of links to explore.

Since it's one of the most important events in human history, one with extremely important parallels to current events in the US and extremely important influences on everyone in China, and you evidently don't know anything about it at all (except that it happened in China, I guess), it will definitely be worthwhile.

I don't see an equivalent turn of events in the US. Could you share what you mean?

No, nothing equivalent to the Cultural Revolution has happened anywhere else ever. Hopefully it never will.

You don't see parallels with the Pol Pot regime?

Yes, history is rich in parallels.

What is your definition of equivalent? Because I see the French Revolution and it’s Central European offshoots, the Russian revolution, the various Latin American and Asian communist revolutions all very equivalent; they all totally upended and and destroyed an existing culture and whole civilizations. If communistic elements and characteristics are involved, such a situation is equivalent to the Chinese communist “cultural” revolution of destruction by definition. You’re miss-classifying the vector as the cause. One may argue scale, but not equivalency.

"Interchangeable", or, at greater length:

      Equivalent \E*quiv"a*lent\ ([-e]*kw[i^]v"[.a]*lent), a. [L.
         aequivalens, -entis, p. pr. of aequivalere to have equal
         power; aequus equal + valere to be strong, be worth: cf. F.
         ['e]quivalent. See {Equal}, and {Valiant}.]
         1. Equal in worth or value, force, power, effect, import, and
            the like; alike in significance and value; of the same
            import or meaning.
            [1913 Webster]

                  For now to serve and to minister, servile and
                  ministerial, are terms equivalent.    --South.
            [1913 Webster]

The Cultural Revolution did not upend and destroy an existing culture and whole civilizations, but neither did the other events you're describing.

A big difference between the Cultural Revolution and things like the French Revolution and the Russian Revolution is that the Cultural Revolution entrenched the existing leader of PRC, while the French and Russian Revolutions overthrew the existing leaders, which is generally considered to be one of the most important things about them. The Cultural Revolution was more akin to Stalin's purges of his opposition within the Party, the Night of the Long Knives, the Salem witch trials, the Cambodian Killing Fields (as CamperBob2 pointed out), the Terror, or the Roman Dominate, but it has important differences from each of them. For example, the Night of the Long Knives lasted three days, the Cultural Revolution lasted 10 years, and the Dominate lasted about 300 years.

Objectively speaking (I think both 'sides' are equally confused):

* People losing their careers over reactionary views/speech

* Historical monuments/names being destroyed (mostly relating to CSA/overt racism)

* Record levels of distrust. Anyone could be a Trumpist or "far left radical", so keep your distance.

* Large organizations are installing ideological offices to keep reactionary behavior in check, some going as far as "struggle sessions" (mandatory trainings)

* Political violence (not too severe yet)

It's not quite as extreme as the Chinese Cultural Revolution, but the parallels are certainly there and I hope it doesn't intensify.

Also, apropos of this case:

* major paranoia about foreign subversion (with, in both cases, some justification, but self-defeating and grossly disproportionate responses)

* persecution specifically directed at intellectuals

How you can be "objective," live through the past twenty years, and wind up thinking "both sides" are equally problematic/at fault for the current situation? Maybe a little history will help?

America has been prone to succumb to demagoguery for a long time. Here's a novel from 1935 that you should be familiar with:

https://www.amazon.com/Cant-Happen-Here-Sinclair-Lewis/dp/19...

The reason it's finally happening now is that the 60-year old conservative project to remake America in the image of the John Birch Society and other right-wing nuts has borne incredible fruit. Essentially, they decided the end justifies the means and are now being consumed by the means. Here's a quick sampler of stuff to start reading up on.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Birch_Society

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fox_News

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newt_Gingrich

https://thehill.com/opinion/white-house/474662-the-myth-of-t...

You provided a perfect example without realizing it, it just wasn't contained in the links you provided.

But he's correct. That's the part you're missing. If he was wrong, that would be completely different. You're focusing on the appearance of the rhetoric, when you should be attempting to determine the truth of the points presented (i.e. which party is correct).

Sometimes- more often than not, I would even say- there is at least one political faction in a society that is completely batshit crazy.

It's never both/all sides. But it can look that way, because whatever accusations are thrown at one side, even if true, are returned with the exact same rhetoric, even if false.

For example you see this in domestic violence court proceedings. Usually, the abuser will accuse the victim of being the real abuser and accuse them of all sorts of things, some of which might even be true (such as hitting an attacker in self defense). This is surprisingly effective, and often times people will side with the abuser or conclude that both parties are part of the problem. But that doesn't change the fact that there is ONE abuser (usually the party with a power advantage) against whom the accusations are justified, and the other party who is comparatively innocent. Even though they accuse each other of the exact same thing and their behavior looks identical from a distance.

USA was created in the wake of perhaps the largest ethnic cleansing in human history (virtual entirety of the North American continent) and has been at war for >90% of its history. It has always been deeply racist (whether overt like KKK lynchings or subtle like census reporting and tokenism).

Whatever these rightoids are allegedly plotting, you can't say they are "remaking" America into something radically new.

How does mid-millenium colonization of America prove current-year racism? This is pure CRT-adjacent nonsense. The use of words like "rightoid" does not help your argument.

The Trail of Tears, the US Civil War and the appalling form of slavery that led up to it, the Chinese Exclusion Act, racially-biased "eugenic" involuntary sterilization, Jim Crow, the Japanese internment camps, the Indian Schools, Wounded Knee, cowboys & Indians movies, the Tulsa race massacre, per-country immigration quotas, mass deportation, child internment camps, etc., are not mid-millennium colonization. There's an unbroken chain of racism running through US history since before its foundation, one so deeply embedded in US culture that I couldn't see most of it until I had been gone for several years.

Idealizations of US history are common to all US factions, though their content differs.

>one so deeply embedded in US culture that I couldn't see most of it until I had been gone for several years.

Wherever you went, odds are it has an equally shitty history, and present.

Yup, but different enough to give me an outside perspective on the culture I'd grown up in. Argentina's present is actually shittier, but not in the same way.

Right. Sorry. I'll be more politically correct next time.

> perhaps the largest ethnic cleansing in human history (virtual entirety of the North American continent)

We're measuring by geographical area? If we are, very few people lived (or has ever lived) in most of the continent.

To suggest that the worst of someone is all there is, is just an old means to tear down the best, and to demoralize. I'm sure you can find much more.

Ethnic cleansing apologism on HN? Really?

> By the end of the 20th century most scholars gravitated toward an estimate of around 50 million [prior to colonization]—with some historians arguing for an estimate of 100 million or more.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Population_history_of_Indige...

To be clear, those 50 million and 100 million numbers are for America as a whole, not North America.

Sure, peoples in South America also suffered some ethnic cleansing but not as bad as North America. At any rate it's millions of people and entire cultures exterminated.

Less than 1% of US population is classified as (pure) Native American, whereas it used to be 100%. A staggering example of ethnic cleansing/replacement.

Yes, although most of South America suffered in different ways that are arguably worse. The Mohawk and the Navajo retained their language and their culture; the Caribs and the Quilmes are so thoroughly effaced that we know nothing of their religion and their folklore. Nothing as culturally catastrophic as the burning of the Maya codices befell the Haudenosaunee.

Although the situation for Native Americans in the US is extremely bad and has been much worse, I think your 1%/100% contrast overstates the case a little bit. The current (not pure) Native American population in the US is 2.9%, or 9.7 million people. This may be higher than the pre-Columbian population of Native Americans, and if it's lower, it's probably not by more than a factor of three, and I really don't want to endorse ideologies proclaiming the virtues of racial purity, since I am a liberal.

The great problem is, in my outsider view, not population loss, and even less is it "race mixing", but the parlous circumstances to which modern Native Americans have been reduced --- circumstances largely established by openly white supremacist government policies.

There isn't a "someone" to tear down here. Everyone who lived in North America before 01900 is already dead, colonizer and colonized alike. And none of them were angels --- or devils. But this is not about whether they were good or bad; it's about how racist they were, which is important for understanding the degree to which modern US reactionary racism is or is not a novel phenomenon.

There's a lot of debate over the pre-Columbian population of North America, with modern population estimates ranging from under 4 million to over 15 million, all of which are much higher than estimates that used to be popular before 01960 or so, though still much lower than its current population. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Population_history_of_Indigeno... and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1491:_New_Revelations_of_the_A....

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Leap_Forward

> Not to be confused with Cultural Revolution.

apparently it's a comon problem.

That quote was literally from Cultural Revolution WP summary, so you may well heed your own advice and read it for once.

My point was that any parallels between that and events in the USA are nothing but disingenuous exaggeration. Consider just how vague your allusions are: without knowing your political views I would be at loss figuring if you allude to the rise of proto-fascist American right or lament the assault of Left woke culture.

> That quote was literally from Cultural Revolution WP summary,

I couldn't find the quoted passage in the Cultural Revolution WP as you mentioned.

It's in the infobox in the right margin of the introduction to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultural_Revolution. Why they thought it was relevant to the conversation is anybody's guess, but I guess people who don't know anything about a thing are likely to have a lot of random opinions about it.

In my view, though, accusing others of dishonesty and hypocrisy because they disagree with one's random unfounded opinions is unacceptable. Last time I said that I got downvoted to -2 and flagged: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30118970

You have broken a number of guidelines in your various comments, for example:

Please don't comment on whether someone read an article. "Did you even read the article? It mentions that" can be shortened to "The article mentions that." (this comment above)

Be kind. Don't be snarky. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30116919

Don't feed egregious comments by replying; flag them instead. If you flag, please don't also comment that you did. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30118970

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

While in some cases you are not correct, in other cases you are, and I appreciate the reminder.

Thank you.

What do you mean? I don't understand what the American equivalent of demonization of personal property and a communist uprising is.

Like being accused, exonerated, and then taking a victory lap over all the major publications to the sympathetic audience. Damn you America! Just like China, no?

Also:

"The FBI documents alleged that Chen received $19 million from China's Southern University of Science and Technology (SUSTech).[9] [23] On January 22, 2021, MIT's President released a second statement pointing out that these funds went to not Chen, but to MIT itself to support a departmental research collaboration with SUSTech which Chen simply directed on MIT's behalf.[25] [26]"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gang_Chen_(engineer)

SUSTech, lol.

I think the "accused" part is the problem. Interacting with the court system is expensive both financially and emotionally. We need to be very careful where we apply it, and that means being careful about who we accuse and for what reasons.

Expecting zero mistakes is unreasonable. The system worked correctly. The person who was not guilty was found not guilty.

Yeah the system worked correctly. He only lost a year of his life. Whoopsies!

And all his grad students and the chair of a university department, based on accusations that turned out to be entirely false.

Yeah, what a victory lap, getting to rightfully speak out about his mistreatment. Tell me, would you trade a year of your life for the ability to take such a grand "victory lap"?

Oh come on, lets not blatantly lie like this. China's "Cultural Revolution" was a mass extermination of the educated people in the country. There's zero comparison between the two.

A 10 year event encompassing a country’s worth of people leads to many secondary and tertiary effects can mean something different for every person.

What's that supposed to mean?

It means that a lot happened in 10 years, so when comparing a single event to the whole thing, obviously it can only match up to part of it, not the whole thing.

That's still silly as that would imply that the US is currently in the middle of a 10 year cultural revolution, yet there's no slew of dead educated people. So again, this is a poor comparison. Do you really think China's cultural revolution put people through a rule of law court system and acquitted people? Or do you think that they just went around murdering people on drumhead trials with no rule of law? (Hint, it's the latter)

The worst part of these accusations is that your reputation is tarnished whether you are guilty or not.

This instilled a sense of fear in every person even if they are innocent because you can still be targeted and your career ruined.

If this scientist was just stating out, rather than already established, he would likely have had to quit science.

There should be some penalty for false accusations that can compensate for these people.

They are also accusations of nothing specific. "Association with China" doesn't seem like it's specific enough to warrant sanction, all it can do it make people suspicious, which it does regardless of whether you've even done anything with China.

I accept the US is having a power struggle with China at the moment, but this is not the way to win it. People who aren't actually in favor of freedom will welcome this "record who associates with China" thing, but it goes against the high ideals of the US and makes it look like many unsavory countries.

Errr... pretty sure the allegation is more specific than you suggest. The allegation was that he was being paid by China and did not disclose this on grant applications.

Case was closed, allegation was rejected.

Witch hunt begins when allegation holds more weight then the verdict, and when it becomes the verdict, you can say goodbye to all semblance of rule of law, which surprisingly many here will condone depending on the subject.

The really, really important thing about witch hunts is that witches don’t exist. Allegations that turn out to be wrong can be really harmful, agreed there. Pretty unclear how to do anything about that without infringing on 1st Amendment rights, especially when it’s not a criminal allegation (i.e. indictments should IMO be sealed til verdict, but not all allegations are indictments).

Here, a https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moving_the_goalposts

Allegations can still be alleged even if they are later found to be unfounded.

The worst part is he spirit has been crushed; he can no longer work for fear of irrational and frankly random political views and actions detrimental to his health, his research, and his family. If he is to continue and regain an amount of his former life, I wager it can only occur after leaving the USA permanently.

Honestly, this is the type of response someone in the government (which?) would possibly pay good money for to mislead the prossecution – sounds like a good spy vs. spy movie except it's not funny.

He can certainly sue the US government for accusing him publicly without enough evidence to prosecute, and the resulting loss of compensation.

Now, it's not exactly affordable for him to do so. But that's a separate problem we should solve.

He can clearly document harms, too. A top-flight research group takes a lifetime, reputation, and resources to assemble.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Absolute_immunity

It depends. From that article:

“However, the Supreme Court has held that prosecutors do not enjoy absolute immunity when they act as investigators by engaging in activities associated more closely with police functions.”

For a successful academic, making a bunch of money in a lawsuit is the polar opposite of what they want to do with their life.

If you value doing science and inventing things and mentoring students and the prestige that comes along with it, simply getting a payday isn't anything like justice. Of course, such lawsuits serve more than simply attempting to actually get justice (which is usually impossible) but to dissuade the state from doing it again to others.

Which is cold comfort when all you wanted to do was play with heat transfer. He said he doesn't even want to apply for grant funding anymore, and I can't blame him. You don't become a professor studying heat transport because you're psyched to go toe to toe with the department of justice over made up nonsense that already wasted a year of your career directly and screwed up decades of accumulated talent and reputation.

Thats interesting it briefly reminds me about how I used to care about how I made money, like I used to find the concept of actually winning the lottery to be something disillusioning as opposed to earning due to acumen, for example

Now I just view not having money as a waste of time, its literally so time consuming and expensive

When in the opposite scenario nobody cares. you’re either in the club or you’re not, on a pool or in a yacht, at the villa or not, on the shareholder list or not.

> He had five or six active research projects, and during the months that followed, they slowed and faltered. The 15 postdoctoral students he worked with were transferred to other research groups, taking their knowledge with them.

> “We are all losers, right?” Dr. Chen said. “My reputation got ruined. My students, my post-docs, they changed their career. They changed to other groups. M.I.T., the country, the U.S., we lose. I can’t calculate the loss. That loss cannot be calculated.”

How would you solve this?

This case went beyond false accusations. According to the professor's lawyers [0], the government possessed exculpatory evidence and knowingly withheld it from the defense -- a theoretically-illegal Brady violation [1].

>" As my team of lawyers argued, Bonavolonta and his agents ignored basic exculpatory evidence, failed to interview critical witnesses until after I was arrested, and dramatically embellished facts in various official documents. Exculpatory information that, under the Constitution, the prosecution was required to turn over — such as a witness saying that I never was in a talent program, a Chinese government initiative to provide funding to researchers and scientists, which was one of the government’s key allegations — was withheld for months until demanded by my lawyers. While I am relieved that my case has been dropped “in the interests of justice,” I respectfully request a thorough review of this matter by Congress and the US Department of Justice to hold individuals accountable for this glaring misconduct."

[0] https://www.bostonglobe.com/2022/01/21/opinion/i-was-arreste...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brady_disclosure

As I said in another thread, you cannot expect groups to self police. The legal system will never hold these people accountable because it works against their interests to. This is basic human nature and true everywhere. This is why companies don't admit to wrong doing for dumping waste. This is why the fia doesn't admit it fixed the f1 championship. And this is why dirty cops don't go to prison.

You want change? Make a 4th branch of government who's only power and purpose is to arrest members of the other three branches when they break the law.

Of course it ain't that simple. How do you keep them from getting corrupted and arresting people they don't like? Food for thought.

self-policing aside, we've become so entrenched in crony capitalism, that we can't even get checks-and-balances right anymore between branches

Entropy isn't just a concept in physics but equally applies to institutions. Early on things work well because the mission isn't muddied and people are idealistic. Things can work well for a time with reforms here and there but eventually the rot grows and brings it down. This is in part why no empire was ever permanent. Sometimes its just better to do a reset with the lessons learned and start off just a little bit better.

That's true and that's unfortunate. At the same time, how do you balance national security versus avoiding situations like this one? One of my takeaways from studying the McCarthy era was that there really were a lot of spies and communist sympathizers in America at the time. It wasn't some figment of someone's imagination. Likewise, I think we have good reason to proceed under the assumption that China is trying to infiltrate our institutions. Because they are.

[Impact per unit of spying] X [number of spies caught] - [impact per unit of innocent person being impacted] X [number of innocent people falsely accused] = net impact to society

Typically, the first part of the equation is wildly overestimated because by stopping spies in 1 area, they just find another way to do what they want to do and the impact happens anyways. Or the threat evolves over time but the policies do not resulting in negative side-effects and very little benefit anymore (e.g. the TSA)

This was my thought as well. The comparison isn't exact, but this feels like a War on Drugs situation: you're never going to stamp out all spying, and as you try, a lot of innocent (or at least non-harmful) people will get swept up in the process and their lives destroyed.

Now, I think policing espionage is more valuable than policing drugs, and the dynamics certainly all aren't the same. But I think the bar for making espionage accusations -- just the accusations themselves -- needs to be much higher than it is.

The “impact per unit of spying” buries a big term in there. It effects 330 million Americans, while a wrongful accusation affects just a few.

If you are really that concerned about “national security” you can just start employing American nationals only. If that is not enough and anyone looking a bit Asian can look suspicious to you then start employing only white christian americans.

This what overt nationalism and fear of losing supremacy can lead to.

But we know that this didn’t work before so that’s why America has become the place where talents from all over the world come. If we go back to how it was in 1920s then why shouldn’t go back even further and start burning witches again?

Im pretty sure Chen is naturalized, otherwise i dont think he would have been allowed back in the country. TLDR, he applied for gov grant money, and failed to disclose foreign offiliations(in China). He refused to unlock his laptop to agents after taking it on a trip to China, and later when he was offered a plea deal so he could return to work, he refused to cooperate. Subsequently charges were dropped(and Chen returned to work) because we as Americans value the right to privacy over finding out what was on Mr. Chen's laptop. It's not racist, and it's ironic you paint it that way given the modern day holocaust happening in China right now.

I’m not sure that is the right takeaway. The US espouses freedom. Unless someone is actually spying, their personal beliefs and political affiliations shouldn’t be subject to government scrutiny.

That statement is nigh ungrammatical, anyway illogical. "is actually spying" is a present tense. "shouldn't [unless]" is either a past tense, thus an illogical consequent to the present tense, or it is a hypothetical, irrealis or desiderative subjunctive in which case it merely implies that someone should not be "spying", in effect. This offers no objective criterion for the government's scrutiny, and the article does not point out what has gone wrong.

Clearly they conducted a background check and disagreed with the expert whether their findings were valid (fun fact, valid translates German valide or gültig, the latter somehow akin to guilty).

This may be well within their rights, eg. if they tried to impose harder interpretation of regulations. It can be criminal if they basicly ignored the expert for wanting to win, or it could be at least negligent if they have fundamentally misinterpreted the law. This is not strictly decidable and rests on the shoulders of the arbiters of truth.

(Another fun fact, gain say could be akin to German Gegenrede, as in against, or to French gagner as in win, German Gewinn. See also: Einrede, a legal terminus; sich etwas einreden "to ellude oneself"; -say in that sense must be akin to sake, forsaken, compare Widersacher "antagonist", akin to adv. wither, "contra")

> "shouldn't [unless]" is either a past tense, thus an illogical consequent to the present tense, or it is a hypothetical, irrealis or desiderative subjunctive in which case it merely implies that someone should not be "spying", in effect.

Could you explain this a bit more to a non-native speaker like me? I'm assuming it's not a past tense for certain. From the second definition in [1] (used in auxiliary function to express obligation, propriety, or expediency) and the examples, it seems to me "shouldn't" here could mean that "be subject to government scrutiny" is the opposite of "obligation, propriety, or expediency". I understand the sentence as: if someone is not spying, subjecting their personal beliefs and political affiliations to government scrutiny is not the correct thing to do. Then why would it

> implies that someone should not be "spying"?

[1] https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/should

There still are spies all over the place, so I don't know what's all that probative about the fact that there really were Soviet spies in the McCarthy era.

Yeah, this is like HUAC Vol 2. Hopefully, we do not repeat that shameful period again.

It's a difficult subject to discuss. How do you prevent humans from harboring unconscious biases against people who are accused of a crime but found innocent? How do you prove that you are harmed? How much compensation would OJ Simpson be owed?

This is just such a sad situation. The scientist's reputation has taken a big beating and he will now be looked through the lease of these accusations for rest of his career, if not more.

The last paragraph stood out for me.

“My love is science. I did not want politics, right? I saw that, and I got away from it. I do my devotion to science. I help people, I support. But I learned that you can’t get away. Politics impacts everybody. So if there are things that are not right, we all need to speak out.”

Lot of times most of us, including me, don't speak out against wrong policies. We all think "let's just focus on our own thing" it won't affect us. But we are all wrong, "Politics impacts everybody".

> The scientist's reputation has taken a big beating

While this really sucked, this is an exaggeration. No charges. Still has his job. He can still file for government grants. The article starts with his colleagues offering up opportunities for him and celebrating that he is back.

Yeah, the feds screwed the pooch and messed things up, but I don't see where his reputation was actually harmed.

> While this really sucked, this is an exaggeration

He lost 15 doctoral students/post docs who moved on in his absence, and I'm assuming his research group(s) imploded - do you think it's going to be easy to get those back? He has a job, but it's not at the same job he had before - for one he'll be co-authoring fewer papers. So his reputation has taken a beating in measurable ways - that's no exaggeration.

You've cured my ignorance. Thanks.

I think you are critically underestimating the impact of having your lab fall apart like this. It may not be a career end, but the career is probably irrevocably impacted.

This will just lead to a chilling effect, where scientists, esp those born outside, will be hesitant to apply for any government aid.

I vaguely remember this case when it first came out. At the time, the impression I got was: Dr Chen was passing info to Chinese agents.

And now the impression is: He had some affiliations with Chinese groups that were fully legal, and he was not required to disclose.

Which begs the question: Why was he arrested in the first place?

> Why was he arrested in the first place?

Sounds like a mixture of incompetence and poorly constructed incentives.

This reminds me of the case of Tsien Hsue-Shen, who in the 1950s was deported from the US and subsequently more or less became the father of the Chinese space program. Iris Chang wrote a good book about it called 'Thread of the Silkworm.'

Last week, the government dismissed the case against Dr. Chen, which alleged that he had concealed seven Chinese affiliations in applications for $2.7 million in grants from the U.S. Energy Department. Prosecutors announced that they had received new information indicating that Dr. Chen had not been obliged to disclose those affiliations, undercutting the basis of the case.

I feel like this part could use more details. The charges were for not disclosing his affiliations, but those affiliations existed nonetheless? Edit: I'm not implying there's anything shady he did or that he wasn't falsely accused, just trying to parse this.

Agreed. It seems like the details matter here.

Were the affiliations suspect but not reportable?

Or were the affiliations unremarkable and not reportable but prosecutors screwed up?

> were the affiliations unremarkable and not reportable but prosecutors screwed up?

Yes, the prosecutors royally screwed up.

From the article:

"Prosecutors had floated the idea of a deferred prosecution agreement, which would have allowed him to return to work and apply for government grants in the future. In return, said his lawyer, Mr. Fisher, he would have to admit to having some ties to China, none of them a violation of the law."

So why would Chen have to declare them if they aren't illegal?

Sounds like a prosecutor was afraid to get sued into oblivion/have his future political ambitions ruined by this affair, and strong-armed the good doctor into signing a document to avoid this going to court, where outcomes are pretty much random.

* tried to strong-arm. He didn't accept the deal.

>Sounds like a prosecutor was afraid to get sued into oblivion

Federal prosecutors cannot be sued:

https://fedsoc.org/events/prosecutorial-immunity

Chen has to declare foreign conflicts of interest if he takes federal grants.

The prosecution themselves have said that there was no reporting requirement for that.

I got my initial understanding of the reg. from an article on Charles Lieber’s case, which boiled them down to “must report conflicts of interest.” The reality (https://grants.nih.gov/grants/policy/coi/index.htm) is more nuanced and up to the courts to decide, but as a one sentence summary I think it’s fair.

There was no such legal requirement on this grant.

>"What tipped the scale, the people said, was an interview by prosecutors this month of a senior Energy Department official who is considered an authority on what disclosures are material on grant forms. The official confirmed that the 2017 form did not require disclosures of Chen’s ties to the technology university or other Chinese government organizations and programs, one person said"

https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/mit-gang-ch...

> he would have to admit to having some ties to China, none of them a violation of the law.

What's the point?

According to the article the State discovered, way late, that the kind of ties he had with China were not of the kind they assumed guilt of and heavily publicized when they went to destroy his professional life, but instead of the kind people have when they are born elsewhere.

When they did find out about this, they instead tried to make him admit to some other non criminal kind of ties to justify their ruining of his life, and when that failed they simply bailed out.

It's heartbreaking.

What people don’t realize is that a prosecutor is like any other job - pressure from the boss to deliver, long hours, “sunk cost fallacy” and all the other crap you see in big corporates.

Not to excuse the behavior, but more highlighting what contributes to it.

Once a prosecutor thinks he has a case against you, you’re pretty fucked to be honest because it rare for them to ever admit fault or back down.

I don't know how the senate is set up in the US, but prossecutors are supposed to decide freely. The "boss" is in the worst case just another layer in the prossecution, that's not just a job but an institution.

The general attourney from Germany denied the NSA case because he found no evidence. He's also bound by orders from the justice department ("weisungsgebunden")

It's just like any other job, except that the job is to destroy people's lives.

sounds indeed like mistrial rather that the allegations having no validity at all. The NYT doing quality reporting as usual in a long piece of fluff.

Not a mistrial. The government agency that issued the grants told the prosecutors that he hadn't mislead them. Hard to prosecute someone for wire fraud when the supposed victim is saying that not only is the defendant innocent, no crime happened at all.

> In recent weeks, however, officials at the Department of Energy have told prosecutors that Dr. Chen had no obligation to declare the seven affiliations, calling into question the basis of the charges.

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/01/20/science/gang-chen-mit-chi...

I still have a lot of questions about how this prosecution happened and how it took this long for it to be dropped...

The “none of your business” kind. Why is there a whole thread of this reasoning here? You have read the article, he was totally innocent, and now you’re questioning his “Chinese ties”. I guess he was right in that his image was tarnished permanently. What a sad world that such an accomplished person has been ruined. Imagine the awesome impact he could have had. His research area could have revolutionized many things in energy.

Maybe they updated the article. The archived link suggests they found out that he was not obligated to reveal any such ties. This is subtly different than finding he has none at all.

The "ties" are his own business, in this case. What I'm saying is that a subtle jab about his "ties" is basically tainting him as somehow still guilty to some degree as a Chinese spy, even though all charges were dropped and it was admitted that there was no base to even charge him to begin with. This is the damage that was done to this man's reputation, even though the "ties" could and probably are very benign and normal for his type of work. The continual push to label all things Chinese as evil is today's McCarthyism.

> Prosecutors had floated the idea of a deferred prosecution agreement, which would have allowed him to return to work and apply for government grants in the future. In return... he would have to admit to having some ties to China, none of them a violation of the law.

I'm a little confused as well. It reads to me as if they offered him a deal to get out of this by saying what they eventually found out anyway.

One of these so-called affiliations was.. serving as an external grant reviewer for some proposal for the Chinese equivalent of the national science foundation (basic/ theoretical science). Which is of course ridiculous.. we scientists review proposals all the time and the government, in fact, doesn't want to know about it because it's extraneous pointless information. This was a rushed, and very dumb, effort by a US attorney in the final days of the Trump administration.

Not sure what is unclear about this part you quoted:

> Prosecutors announced that they had received new information indicating that Dr. Chen had not been obliged to disclose those affiliations

He had affiliations, but they were of the kind that he was not required to disclose, so the government was harassing him for no reason.

These things have a way of working themselves out.

"Father of Chinese Rocketry" https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qian_Xuesen

Except for the 5 years under house arrest part. Wow.

Survivorship bias, perhaps? That is, all the stories you hear about like this are the kind that turn into stories you hear about -- you don't hear about anyone whose life is just quietly ruined, so it seems like they all work out fine. And of course nothing "works itself out" -- it's people who work them out. It doesn't have to be you -- it's OK to just read the article and move on with your own life -- but whenever things "just work out" it's because someone stepped in and made a positive difference.

At the macro level, if you're the policy-maker and doing the persecuting, stories like this should give you pause. Of course it's survivor bias for the individual.

The whole story is basically “how the USA gave China its space and ICBM program.” I assume “worked out” meant for the Chinese, because it really did.

For all of humanity. When I worked at Satellogic in Argentina, China's space program was how we got our satellites into space. If we'd been dependent on the US and Russia, we'd've been in bad shape.

> “My thinking is, I didn’t do anything wrong,” he said. “So whatever they look at, they won’t find that I did anything wrong.”

This statement seems like a completely backward mindset to have, especially after watching this classic advice piece on youtube [1].

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d-7o9xYp7eE

Wow, what an insightful video. In nerdy terms, the prosecution will basically p-hack your case until they get statistical significance.

> the prosecution will basically p-hack your case until they get statistical significance.

This is a great analogy.

What's backward isn't the statement, which is perfectly common sense, it's that judicial system.

I wonder, if ever interviewed by the Police, I could just say: "No thanks, search on YouTube for 'Don't Talk to the Police' for why. Or maybe, giving that reason why I won't talk means that I'm actually talking to the police?

Somewhat a tangent: when going through due diligence for Series A, my CEO said: "Remember, they are not your friends." The thing was, though, after they invested, the VC fired him.

Maybe that's the difference between prosecutors and makers.

You don't need to explain why (and probably shouldn't). All you need to say is "I'm not interested in answering questions" (possibly suffixed with "without an attorney present", though that could escalate things), or "I don't consent to any searches", or whatever fits the circumstances of the interaction. Depending on the laws in your jurisdiction, your legal obligation may be no more than stating your name and possibly providing identification if requested.

But don't be a dick: be respectful when you decline further interactions. Verbal (or other) aggression could give them a reason to try to force the issue, regardless of whether or not it's legal for them to do so.

"The dismissal is a setback to the China Initiative, an effort started in 2018 to crack down on economic and scientific espionage by China."

No, it is not. Why would it be a setback if somebody who is innocent has their case dismissed. I mean who writes such lines? Doesnt this line imply that this dismissal was a bad thing (since nobody endorses espionage).

One assumes that the goal of the China Initiative is to charge people who are actually guilty of espionage. Highly public failings at that goal would seem to be setbacks, right?

Well, some publishers are careful to note the distinction between `allegations` and `accusations` while others do not. Then there's the word `indictment` which I always assumed meant something after the fact but is instead actually defined as a "formal (lega) charge of an accusation".

The purpose of the China Initiative was ostensibly to root out industrial espionage. Instead they ended up investigating and prosecuting a bunch of Chinese scientists for legally trying to advance their work and careers, and haven’t yet discovered much if any industrial espionage. The worst they’ve found so far, from what I can tell, is a few undisclosed grants and minor visa violations.

Having incompetent, overzealous investigators and prosecutors ruin a bunch of innocent people’s lives for the sake of some questionable agenda they aren’t otherwise successfully advancing makes the whole endeavor seem like a farcical waste of public resources and undermines the reputation of the DOJ.

"The collateral damage from this error is a setback for the China Initiative, as it undermines public support for the program and discourages legitimate researchers from applying for government funding, hurting US scientific progress."

Was that so hard?

Is your comment meant to be an improvement?

Yes.

>The dismissal is a setback to the China Initiative, an effort started in 2018 to crack down on economic and scientific espionage by China. Many of the prosecutions, like the case against Dr. Chen, do not allege espionage or theft of information, but something narrower: failing to disclose Chinese affiliations in grant applications to U.S. agencies. Critics say it has instilled a pervasive atmosphere of fear among scientists of Chinese descent.

While I can agree with and see the value of the overall agenda, it seems a matter of bad application. I won't pretend to be an expert on the matter who can say exactly what needs to be done, but I wonder about how necessary it really is to drag people through the mud in such cases. It certainly can have a chilling effect on scientists with affiliations to Chinese entities, many of which are plenty secular. I understand the impetus to investigate all affiliations when a foreign state is involved, but at the same time it becomes self destructive if it goes too far all too quickly. The solution, to me, seems to fall on those doing the investigating; that the investigating parties must hold to a higher and better informed standard before bringing forth charges that could hurt American scientists, and by extention, American science

What if the chilling effect and cruelty is the, perhaps silent, point?

The problem with law enforcement today is that they want their work cut out for them. Instead of doing the old school investigation stuff and THEN getting a subpoena, they instead want to have blanket access to all of our communications. Instead of proving real espionage, they want to merely assert "suspect" links and then you're the one who have to prove you're innocent. Instead of finding drug dealers and terrorists the old fashioned way, they want all of your bank transactions reported automatically for them, so they can sit on their chairs and deep learn their way into your data towards some flimsy accusation that they will use to pressure you into pledging your guilty to something. Really, it is about time we raise our voices agains that. It is about time we say enough is enough. It is about time for us to say, the State serve its Citizens, and not the other way around. Fuck this bureaucratic neo-feudalism.

Let us say no for this shit! ---

BASTILLE DAY

Music: Geddy Lee and Alex Lifeson Lyrics: Neil Peart

There’s no bread let them eat cake \ There’s no end to what they’ll take \ Flaunt the fruits of noble birth \ Wash the salt into the earth \ But they’re marching to Bastille Day \ La guillotine will claim her bloody prize \ Free the dungeons of the innocent \ The king will kneel, and let his kingdom rise \

Bloodstained velvet, dirty lace \ Naked fear on every face \ See them bow their heads to die \ As we would bow as they rode by \

And we’re marching to Bastille Day \ La guillotine will claim her bloody prize \ Sing, o choirs of cacophony \ The king has kneeled, to let his kingdom rise. \

Lessons taught, but never learned \ All around us anger burns \ Guide the future by the past \ Long ago the mould was cast \

For they marched up to Bastille Day \ La guillotine – claimed her bloody prize \ Hear the echoes of the centuries \ Power isn’t all that money buys \

The problem is also that it targets a specific group for the (alleged!) actions of a tiny fraction of that group. That sort of thing creates an unwarranted atmosphere of distrust that hurts everyone.

A broad-based initiative to stop economic and scientific espionage? Sure, that could be a good idea. A targeted initiative that obviously will end up demonizing a particular race/nationality/ancestry of people? No, not good at all.

I absolutely agree that the investigating parties need to have higher standards of investigation. But the entire framing of it as the "China Initiative", literally an intent to target people for persecution based on their national origin, is a huge problem.

People wrongly charged with crimes should be able to sue for damages. That's the case in come jurisdictions, but often requires significant evidence of prosecutorial misconduct, a high bar to clear.

To at least attempt to think about this critically, and to try to ignore the amount of frankly shocking things people are saying here, can I ask, maybe from people in the field, is this level of industrial/scientific espionage even a critical factor in our current world? We live in a global world where scientists in various institutions are constantly trading papers, findings. Why are we so worried that the U.S. might be doing something so different from China, that this level espionage would even be viable? Surely, everyone is working on different things here and there, but this idea that there is such critical intellectual property the US that needs to be guarded so intensely in this like James Bond scenario, just feels a little wacky.

Are you all really here in 2022, being like "we can't risk a Chinese national from even seeing our American semiconductor research, they will steal it and use it against us?" Are actual scientists concerned? Or just the state, and apparently most of the fellow commenters?

This is a paranoia induced reaction that is being fostered by the media and the war industry, who are interested in creating a new cold war scenario.

Incorrect. It is a MORAL issue. Technology stolen from the US companies is advancing the national security agendas of countries with no regard for human rights and the rule of law. It is immoral to turn a blind eye to this very real threat.

It is kind of curious fact that the US is not a member of ICC. Could you guess why?

There are good reasons why geopolitics cannot be held to strict interpretation of laws, not the least of which is the enforceability paradox, whereby countries more likely to break the norms are less susceptible to enforcement action. This, and attaching the name 'court' on something does not make it any less arbitrary or politically motivated

I'm pretty sure US companies aren't thinking about the morality of it at all. Only $$$ lost and shareholders' emotions.

We know US companies aren't thinking about the morality, nor are US universities, which is why the government is stepping in.

If this was happening during the cold war, CEOs and University Presidents would be being indicted for treason.

Well, many military technologies developed by the US companies are being used to manufacture weaponries used to kill foreign civilians... what's the moral of that story?

Also, by your logic what if totalitarian regimes are to steal medical technologies from US companies to develop medicines for their citizens? Is that moral or immoral?

false equivalence. If you actually cared you would acknowledge the vast difference between China's human rights record and that of the United States.

Interesting. So you think morality is quantifiable? Like it's fine to violate X amount of human rights but not X + 1. I'd like to hear your criteria.

If you think genocide, ethnic cleansing, natural resource exploitation on a global scale, modern day slavery & deadly global pathogen release are equivalent to US misconduct I wouldn't know where to begin in engaging with you.

I can spin this too if you allow me:

"genocide" of Muslims via constant war-waging; "ethnic cleansing" of native Americans; natural resource exploitation on a global scale; "modern day slavery" (i.e. extreme capitalism) both domestically by trapping workers into lifetime debts, and overseas by outsourcing to sweat shops; "deadly global pathogen release" by politicising pandemic responses while failing at it.

Rivalry states smear each others all the time. Also no contender for hegemony is morally superior than another.

> no contender for hegemony is morally superior than another.

Contemplate Nazi Germany winning WWII, or Soviet Russia winning the Cold War. Your contention doesn't stand up to history's lessons.

That’s exactly the point. Had the Nazis won WWII, the narrative would have been the allies were the one that commit genocides, the morally corrupt, and the war-mongers; the Nazis will boast themselves as the most righteous, and most people would have no problem believing that. Hard to imagine for sure, but in a world where the winners write the history, it would be naive to think only the winners must be just because “justice always prevails”.

> It is a MORAL issue. Technology stolen from the US companies is advancing the national security agendas of countries with no regard for human rights and the rule of law. It is immoral to turn a blind eye to this very real threat.

This 100%.

With all due respect, this is completely irrelevant. This same technology and better is being sold out to countries like Saudi Arabia[1] and Israel[2], which are not exactly shining beacons of human rights.

What seems to be the argument here ? "If China wants to use US tech to oppress and kill people with no regard for human rights and the rule of law... they have to PAY for it first, like all respectable totalitarians do"?

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_rights_in_Saudi_Arabia [2]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_rights_in_Israel

Your point being: since the US provides aid to countries whose human rights records are controversial China should be free to steal and misuse US intellectual property. Great argument. Have fun in a world where China's views on human rights prevail. I'm sure you & your family and their families will be very happy.

>Your point being: since the US provides aid to countries whose human rights records are controversial China should be free to steal and misuse US intellectual property.

That's not my point at all. My point is that it's hypocritical to worry about China using stolen US tech to augment and cement it's oppressive regime when there are countries whose entire dark existence is carved out of US tech and support.

Quantitatively speaking, the marginal utility that China gets from each stolen piece of US tech is probably lower than what they get from each million dollar the US government borrows from them, or each 100000 teenager who downloads tiktok, or from each 100 customer who buy their phones. What I'm trying to say here is that China is not dependent on stolen R&D to opress and brutalize people, they can opress and brutalize people perfectly fine without it, it's just an added bonus on what they already can do.

On the other hand US support for the 2 countries that I mentioned is literally keeping them together against astounding resistence, I would gladly bet my life they would fall apart in <= 10 years if the US was taken out of all geopolitical equations in front of everybody's eyes. If you knew the sheer amount of tyranny and evil the US is single-handedly pumping into the Middle East through those 2 countries alone, you wouldn't be able to sleep at night or day.

So to sum up : I don't think your offense at China's use of US tech is proportional to the amount of damage that tech actually ends up doing. There are other countries where US tech and arms are at least 2 orders of magnitude more destructive and suffering-inducing.

>human rights records are controversial

What a creative way to understate the fact that one of the countries mentioned cut a journalist in half with a chainsaw, while the other bombs civilians on a yearly basis and kills literal babies. "Controversial" is how you describe an things where there are credible differences of opinion on; not raw, pure evil.

Surveillance tech, AI, civil engineering & biotech are all examples of appropriated technologies used for heinous crimes against Tibetans, Uyghurs, Falun Gong & general dissent in China; and to hold SE Asia hostage to vast water sources now controlled by China. You're mistaken because you're poorly informed.

You're similarly misinformed about Israel. The IDF Ruach Tzahal sets forth an ethical code of conduct that has resulted in numerous prosecutions when violated. Yes, immoral actors (eg. Ariel Sharon) can effect terrible suffering as individuals on civilian populations. That's war and everything about it sucks. But, you won't find serious ethical codes of conduct in the Saudi or Chinese doctrines.

And this is my point... mistakes, imperfections, atrocities... it is inseparable from sustained conflict regardless of who is fighting. Some countries try to do better inside this reality, some pay lip service, some don't care. You lump it all together out of some personal and poorly informed bias.

The point is that if it were a MORAL issue as you suggested, then the US would not have sold their technologies to other countries whose human rights records are controversial. The fact that they had not problem doing that entails that it was not a moral issue, at least for the US companies.

If your problem is with human rights and the rule of law, you should stop US violations first, because the US the most powerful country. The American military continues its aggression on human rights around the world.

I worked in cyber security at a major industrial company for 5 years. Yes “insider threat” is a very real concern and people get busted exfiltrating company data all the time.

is this level of industrial/scientific espionage even a critical factor in our current world

Yes. It completely bankrupted and destroyed the Canadian company Nortel [1]. Sure there were other problems that led to the downfall of Nortel, but this was a major contributing factor and has had a big impact on the Canadian tech ecosystem.

https://globalnews.ca/news/7275588/inside-the-chinese-milita...

So in the years before this hack, Nortel had already laid off more than 2/3rds of it's workforce, received a massive government bailout, and had top execs like their CEO fired for an "accounting mistake" that cost billions. "Other problems" is an understatement.

That story revolves around Brian Shields's account, which, while I don't doubt the details, I think lacks the business perspective and doesn't really explain Nortel's demise. Nortel was maximising growth during the the dot-com boom, spending heavily on acquisitions and not paying attention to its profitability. It couldn't have been worse placed to handle the dot-com bust when its main market shrunk hugely. Huawei and ZTE were not really major competitors internationally at the time.

It's dismaying to see history rewritten so brazenly.

Nortel collapsed because it made bad investments during the tech bubble, and then was hit by the nosedive in investment in network expansion when the bubble burst. On top of that, Nortel was terribly led, resorted to fudging its finances, and got caught.

That's what caused Nortel to collapse, not supposed Chinese spying. Huawei, the alleged beneficiary of the spying (which is just an unproven allegation at this point), was not even a major rival to Nortel when Nortel began to collapse. Huawei had barely even begun to expand out of China at that point. Nortel had much larger international competitors.

Yet somehow, almost two decades after Nortel began to implode, a rewritten history of Nortel's collapse, somehow premised on Chinese spying, has begun to become popular. I think this has much more to do with the recent increase in tensions between China and Canada than with any new information about how Nortel went under.

This shouldn't be a surprise. The Avro airplane was similarly infiltrated by soviet spies back in the 50's, thanks to lax immigration standards and policies.

The thing is that, while Nortel was pretty much an open bar for technology transfers (Canada didn't seem to care), what killed the company was accounting fraud.

> Are you all really here in 2022, being like "we can't risk a Chinese national from even seeing our American semiconductor research, they will steal it and use it against us?"

There are a number of issues at play here and I can speak to several of them, having either helped the federal government directly or having knowledge of industrial espionage in my industry at the time (semiconductors).

Some technology is export-controlled in the United States, full stop. Semiconductor research may absolutely be export-controlled and thus may not leave the United States or be shown to foreign nationals. Any researcher's talk, paper, research, materials, etc. must undergo an export controls review first before it leaves the United States or is shown to a foreign national. This is SOP at every research lab in the United States.

If you do not disclose information when asked by the federal government as part of an investigation impacting national security, then woe be unto you. I don't know what else to say there. It appears that this may be what caused this gentleman the issues outlined by the NY Times.

Industrial espionage is absolutely a thing in the semiconductor industry. I was once told how Hynix pilfered fab designs from Samsung. The loss was estimated to be $1 billion. I am personally aware of other lesser IP loss through the hands of careless engineers.

I hope this helps answer your question. It is absolutely a thing in 2022.

> The estimated loss was estimated to be $1 billion.

I always give side eye to the accounting that considers lost sales opportunities to be losses.

Not saying Hynix did nothing wrong, only that that number assumes a lot of factors that are in no way guaranteed (stability of the market, no third player independently developing innovations that would create an attractive alternative for customers, the ability of the stealing company to implement the design they've acquired, etc.).

> I always give side eye to the accounting that considers lost sales opportunities to be losses.

That's a perfectly valid but also somewhat trivial point. Some number has to be assigned as human nature requires it.

Maybe the best representation of the situation is to present it as a question. When fabs cost $xx billion and take almost a decade to reach fruition from R&D to the point where they start shipping a viable product, if you were able to shave two to four years off that process, what does that number look like to you?

It looks like saving a billion dollars in redundant work, which is a net societal gain. Now consumers have two companies to choose chips from instead of one functional monopoly due to a trade secret moat... Win for consumers. ;)

... Hence my unease with the way the question is phrased. I'm not saying we should either mandate corporate espionage or enforce some kind of punishments for not publicizing designs, but my point is it doesn't take a lot of reframing of the question to completely change the numbers, and that makes the numbers suspect for being anything real.

It's akin to the sleight of mind that allowed us to put the burden of fraud on consumers with the concept of "identity theft," instead of asking why it should be the responsibility of the person who's information was used that some third party used that information to trick a company into giving away resources. What if the mindset were instead "it's not Alice in Topeka's responsibility that Visa allowed Bob Hacker to scam Walmart out of a bunch of free stuff by pretending to be Alice, and Alice should be required to do exactly nothing to fix Walmart and Visa's problem?" What if instead of having to contract credit monitoring agencies to look out for identity theft, the government held credit reporting agencies responsible with statutory damages for defamation when they incorrectly declare a person has done something they have not?

A slight reframing of the problem completely changes the proposed solutions and the value calculus of what was gained and what was lost.

> Now consumers have two companies to choose chips from instead of one functional monopoly due to a trade secret moat... Win for consumers.

If we were considering this purely from the lens of consumer choice, allowing IP theft seems like a no-brainer. But it's pretty clear from the last few years how important supply chains are to the countries they reside in (and how their absence is strongly felt). To phrase it another way, suppose IP theft makes an industry outright unprofitable in a country and those jobs disappear in that country. It can take decades to spin that stuff up again and the consequences can be disastrous. From that perspective, it's understandable why governments would want to tamp down on IP theft. That said, the story described in the OP is tragic and reflects a perverse situation where someone who came to America seeking those things we promise to the world was considered guilty for chasing the American dream.

It's not a gain even purely from the lens of consumer choice unless there is only one iteration of chip improvements ever. Why? Because if this is permitted, there will be no company A to do the research to create the next generation of chips and innovation basically halts.

How are those even remotely similar?

On one hand you have a company that has invested billions of dollars to develop a technology on the assumption that it will give them an advantage that will allow them to recoup their losses. Then someone steals it and they can't recoup because it's no longer an advantage. Yes, in this one instance it's a benefit to consumers, but it's clearly not a benefit to the people who worked hard to develop the technology or the investors that took on the risk of trying.

It feels like your next argument will be that patents shouldn't be enforceable because it's better for society that everyone have access to everything.

> It looks like saving a billion dollars in redundant work, which is a net societal gain. Now consumers have two companies to choose chips from instead of one functional monopoly due to a trade secret moat... Win for consumers. ;)

But looking at it from the company point of view.

- Company A spends 5 billion $ researching a new fab, from which better chips can be made.

- Company A expects to sell those chips as <cost> + <margin> + <an amount extra to pay off the 5 billion that was spent>

- Company B steals the plans for the fab

- Company B sells the chips for <cost> + <margin>

At this point, it is impossible for Company A to recoup the money they spent researching the technology, because people will buy from Company B if it costs less from them. That's a pretty huge loss.

For Company A it's a loss, for Company B it's a gain, and for the world it's a gain, because now there are more of those better chips than there would have been. The problem is that if Company A expects this to happen, they may not spend the US$5 billion in the first place, which is an even bigger loss for the world.

Nortel comes to mind. Think about all the highly paid engineers that lost their jobs. An entire domestic sector wiped out.

Nortel was sunk by mismanagement before the espionage episode, not by the espionage itself. Quite possibly a lot of Nortel's technology would have been lost in the confusion of bankruptcy if the spies hadn't saved it.

Do you have any info or reading on this? I tried to Google "nortel mismanagement", but it's unclear any of the sources put it in light of the espionage.

There are some comments at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30114607, but I admit I haven't verified them. I'm interested to hear what you end up concluding if you do dig into the sources.

Sales isn't the only part of it. Hynix could have reverse engineered the chip and made a functional copy that wouldn't violate any copyright or patent laws (this last is a maybe, depending on if the interface is patented or just the implementation), but that would have cost millions in engineering hours. They also could have hired engineers to build the fabs, again at the cost of a lot of engineering hours.

The time to bring technology to market is also worth lots of money.

Do you not think Intel is at a loss financially due to how they fell behind TSMC in fabrication technology?

If Intel instead had had the better process, how much more revenue would they have, what market cap would they have?

It has material impact. If someone unscrupulous could steal TSMCs tech, do you not think TSMC would suffer? Or how much better off the thief would be?

Preventing incremental material losses suffered by a U.S. mega-corporation isn't very high on my priority list and shouldn't be very high on yours, either, if you are a citizen of this planet. Many parts of the U.S. have third world conditions and the UN recently sent inspectors to parts of West Virginia because things have become so bad there. Millions are without healthcare, children are hungry, etc. Why waste even a breath on protecting proprietary semiconductor technology? The major semiconductor companies have significantly more motivation to protect their proprietary technology than the modicum of care we derive from our saber rattling and trying to maintain geopolitical dominance, and at the end of the day it is up to them to protect their own tech (their real enemy is AMD and ARM anyway). Imbuing certain technologies with vague and in practice largely imaginary export control laws does very little to prevent this kind of behavior, and it is in my mind a misappropriation of resources and mental energy to go out of our way to try to enforce them on a national scale. Shouldn't we, as a society, instead reserve this level of moral and legal outrage for CEOs who price-fix, bribe, and make 100x more than their average employee while people are starving in rural backwaters and dying in the streets and in hospital hallways thanks to COVID?

Oh I agree companies should have greater interest in the well being of their communities and we should effect change that makes them beholden to the communities that allowed them to prosper and not sell the communities out to the lowest bidder overseas.

But… tell China this same argument. That they should not protect their self interest and see how well it goes over.

> But… tell China this same argument. That they should not protect their self interest and see how well it goes over.

Note that my argument is one of prioritization -- to protect our self-interest, we have a lot more pressing problems at home than Intel et al losing a few bucks because they let the wrong people see the secret formula, and wasting precious human and financial resources on the wrong problems can be worse than doing nothing.

As you mention, China on the other hand can afford to worry about problems like this, given their 0.7% poverty rate as of 2015 (despite some glaring issues like ethnic genocide, free speech, etc). In the U.S. we have an 11% poverty rate and nearly a million dead from COVID. We don't have time or resources to play the secret formula game with walkie-talkies in tree forts. Gotta do our homework pretty soon or it will be bed with no supper.

The irony of all of this, of course, is that we already have a system in place for protecting secret formulae: you patent them.

But here we get on the issue of the question of international espionage and whether it matters if you patent something in the US if China will just refuse to enforce an international patent.

Perhaps there's a case to be made that in a world where superpowers don't obey each others' laws, this was never going to be Samsung's $1 billion to make...

It seems like when you sum it all up, this is a really good time to be a Chinese tech firm.

It just goes to show that patents are stupid at the end of the day. From a harm-reduction standpoint, they do way, way more harm in the form of astronomically high drug prices, core pieces of technology being off limits even though almost anyone could have invented them, etc., etc., than they help. Patents, like intellectual property, are an imaginary legal construct, and if you want to compete in a global economy, you have to assume others aren't going to buy into your imaginary concept, particularly when it comes to opposing global powers.

A lot of knock-off technology is actually _created_ by people reverse-engineering things _from_ the patent as well, which they then mass-produce in a jurisdiction that doesn't respect U.S. intellectual property (AKA China where most things are mass-produced).

The real system of protection in place for protecting secret formulae is simple and more effective -- don't show it to the wrong people, and don't outsource your factories.

I am a professor in the field of cryptography and there are export restrictions here as well. Under no circumstances would I allow the US government to block publication of my papers or talks based on the theory that my speech is “a technology export.” It’s not even clear that this would be allowed under the First Amendment. The government could obviously try to advance that theory, but I strongly suspect they would run into a hailstorm of First Amendment litigation and public blowback.

To me it feels like these prosecutions are an attempt to do exactly that — place restrictions on academic speech and collaboration — but to do it through the “backdoor” of funding agencies and fraud accusations. In other words, if the US said “we are prosecuting you for sharing your open research publications with Chinese scientists,” this would be politically and maybe constitutionally infeasible. So instead they’re trying to achieve effectively the same chilling effect by accusing these scientists of criminal fraud in their funding applications. It is also noteworthy that these cases keep falling apart, which makes me think that they’re exactly as weak as I'm making them out to be.

At the end of the day we need to be very careful about this. We are a country that values free speech, has a constitution that guarantees it, and also needs open speech to make science work. “The government passed some laws restricting technology export” does not actually mean the government can and should be able to restrict scientific speech, and it definitely shouldn’t let them do it through weird indirect means like this.

ETA: It is important to draw a distinction between proprietary or classified IP (and physical equipment) where espionage or theft of trade secret accusations might make sense vs. open scientific research where it sure doesn’t. These cases keep trying to blur the distinction. I suspect if they were clear examples of the former then the cases wouldn’t keep collapsing.

ETA2: I have NSF funding and I just want to add that NSF regulation is byzantine. There are too many regulations surrounding NSF applications and reporting for a human (with an actual job) to be 100% certain that they haven't misstated something or omitted a critical detail. I would guess every US scientist is vulnerable to this sort of (selective, politically-motivated) prosecution.

As you are of course aware, but perhaps some people reading this are not, the government did consistently advance the theory that publication of speech about cryptography was "a technology export" subject to export control --- specifically, cryptographic source code --- until Bernstein v. United States, which required a several-years-long court battle.

You were a country that values free speech. Now you are a country that values "content moderation" to suppress "misinformation".

This is exactly my point: the government advanced exactly this theory and the crucial point is they lost in court. They were forced to weaken the laws as a result. The new laws remain constitutionally untested and the government seems very eager to keep them that way.

Agreed. But public opinion has shifted; people in the US think "free speech" is a "right-wing issue" now, and as you can see every time China is mentioned on HN there are ten thousand xenophobic comments by assholes from the US who don't even know the difference between the Cultural Revolution and the Great Leap Forward. In theory public opinion shouldn't affect the outcome of a court case unless it results in statutory or constitutional changes, but of course it does. Given the current trend toward authoritarianism, the longer the government can delay the court battle, the better their chances.

With due respect, the right wing is perfectly happy to use the power of government to suppress speech they don’t like. See eg the new bills banning discussion of sexual identity in Florida schools. I usually regret responding to OT partisan comments, but statements of belief like “<my preferred political party> is the party of free speech” is exactly how you end up voting in a government that brutally suppresses free speech.

I didn't mean the right wing was actually in favor of free speech, and I should have been clearer about that. The right wing has never been in favor of free speech, nearly by definition. The consequence is that the US political scene is dominated by two illiberal parties, much like, for example, Egypt after Mubarak's flight, or the late Weimar Republic.

I'm surprised that you'd think right-wing US parties were my preferred political party; maybe you've forgotten who I am because I stopped using Twitter. Still, I'd think even my comments in this thread would provide abundant evidence of my commitments to liberalism and distaste for authoritarianism.

I don't think it is strictly a partisan issue but the potential precedence where a re-normalization event may occur. What struck me curious was a random quote quote from somewhere that reads: "conservatism is progressivism with speed limits". I mean, where have we seen instances where such precedences have been set in the grassroot moments all the way to our highest courts?

Crypto export control.

DeCSS.

SDMI.

Effects from twitter bots from the early years and now?

*jokes are hard

This comment does not contribute.

Concur.

The US can be extremely creative when it comes to mislabeling things. Wire Fraud, Munitions and Money can suddenly equate to selling something, cryptographic code and people. This makes no sense to uninitiated outsiders.

I don't understand how you think your point relates to it's parent. Are you just piggybacking off the point that the US does control export of semiconductor technology to make this separate point? Or are you suggesting the US shouldn't control export of semi-conductor technology in the same way they shouldn't restrict your publications on cryptography?

The point is that they aren't "controlling an export", they are trying to restrict free speech.

The parent comment says "any researcher's talk, paper, research, materials, etc. must undergo an export controls review first before it leaves the United States or is shown to a foreign national. This is SOP at every research lab in the United States." My purpose in the comment is to point out that such review is not legally required for public academic research, and there are good constitutional and policy reasons it should not be. Moreover we should be careful about letting the government implement such policies via indirect means.

While I'm not in the field of semiconductor research, the export control laws in my field are quite similar (in fact, they're literally the same Federal laws.) And if you read the US code, you'll see that it excludes "[p]ublic domain information which is published and is accessible or available to the public, unrestricted: publications & conferences, patents, fundamental research." These exceptions exist because earlier laws did not have such exceptions and were found (in a case involving cryptography) to be unconstitutional.

Thank you for the context

"[p]ublic domain information which is published and is accessible or available to the public, unrestricted: publications & conferences, patents, fundamental research."

That's the definition for what falls under public domain and isn't export controlled, but say you are the one first publishing and bringing it in to the public domain. Would that first publication of something that isn't currently in the public domain fall under the exception?

Yes, that's one exception that seems highly relevant to the current case. Software is another. I'd like to believe that "published research is protected by 1A, but the speech necessary to make new published research is not protected" would go over like a lead balloon in the courts. Notice that these laws haven't been tested: instead prosecutors are going after "grant fraud" (and then dropping all charges before a judge can rule.)

If you didn't take money from the federal government, I would be inclined to agree with you, that export controls are an abridgement of the freedom of speech, but if your work is taxpayer-funded, then the government absolutely has the authority to restrict how you use the fruits of those funds; if you cannot abide by them then perhaps consider stop taking federal funds?

I think you are 100% backwards in your thinking here. If the US taxpayer funds research then public funders actually have a very high bar in their ability to restrict the publication of that research. For the simple reason that the taxpayer funds it and government restrictions on speech face a very high Constitutional bar. By contrast if I take funding from Amazon or Apple it’s much easier for them to demand NDAs and speech restrictions. (Which I have been asked for and wouldn’t agree to.)

you are right in practice, but my argument is not about what is de facto the case, but what should be the case.

> government restrictions on speech

Well this obviously should not generally be the case. If you are, say a high ranking general at the pentagon -- which is a position directly paid by the government, so arguably way more "protected" by the constitution than a subcontractor awardee of a grant, which could be considered to "create a legal veil", then can you claim "first amendment" if you pass military secrets on to an adversarial government? Of course not.

There is a huge amount of constitutional jurisprudence around the notion of national security clearance and all of it rests on the idea that it is a strictly limited exception to the First Amendment, generally one that is used sparingly and only when needed. This is why private citizens must volunteer to obtain security clearances. The General you speak of is presumably a volunteer who also agreed to be bound by stricter rules around classified data.

The NSF does not (generally) fund classified research. They fund unclassified research at open academic Universities. If the researcher in TFA had joined a military lab and submitted to a clearance, this would be an open and shut case. He did not do anything of the sort, and so the prosecutors were forced to hunt down some workaround to achieve their desired result, then ultimately drop a groundless case.

>has the authority to restrict how you use the fruits of those funds; if you cannot abide by them then perhaps consider stop taking federal funds?

Not sure if you're familiar with this bit[0]:

   Congress shall make no law respecting an 
   establishment of religion, or prohibiting the
   free exercise thereof; *or abridging the 
   freedom of speech*,

Are you arguing that taking public money obviates the above?

I'd say that since the government is involved, the above (are you not familiar with that bit?) is absolutely relevant and needs to be respected -- given that it's the law of the land.

[0] https://www.law.cornell.edu/constitution/first_amendment

going to quote my sibling child comment here:

If you are, say a high ranking general at the pentagon -- which is a position directly paid by the government, then can you claim "first amendment" if you pass military secrets on to an adversarial government? Of course not.

I suggest you think about why a general gets treated differently than a private citizen. Suppose you are a private citizen and manage to snap a picture of a secret research plane coming out of area 51, while not in the bounds of the facility. You will very likely enjoy first amendment privileges.

>I suggest you think about why a general gets treated differently than a private citizen.

I didn't realize that being an academic at a private research institution was equivalent to being a member of the armed forces.

Thanks for clarifying that for me. I should have realized that they were exactly the same thing.

Please.

Listen, if you work at a private research institution and you raise funds through a nonprofit (like, say HHMI), then by all means, do what you want. You are not beholden to the taxpayer. Money from the government absolutely comes with strings attached. Do you think that an employee of Lockheed Martin would be able leak secret plane information on a government contract to an adversarial country with impunity, just because it is a "private company owned by private citizens", thus gaining "first amendment protections"?

There's a difference between classified information and scientific research. Yes, some scientific research could be classified, but unless the government can show "national security implications" (a pretty low bar, IMHO), they should not be restricting the flow of speech or ideas.

A general officer in the military is not only covered by the Constitution, but by the UCMJ[0].

As such, your comparison is flawed.

We're (or at least TFA and me) aren't talking about folks subject to NDAs or restrictions based on "national security."

Private companies and private citizens can (at least in the US), limit and censor speech and information as much as they want -- and for the most part be supported by the courts (vis a vis NDAs and the like).

The government on the other hand is explicitly barred from banning most speech (there are exceptions of course, including libel/slander and/or disclosing classified information to unauthorized folks -- note that publishing such information has been held to be "free speech" -- it's the folks who disclosed such information that could be civilly (in the case of an NDA) or criminally (in the case of classified information) liable.

However, the government is barred from restricting speech except in those narrow circumstances.

Please explain how such narrow circumstances apply in this case? Or, absent those circumstances, under what legal framework would government restrictions on speech apply even to government-funded research? Please do explain. I'd be fascinated to hear it.

I'll repeat, and I'll use the words of those who wrote the law of the land. Hopefully, you'll understand the second time around:

   Congress shall make no law respecting an 
   establishment of religion, or prohibiting the 
   free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom 
   of speech, or of the press; or the right of the 
   people peaceably to assemble, and to petition 
   the government for a redress of grievances.

About which part of the above do you disagree?

If you feel the above is in error, I suggest taking the steps defined here[1]. Good luck with that.

[0] https://www.military.com/join-armed-forces/the-uniform-code-...

[1] https://www.archives.gov/federal-register/constitution

You act as if I haven't read the constitution. I've pored over the constitution so many times, I'm well versed in obscurities down to the twenty dollar clause and the post roads clause.

Can you explain to me how classifying content is not an abridgement of free speech in an absolute reading of the constitution?

"Congress shall make no law.."

It does not say "Congress shall make no law, unless it's classified"

The UCMJ is (of course) congressional law, so by your analysis, the UCMJ would be in abeyance of the first amendment.

You didn't answer my question. Rather, you moved the goalposts.

Do that and I'll reciprocate.

Have a great day!

contract law. done.

>contract law. done.

That doesn't answer my question. Which was:

>Please explain how such narrow circumstances apply in this case? Or, absent those circumstances, under what legal framework would government restrictions on speech apply even to government-funded research? Please do explain. I'd be fascinated to hear it.

Are you advocating that all government-funded research should (or already does) have NDAs associated with them?

That's news to me. Please provide some documentation for your claim.

Yes, Congress has implemented laws that are within the narrow exceptions to the the bar on restriction of speech. How does that apply in this specific case?

What you are claiming/proposing is not the law of the land. What changes to the law/constitution are you proposing?

I await your response with (hopefully) some actual exposition. Based on your previous writings in this thread, I won't hold my breath.

>You act as if I haven't read the constitution.

That's a result of your statements.

>I suggest you think about why a general gets treated differently than a private citizen.

It's called the Uniform Code of Military Justice[0], and only applies to military personnel. That's why a general gets treated differently to a private citizen.

[0] https://www.military.com/join-armed-forces/the-uniform-code-...

ETA2: every scientist should include a statement that they believe they have complied with necessary regulations but that to evaluate and comply with them completely and consistently is an onerous burden and that they are operating in good faith, and welcome an audit.

Audits (if they aren't biased or motivated) can determine whether the failure to comply was ignorance, or intentional, and if ignorant, was it criminally so?

I mean, I've filed for NIH grants and there were parts that were self-contradictory and parts that my institution wouldn't let us do, so we always had to send it off to Contracts and Grants. Several proposal that I considered completely legit failed C&G review.

We (as in a company i have worked for) have caught employed chinese nationals try to install malware / provided internal account credentials to chinese ip addresses in simple retail big box industries. (I saw this happen personally and was shown what he was trying to install, and how a service account assigned to our group was trying to slurp up and probe the data from an IP address backtraced from China)

If that can happen in something relatively trivial you dont think a high stakes industry has it worse?

> If that can happen in something relatively trivial you dont think a high stakes industry has it worse?

I don't disclose my work for the federal government anymore on public profiles because I became tired of the constant hacking attempts directed at me. Once I scrubbed my profiles they stopped.

> Any researcher's talk, paper, research, materials, etc. must undergo an export controls review first before it leaves the United States or is shown to a foreign national.

Are you saying that if a professor in the US doing semiconductor research gave a talk in their university, that talk would have to undergo an "export controls review" before being given (since students could attend the talk, and many students are foreign nationals)? I'm having a very hard time picturing that. Do you have first hand experience, or is this just how you imagine this works?

What’s the primary export of the United States?

> Are you all really here in 2022, being like "we can't risk a Chinese national from even seeing our American semiconductor research, they will steal it and use it against us?" Are actual scientists concerned? Or just the state, and apparently most of the fellow commenters?

It’s intellectual property. The majority of the worlds cutting edge research are designed, developed, tested, and eventually marketed in the United States. That’s the advantage of free markets and gives the US first mover advantage.

Yes, it’s exceedingly important that is maintained (to the United States). If that stops occurring... manufacturing is gone, mining and energy sectors are regulated to oblivion. There’s not much left. Food and services? Healthcare? None of those produce enough wealth to maintain the nation, only information and advanced / advancing technology can support US growth.

>That’s the advantage of free markets

The large amounts of research done for and funded by the US government helps a lot too as do the various methods to give R&D tax advantages.

The majority, really? TSMC's fabs are in Taiwan, using ASML machines from the Netherlands. Much of their chips run ARM, from Cambridge. As I look at my tabs, I see Google Maps (invented by an Australian in Sydney), and Spotify (from Sweden).

The world is far, far, bigger than the USA; and as an Australian, I'd say it's extremely pretentious or naive to think the US has a 'majority' of cutting edge tech.

Google Maps and Spotify are not cutting edge tech.

ASML tech leveraged investments made over the decades by US national labs and consortiums like EUV-LLC as well as by companies like Cymer (DUV) which they acquired. IIRC, Part of the reason the US can forbid ASML selling EUV machines to China is they are covered by some patents held by US DOE/NIST.

For sure, ASML did the “final mile” in perfecting EUV and making it work in a production environment vs the prototypes in the labs 20 years ago, but I don’t think the funding that the US government and consortium members dumped on decades of research should be swept under the rug.

The parent does have a point, a common argument for pharmaceuticals is that governments and universities fund, or participate in funding, everything except the ‘last mile’ of drug development, i.e. human clinical trials. So a naive reader may assume they were primarily responsible but in fact it is the ‘last mile’ that consumes the vast majority of resources. Although the breakdown may not be clear in the case of EUV, it is possible that the vast majority of effort was getting across that ‘last mile’ of development, and thus a primarily non-US effort.

Okay, but that's just ignoring that ASML's largest design center is in NY just a few tens of miles from NYC and White Plains. Why is it there? Global Foundries (former IBM and AMD) is nearby and that was where the research was happening. Their second largest design center is in Norway, so not even in the EU. But sure, they're a Dutch company that does most of its design work outside of the Netherlands.

In terms of research, well the USA is still leading in total number of dollars, researchers, labs, and light sources dedicated to semiconductor research. Heck, we have three of the world's most advanced accelerators (Fermi Lab, Argonne National Labs, and SLAC) that are critical to semiconductor device research and were where most of the EUV breakthroughs were made.

In terms of total effort for EUV, yeah most probably wasn't in the USA. But if I had to hazard a guess, probably 50-60% of the research and development of EUV was done in the USA, Canada, Taiwan, Japan, and South Korea. So essentially countries firmly within our sphere of influence with the rest occurring in Europe (not the EU, the continent), the People's Republic of China, India, etc. And as we're moving forward, TSMC's stated reason for putting their most advanced fabs in the USA going forward is because they want faster and easier access to where the research is occurring at the bleeding edge of the research without the problem of the time gap that delays and impedes communication due to sleep schedules.

The integrated circuit was invented in the U.S., and the semiconductor industry was pioneered in the U.S.

Op said that the U.S. pioneers and develops technology, giving a first mover advantage. Yes, eventually other countries catch up and start innovating on their own, but the point that the U.S. is generally the pioneer stands.

The IC was invented over 60 years ago. That's human 2-3 generations.

The IP of how to do things (patents) is made up and detrimental to society. Other IP such as brand names is reasonable, we don't want people saying they're selling us Coca-Cola if it isn't from that particular manufacturer.

If there are ways to make stuff, everyone should be allowed to try, because it's in setting up the complex web of inputs and bringing the product to market that people benefit.

The advantage of free markets isn't that it allows the US to make IP, it's that it lets various people have a go at supplying something that people want.

A friend of mine is a scientist in a relevant field, and has caught Chinese PhD students photographing documents in one case, and taking a video recording of a sensitive part of a laboratory in another case. In both cases, what they were recording was not related to their own work.

Not everything is published openly. Some research is kept quiet until the economic value has been realized, and sometimes the "what" is published but not so much the "how".

This happens so often and so frequently that it makes me wonder if there is some official part of the Chinese government set up to consume and distribute this information.

I mean if an American went to a prestigious university or worked a job where they got access to sensitive information for a random company like lets say Ferrari. They wouldnt immediately know who to sell this info too or have a buyer. But it seems like we hear constant stories in such a way that makes me think they were already briefed on who to tell and get this info too.

Idk, maybe im being naive, maybe the CIA sends emails or reaches out to American nationals who work on sensitive projects.

Is that illegal? If not, their actions are not exactly nefarious. Sharing unpublished knowledge is a boon to humanity. (Not that the Chinese are publishing their “findings” openly.)

Scientists do not necessarily see the global picture here -- if anything, they'll be inclined to downplay geopolitical and nat-security issues (or at look the other way) if it produces more and better science. This is excluding any consideration of funding -- just what a scientist is supposed to care about.

Some people need to take science more seriously, but there's a kind of crowd that needs to stop worshipping scientists.

>>> if it produces more and better science

Its not even about science anymore, its all about money and prestige [0]. I am not saying there are no principled scientists, but money and prestige makes the world go around.

[0]: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/12/21/science/charles-lieber.ht...

Two sides of the sword: The reason China got nuclear weapon so fast is that USA pushed the top nuclear scientist back to China. This could happen to semiconductor or other fields.

I don't see any solution though, if you don't control, you will lose valuables faster, if you do, you will overdo it sometimes.

Nothing is perfect, if things went too far in the process, let's trust the legal system to sort it out.

The opposite of 'wacky' - key R&D and especially know-how is critical to the development of specific industries and in some cases, it should be guarded.

It can take decades of effort, R&D, product development to develop the key understanding towards making for example, jet turbines, high speed trains, chip fabs etc..

Economic espionage is real and part of China's industrial strategy.

It should be noted that 'everyone else' will also steal R&D to the extent that it's related to weapons, but generally not industrial information.

That said - probably most research isn't that important, and this kind of thing can easily turn into 'Witch Hunt'. Paradoxically, the CPP will also use an overbearing posture by the US on this issue as part of propaganda efforts.

The CCP right now is fighting a 'narrative war' with all the touchy issues: they are circulating information indicating that COVID started in Europe, and in response to stern words by Canada PM Trudeau, China is telling it's citizens the a recent outbreak is due to 'frozen food from China'. Controlling information means being able to tell their citizens whatever they want and having them believe it for the most part. That a few independent thinkers want to 'VPN out' and form their own opinions isn't that important if you can tell 99% of people what the truth is.

CCP is playing 'full court press competition' - they are engaging and comprising students on campus [1] , seeking information from well placed ex-patriots [2], planting spies everywhere [3], grabbing people and re-patriating Chinese citizens abroad by force [4], running disinformation campaigns [5], compromising state officials [6] and more.

So it's important that our 'values' of true justice, equality, transparency etc. are not compromised, and we don't want to regress to early 20th century racism, but at the same time, it's a 'war' of sorts and it's incredibly naive to operate on the basis that this is not happening and affecting everyone.

Probably it will take more than just a simple plan, but a major new way of thinking about China, and a whole series of changes in that regard.

Even things such as governments new 'Trustless' IT policy published here yesterday, are a step in the right direction.

[1] https://www.propublica.org/article/even-on-us-campuses-china...

[2] https://www.csis.org/programs/technology-policy-program/surv...

[3] https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/explain-the-chinese-...

[4] https://thethaiger.com/news/world/china-forced-nearly-10000-...

[5] https://thediplomat.com/2020/06/chinas-disinformation-campai...

[6] https://www.sfgate.com/politics/article/Barbara-Boxer-China-...

> So it's important that our 'values' of true justice, equality, transparency etc. are not compromised, and we don't want to regress to early 20th century racism

This is a challenging problem for a democracy being exploited by an authoritarian government.

The challenge is 1) Not causing xenophobia (as the article implies) while still 2) recognizing and preventing the practices and influence of the CCP on our population, corporations, and economy which do not align with our moral values and also preventing the export of externalities onto democracies whose very structure allows it.

Most of the books I read have something along the lines of first recognizing the author's appreciation for and love of the Chinese people then discussing what the CCP is doing and what a democracy can do to protect itself without compromising its values.

If anyone looking into this dichotomy has not seriously studied the subject and just thinks the US government is trying to start a Cold War, is paranoid, or that open markets and will magically fix this problem I recommend a book published in 2022. "The World According to China" - Elizabeth C. Economy.

Yes, that's exactly it.

The problem is that the 'infiltration' is pervasive, as designed by the CCP and it therefore gets really nuanced in terms of trying to uphold justice and anti-discrimination.

CCP is pursuing '360 Thought Control' within their borders ... but using every avenue outside their borders as well.

There are also subtle gradient problems as well: some Chinese students on campuses which have had CCP intimidation have state 'yes it's a thing, but really most of us consider it to be kind of ridiculous'. In that case, it may be a lot of 'intent' but little real influence.

But the indirect, knock-on effects can be as dramatic. I once saw a presentation by an American early state investor for the Shenzhen/HK area, keen to give an idea of how the area was expanding. His presentation talked about strategic initiatives of the local governors there, and it was right out of the governments talking points. In short, he was acting as shill for the CCP. I think the only reason he was doing it was to stay in the 'good books' of local governors and to develop relations. The leverage consistently utilized by Chinese government on all such matters is palpable. Hollywood which is an array of people within an industry, not a 'single entity' exemplifies this. The Dalai Lama no longer gets many meetings with high profile dignitaries, and Hollywood has basically 'shut up about the issue' for the most part due entirely to economic coercion.

Certainly, one of the measures Western Nations should implement is a transparency policy whereby their measures are given public airing, and possibly 'tit for tat' sanctions, which is to say all measures taken by them imply some kind of in-kind response. It would take a lot of coordination.

Edit: China is indicating the recent Omicron outbreak there is from Canadian frozen food (not Chinese, as I miswrote). A blatantly terrible bit of propaganda.

You can't be serious about opsec and not take seriously the risk of an internal bad actor with access to your systems.

Yeah, that was my thought - they treat everybody like a spy, because that's literally their job description.

The majority of the cases I'm familiar with had an internal bad actor.

If you don't take that into account when formulating your security policy and threat model then you have not done your homework.

>Surely, everyone is working on different things here and there, but this idea that there is such critical intellectual property the US that needs to be guarded so intensely in this like James Bond scenario, just feels a little wacky

lots of technology that took billions of dollars and decades to develop? Why would you give that away for free?

Protecting IP isn't some new thing, humans have done it for thousands of years

>As Constantine Porphyrogennetos' warnings show, the ingredients and the processes of manufacture and deployment of Greek fire were carefully guarded military secrets.

>The technological advantage it provided was responsible for many key Byzantine military victories, most notably the salvation of Constantinople from the first and second Arab sieges, thus securing the Empire's survival

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greek_fire

> lots of technology that took billions of dollars and decades to develop? Why would you give that away for free?

I don't know, ask Alexander Fleming maybe. To save lives? Make the life better for scores of other people, no matter their nationality or class? Why do you even do research, just for the bilions?

>Alexander Fleming

not a great example, Penicillin was only made possible due to government funding to refine the manufacturing process for war

>As to the chemical isolation and purification, Howard Florey and Ernst Boris Chain at the Radcliffe Infirmary in Oxford took up the research to mass-produce it, which they achieved with support from World War II military projects under the U.S. and British governments

and you could make the case that if the Allies just handed that research over to their enemies it would prolong the war

I'd like to point out that the majority of replies to this comment are about industrial espionage, and not academic research.

Academic research tends to run some time ahead of industrial applications.

But the discussion we're having right now is about academic research, which gets published openly. Professors move between institutions all the time. Has Harvard sued MIT because some professor didn't get tenure and took their research and students with them?

I think that there's a difference if the professor in question were consulting for US companies, or specifically in projects within the DoD(versus receiving a grant, which again is a different situation), and shared those with Chinese entities. But as far as I can tell, nobody in this comments section is looking into that and we're just having arguments about other situations instead of what has actually happened. That obfuscates the matter at hand.

> ... is this level of industrial/scientific espionage even a critical factor in our current world?

Yes

Industrial espionage can be an existential matter for companies. They rarely make the headlines but there's plenty of court cases like AMSC vs Sinovel, where Sinovel (China) stole the control software AMSC had developed and pretty much ruined them as a company.

I've personally witnessed Chinese national students attempting to acquire access to sensitive lab equipment and documentation their research wouldn't require (this is physics, here, not CS).

I've been on the defensive end of attacks by employees (all Chinese citizens, living in China) in our Chinese organization attempting to breach data and infrastructure firewalls.

Once upon a time my work touched some sensitive, classified areas. I was more or less constantly harassed by rather hilarious and obvious attempts by Chinese individuals to gain access to the classified bits for a time.

We don't live in a world where scientific and technological advances are all to the good for humanity. There are politically powerful people who would see these things used to ends that hurt others for their own gain. It happens all the time, and likely will as long as humans are what we are.

> There are politically powerful people who would see these things used to ends that hurt others for their own gain. It happens all the time, and likely will as long as humans are what we are.

Don't you think this group of politically powerful people might include the ones you research for?

Of course it would: but I'm struggling to understand the relevance, here. We do this stuff. They do this stuff. We each want to stop the other from doing it. There's nothing contradictory about it, as I'm not making an absolutist statements regarding ethics or morality.

"I've personally witnessed Chinese national students attempting to acquire access to sensitive lab equipment and documentation their research wouldn't require (this is physics, here, not CS)."

Well, I've personally witnessed american students attempting to acquire access to sensitive lab equipment and documentation their research wouldn't require, too. That included me! Thank goodness the attitude of my leaders was "smart people should have access to more tools than their job requires". that included chinese nationals who were in my program.

Certainly, my goal was the capture the hearts and minds of chinese people who were in my PhD program, so that they would move here, become US citizens, and contibute to our economy. It never even occurred to me that people could have a "dual scientific citizenship" and sort of hold positions in china and the us at the same time, and exploit that.

My goodness you read far too much into my comment: acting as though I thought every piece of sensitive information should be closely guarded to the death is...less than charitable.

One of my favorite college professors got nabbed for secretly collaborating with the Japanese government: https://voiceofoc.org/2014/02/former-uci-professor-pleads-gu...

It does happen, even at university level.

The only critical approach is to begin with the beginning and the trigger event, refusal to provide the passwords requested to his devices. In the UK it's a crime to refuse law enforcement request for your passwords. If the similar is true in the USA, or there's critical details involved - which frankly only CCTV footage could possibly reveal - about this incident, then there's your cause and effect from whence forward everything looks like semantic disassembly to me on the academics part and a desperate need to show substantive accusations on the governments part.

A history of espionage and theft of trade secrets demonstrates the necessity of concern.

"Xiaoqing Zheng who holds dual-citizenship in the United States and China, used elaborate and sophisticated methods to steal countless digital files containing trade secrets from General Electric regarding their wind turbine technology" https://blog.twinstate.com/news/ge-trade-secrets-theft

Jizhong Chen and Xiaolang Zhang indicated in theft of trade secrets https://www.cnbc.com/2019/12/09/apple-has-deep-concerns-that... https://www.digpu.com/business-and-finance/chinese-man-jizho...

"According to today’s conviction, Xu attempted to steal technology related to GE Aviation’s exclusive composite aircraft engine fan – which no other company in the world has been able to duplicate – to benefit the Chinese state." https://www.justice.gov/usao-sdoh/pr/jury-convicts-chinese-o...

" A notable example is the 2014 lawsuit by T-Mobile, in which Huawei was accused of, among other conduct, sending an engineer to a T-Mobile facility to see "Tappy," the company's computer driven robot with a mechanical arm used to test smartphone screens to improve the reliability of its handsets. The engineer slipped one of the robot's fingertips into his laptop bag but was caught on camera" https://www.mondaq.com/unitedstates/trade-secrets/1052104/th...

"A former associate scientist was sentenced to 24 months in federal prison in federal court today for stealing proprietary information worth more than $1 billion from his employer, a U.S. petroleum company." https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/chinese-national-sentenced-st...

There are dozens of such visible cases. The vast majority of trade-secret theft is uncaught.

Like McCarthyism it’s a noble cause, but I can’t help but wonder if these initiatives rather tend to be outsmarted by the real spies. People who are accidentally incriminated by clerical errors and misunderstandings are much lower hanging fruit.

> Like McCarthyism it’s a noble cause

I'm unsure if this is sarcasm or not.

It’s not. Why on earth would you want to have a bunch of Soviet or communist Chinese spies running around?

McCarthyism was about class struggle. Persecuting all communists, socialists and trade unionists made it less likely the working class would rise up against the capitalist ruling class. It worked for the Nazis, after all.

You seem to have internalised this logic, since you're assuming all communists are spies for another nation.

> made it less likely the working class would rise up against the capitalist ruling class

It would make it less likely for the country to shoot itself in the foot and radically lower the standards of living of its citizens, like happened and, unfortunately, still happens, in every country that adopted communist ideas in their government.

I don't think “communist ideas” is well-defined. Could you explain what you mean by the phrase?

Not OP but it seemed unambiguous to me given "countries that have adopted". The countries that proclaimed themselves communist at some point -- the Soviet Union, China, Yugoslavia, Cuba, Czechoslovakia, Angola, etc. (Most no longer exist, only Cuba, Vietnam, China and Laos are governed by self-described communist parties today.)

And a lot of those countries had standard of living sharply rise during communist era. People really, really under appreciate how bad conditions were in many of those countries for those who weren't creme de la creme of society, or how much for example interwar Poland history is kept silent about the squalor and poverty of huge portion of the society.

Yes, for various reasons economic systems in many of them failed (or in few cases, it was nationalistic strife that dealt the blow), but others learnt lessons from it (for example, about badly defining and strictly adhering to plans, or too high concentration in one company, etc.)

What about countries that only adopted two “communist ideas”? What if a country adopted hundreds of them, but didn't call itself communist? What if No True Communist Society does XYZ thing that all of the countries on your list have done?

You can't talk effectively about something until everybody agrees on what the words mean.

You mean countries that started off much poorer than the US, yet the standard of living drastically improved during the socialist period? Then drastically dropped after 89, when the imperialists won the Cold War?

Just because poor countries become socialist doesn't mean socialism makes them poor. Consider that they were kept poor and socialism is the way out.

Socialism makes countries poor. In countries with corrupt governments, poverty is reached markedly faster. If socialist countries don’t become totally destitute, it’s because they manage not to mess up capitalism completely.

"If socialist countries don’t become totally destitute, it’s because they manage not to mess up capitalism completely."

or lucky enough to have a goose laying golden eggs. i.e. the North Sea https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_Sea_oil

You, on the other hand, seem to have internalized a class-based worldview. I'm not sure that's healthy either

Class struggle is the engine of history. Whether that fact is healthy for myself personally or not has no bearing on its truth.

The company I work for keeps more of the value I create than they pay me. Whether I like it or not, I'm working class and in direct opposition to capitalists.

All exchange is predicated upon each party gaining more utility from what they get than by retaining what they give up. The company you work for retains the goods/services you sold them and enjoys a net increase in utility, and you retain the compensation they provided in exchange, and enjoy your own net increase in utility as a result.

On top of that, the ultimate consumption utility enjoyed at the terminus of the entire chain of production is not something you are individually responsible for; you aren't creating the final value, only offering your own marginal contribution of value by selling your own goods and services to your own particular customer.

The concept of "class" does not factor into the reality of any of this.

I was with you until the last sentence.

Per Marx, there is the class of people who work for a living *, and the class of people who don't because others do. This has been true since 10,000 years ago and the distinction remains relevant today. The actual classes change, but the division remains.

* Managers and executives are still workers, only their job is to drive other workers on behalf of the owners.

1) I doubt you're actually working class, even if you're working for money

2) Capitalism is a decentralized system of allocating resources. By working and investing (even if just owning a retirement plan), you are taking part in it all. You may now collect your monocle and top hat.

3) Getting paid some fraction between 0 and 1 of the value you create is a fact of nature for all actors in the system. The company has to create more value for its customers than they pay for it, otherwise nobody would bother buying.

4) The system itself creates vast amounts of wealth and progress, for the entire society. You wouldn't have a good job and a good computer if it wasn't for all that extra value.

5) Don't confuse capitalists with capitalism. The people may behave badly, but the system is resilient - that's why it's been working well for centuries, through thick and thin.

Capitalism is a mode of production in which production is motivated by profit derived from the private ownership of the means of production. Those that own the means of production (factories, companies, etc.) perform no labour, but get paid from the difference between the value produced by those that do work and the value generated by that labour. This difference is called profit.

I own no significant means of production. The vast majority of my income comes from selling my labour power for a fraction of the value it generates. Thus I am working class, generating profits for capitalists.

Wealth and progress is generated by labour. I wouldn't have a good job and a computer if the forces of production hadn't been advanced so far. This advancement does happen under capitalism, but not exclusively. Worse, the mode of production can inhibit further advancement, like feudalism was inhibiting industrial advancement.

Capitalism fails all the time, it does it so often it's called the business cycle. Sometimes is fails catastrophically, like the Great Depression or 2008. It's being kept just barely functional by those that benefit from it; most of us don't.

> it's been working well for centuries,

It depends on one's definition of _working well_. The neoliberal economic school would wholeheartedly agree. But the disproportionate distribution of gains since the early 1980's says otherwise. Of course, that's a values-laden discussion that's probably not a great fit for HN. If the system works immeasurably well for the 0.1% and dreadfully for the bottom 20% such that on average the GDP trend is positive, is the system working well? The system has been resilient, but I'm afraid I'd don't know what the corrective forces are any longer, given the dysfunctional state of the political enterprise in much of the world.

Here's my argument in favor of the system working well:

The quality of life for 99.99% of the population has increased more in the last 100 years than it did in the first 10,000 years of the human civilization. For a graphic example consider Charles Dickens *, he documented how people lived in the 19th century and it reads absolutely horrifying and unthinkable today.

Yes the rich are getting richer faster than the poor are improving their lot. However the poor's quality of life went up tremendously - housing, sanitation, hygiene, calories/nutrients, medical care, workplace safety, transportation, life expectancy, education, you name it. There is simply more wealth to go around today. Is the wealth distribution just? We can debate that **. Is the capitalist system improving lives across the board? Most certainly yes.

* or Friedrich Engels

** personally I would avoid this frame completely, but hey

Iirc McCarthyism is the suppression of socialist ideas full stop, regardless of sympathy to Soviets or China.

You recall incorrectly

> McCarthyism is the practice of making accusations of subversion and treason, especially when related to communism and socialism.[1] The term originally referred to the controversial practices and policies of U.S. Senator Joseph McCarthy (R-Wisconsin), and has its origins in the period in the United States known as the Second Red Scare, lasting from the late 1940s through the 1950s. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/McCarthyism

And the next sentence, which you conveniently left out:

> It was characterized by heightened political repression and persecution of left-wing individuals, and a campaign spreading fear of alleged communist and socialist influence on American institutions.

Doesn't seem too far off what I said. A widespread persecution of people with left-wing politics. Some other groups such as homosexuals also suffered. There was a tenuous and absurd justification of "un-American"ness or of communist sympathies.

Yeah that was my fault. I completely misread the comment.

This still sounds like sarcasm tbh.

No, I don’t like to use sarcasm, I prefer plain language instead. Especially in writing where sarcasm is harder to detect.

"McCarthyism" is a derogatory term for overzealous political witch-hunts which cause irreparable harm to honest, innocent citizens.

What you mean is counter-intelligence, and yes, that's absolutely an important thing.

The term probably shouldn't mean that since there actually was a wealth of communist spies, sympathizers, etc. Ie, it was not a witch hunt. McCarthy's problem was using the Congress in an executive role.

McCarthy's problem was being a daft c_nt on a power trip, with no idea how to actually deal with spies, and heavily based on violating supposed american freedom of thought and association. It was absolutely a witch hunt.

There's in fact no record he ever disrupted any actual spy work, as far as I know, and his legacy is that even in Warsaw Pact he became famous - famous enough to require redefining in popular vernacular "useful idiot" to include him and his supporters.

Sure. I mean, there probably were witches too, they just weren't actually magical.

> "McCarthyism" is a derogatory term for overzealous political witch-hunts which cause irreparable harm to honest, innocent citizens.

Yes, that’s exactly my point.

> What you mean is counter-intelligence

No, I do mean McCarthyism. The pitfall that counter-intelligence easily falls into where they end up targeting innocent people rather than actual spies.

A spy spends every waking moment trying to not look like a spy. Gang Chen on the other hand spends every waking moment trying to figure out heat transfer and nothing about not looking like a spy, because he “has nothing to hide”. That alone is going to make him look more like a spy than a real spy.

McCarthyism was exactly about accusing people falsely of being associated to communists.

McCarthyism boils down to someone having absolute power to destroy somebody else's life based on their own beliefs. For instance, homosexuals were also targeted by McCarthy, simply because they were interpreted as subversive. It's nothing more than a modern witch hunt, a practice that can't be reconciled with what we consider the rule of law today.

There is absolutely nothing noble about it.

> There is absolutely nothing noble about it.

The cause, not the execution. I never said that the execution was noble. The phrase “noble cause” is used to describe this exact kind of situation, where the ends don’t justify the means.

That they botched the execution was my entire point. Rounding up homos was easy and made themselves look good in the eyes of the public. Much easier than identifying and rounding up actual spies. I’m talking about the perverse incentives here.

All countries have spies and all fight foreign spies all the time. If you find this fight noble, so be it, but it's not really relevant. McCarthyism was really just a total abuse of power, a witch hunt only several times amplified through the power of modern media. And it destroyed the lives of thousands of people for no reason at all. So sorry, but I don't like it being mentioned in any kind of a positive context. There wasn't any.

Where do you see it being used in a positive context? I used it as an example of something that’s bad, how is that “a positive context”?

There are two issues that should be separated. The first is that there were (and probably are) foreign spies in industry and government. That's damaging and they should be removed. The second issue is that those given the power to find and remove spies can abuse it. That's also damaging and should be prevented.

However, that fact that people abuse their power doesn't mean we should stop looking for spies, or that all spy hunting is a form of Mcarthyism.

> That's damaging and they should be removed.

Damaging to whom? How is the average person damaged?

Having a big enemy to fight is good for those in power. Always has been, probably always will be.

McCarthyism led to the persecution of anyone with socialist political sympathies. It was an attack on unpopular economic beliefs.

Let's McCarthyism what it is: Unamerican.

So I've been thinking a lot about this...

Consider that the application of the word "unamerican" is itself is destructive to national unity no matter where it is applied, and as such probably should be avoided, including in reference to McCartism or even to the very word itself.

Where does that leave us? Not entirely sure. The best I could come up with is "not exactly pro-american". This word does not have stigma (cats are not pro-american which is fine with everyone), yet in a political context it carries weight.

Was mass incarceration of the Japanese Americans a noble cause? Nobody wants a bunch of hot-war enemy spies running around, after all.

I'm not trolling you, I want to know where you draw the line (if at all). 9% false positive? 99%? 99.999%?

Yes, that’s also an appropriate use of the idiom.

How about preemptively jailing all men in case some are murderers. Also a noble cause?

Yes, that’s another good example.

The thing people today may not know about McCarthyism is that there WERE a lot of Soviet spies in the State Department. It desperately needed to be addressed.

The reason people forget this is because McCarthyism itself was not actually a very good remedy. It was great for the self-aggrandizement of Senator McCarthy (until he went too far, and his target Mr. Welch called him out while being interrogated before the Senate for making a national show of a very weak question of Welch’s colleague, a question could have been raised far more timely without the spectacle). It was great for building an atmosphere of fear, too. But in the end it was a pretty bad spy eradication program.

I'm sure there were spies - but this is not what McCarthyism was about. Primarily it was about communism.

Spying for a foreign govt is bad, and we don't want them in our govt, regardless of their ideology. Communist beliefs, tendencies and association are protected by our (US) constitution.

Targeting spies is good, but McCarty was targeting communists (or alleged communists).

McCarthy was targeting people whose ideology he didn't like, and using communism as a justification.

> there WERE a lot of Soviet spies in the State Department. It desperately needed to be addressed.

Where can I find some serious research on that?

Behold, "a noble cause":

"On May 26, 1947, the Federal Bureau of Investigation issued a memo stating, 'With regard to the picture It's a Wonderful Life, [redacted] stated in substance that the film represented rather obvious attempts to discredit bankers by casting Lionel Barrymore as a 'scrooge-type' so that he would be the most hated man in the picture. This, according to these sources, is a common trick used by Communists. [In] addition, [redacted] stated that, in his opinion, this picture deliberately maligned the upper class, attempting to show the people who had money were mean and despicable characters.' Film historian Andrew Sarris observed as 'curious' that 'the censors never noticed that the villainous Mr. Potter gets away with robbery without being caught or punished in any way'."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/It%27s_a_Wonderful_Life

That’s precisely my point. Going to the movies to look for something to act outraged about is safe, easy and cheap. Doing actual counter-intelligence is dangerous, hard and expensive.

The FBI being distracted with this nonsense is probably the greatest gift the real spies could have hoped for.

At that time, McCarthy had been in the Senate for all of five months, not nearly long enough for him to start grilling people for having associations with the Communist party.

Of course, few communists openly come out and say they are making communist propaganda. It's a bit silly to think Capra would have been one of them, or that "It's a Wonderful Life" doesn't also celebrate the banker George Bailey (portrayed by conservative Republican Jimmy Stewart), but I can understand why the government would want to monitor communist groups, even if they get it laughably wrong from time to time.

Capra was tarred as one and as a reaction became a right wing sympathizer for the rest of his life.

This is a troubling story in so many ways, I don't know what the answer to the problem is but feel something needs to change within the government when people are subjected to what can only be described as a witch trial bordering on McCarthyism.

The fact the state and his own lawyer were pressing him to take a deal is also very troubling as it echoes the plight of many impoverished young men who lost their families, careers, reputations and futures by pleading down trumped up charges laid against them.

These are the stories the RWM doesn't cover as it does not fit their narrative.

> These are the stories the RWM doesn't cover as it does not fit their narrative.

As if LWM is totally unbiased and cover stories even if they do not fit their narrative.

> These are the stories the RWM doesn't cover as it does not fit their narrative.

That's just ridiculous.

I agree with all of your points except the last - I’m guessing you dont read “RWM”?

https://www.wsj.com/articles/mit-professor-gang-chen-says-mi...

You are right. I apologize for injecting a subject that has no relevance to the conversation, sometimes I forget that doing so is not within HN guidelines. (And by right I obviously mean correct, although it is an interesting double entendre!)

The WSJ article is objectively better than the NYT article, too. It gives much more info about what he was actually accused of, and how the case fell apart. So instead of just apologizing for bringing it up, maybe you should work to recalibrate your views.

When both the state and his lawyer were pressing him to take the deal, both the state and his lawyer believed he was guilty.

The charges were withdrawn, as I understand it, when the Department of Energy clarified the understanding of the grant application for the US attorney and they came to the conclusion that there was not a duty to disclose the particular affiliation.

There’s no doubt that this caused professional harm to him. At the same time the US government has a reasonable interest in knowing of the foreign government affiliations of researchers it funds, and should reasonably pursue those who flout the rules.

Was this prosecution flawed? It seems very much so. Was it pursued reasonably and in good faith? It’s hard to say it wasn’t, unless your outlook is to be immediately suspicious of prosecutors.

You seem to imply that he flouted the rules, but we don't know if he has any ties to China beyond the ties that anybody born there would have.

No I don't imply that at all. The article is clear, at least seemed to be to me, that he had affiliations with Chinese organizations, he did not disclose them, and most importantly to the charges being dropped, based on Department of Energy regulations, he was under no obligation to disclose them.

The US attorney brought charges based on the idea that he was obligated to disclose them. The US attorney was wrong according to the Department of Energy, who administered the grant.

I don't get what the issue is here. He wasn't put in jail, and he was acquitted. The system worked correctly.

I'd be curious to hear how many candidates for tech companies get disqualified due to failing security clearance.

I'm reminded of this great story:

"How I got an FBI record at age 11 from dabbling in cryptography then got into more trouble"

https://web.stanford.edu/~learnest/les/crypto.htm

There was a case at Caltech with an Israeli national and I don’t recall that receiving nearly the same level of scrutiny. Instead the supervisor who got her work stolen got disciplined for putting a cat as a coauthor on one of her papers as a joke.

In US you end up being free, but treated like a spy by some funding agency. In Russia you end up in prison having no hope of getting back. Arrested in April 2021, 69 year old professor Golubkin is still in remand prison. https://meduza.io/en/feature/2021/04/13/another-treason-case accused for governmental treason.

As bad as this is, it could have been so much worse for him. The government does not usually correct itself like this, preferring instead to continue with prosecution, notch up another corrupt win, and call it a day. And in fact, for this reason, the (current) government needs to get major kudos! And Dr. Chen should get more hugs, and more support - as many as he needs to help him forget this nightmare and get back to doing what he loves.

>And in fact, for this reason, the (current) government needs to get major kudos!

From the article: 'The 15 postdoctoral students he worked with were transferred to other research groups, taking their knowledge with them. “We are all losers, right?” Dr. Chen said. “My reputation got ruined. My students, my post-docs, they changed their career. They changed to other groups. M.I.T., the country, the U.S., we lose. I can’t calculate the loss. That loss cannot be calculated.”'

It's a positive that the rule of law in the United States has been demonstrated to work in this case. But he could have easily accepted a plea deal earlier and have avoided the dismissed charges. He also lost his staff and may be stigmatized in the future for people who see that he was arrested by the FBI in his home, but don't read the full story behind the dismissal.

The dismissal of charges sounds like a bare minimum for a functional society, not an extraordinary response (and it should not be the norm to double down and press on with false charges). A fair response would be for him to be compensated so he's no worse off, and at least receive an official apology from the government.

I made my comment in light of my recent education about how the government actually functions, specifically its criminal justice system. On the spectrum of outcomes this is actually pretty good, considering the alternatives. Countless men are wrongfully convicted, spend their entire lives in prison, and are eventually exonerated. What do they get? They get released.

I've read similarly from the Marshall Project's Innocence Project [0] about wrongful convictions, so I see more of where you're coming from.

My view of justice, however, is that a government should treat its citizens fairly. Taking into account prior behavior of the government, this is extraordinary, but I personally differ in that praise should be reserved when a government acts fairly independent of prior performance.

In this case, the government should officially apologize to neuter any stigmatization he might have had for his prior arrest, and help him catch up in his research projects, where he might now be struggling due to a loss of talent caused by the unjust arrest and accusations.

[0] https://www.themarshallproject.org/records/473-innocence-pro...

I agree with you. In fact, I'd go further. If I had my way these kinds of misdeeds would result in sanctions against the prosecution, or the judge if involved. But our justice system is deeply protected from any accountability by layers and layers of both practical and legal moats. It is virtually impossible to sanction a judge[0]. It is difficult to even sanction an attorney. The key problem being no working attorney wants to take on either target, because it will ruin their relationships upon which they make a living. The entire system is "don't rock the boat" writ large. A state mints 20k new lawyers a year, and disbars maybe 4, and each of those disbarments are uphill battles. And literally no one cares about this.

I absolutely hate the way the system is. But that is how the system is.

0. The only exception I've ever heard of was the recall of the judge in Brock Turner's rape case, and that only happened because of lightening-in-a-bottle once-a-century national attention. Judges have incredible power in the US, and virtually no oversight. Almost all judgeships are corruptly acquired by backroom finagling among lawyers trading favors with each other. Do you think they'll allow something stupid like malfeasance ruin the careful spending of political capital it took to install that judge? Hell no.

"“We understand that our charging decisions deeply impact people’s lives,” said Rachael Rollins"

Understand my a$$. They do not give a fuck about what they do to people. If they were directly responsible and punished in cases where they've improperly ruined people's lives then they might understand.

In security, you're always guilty until proven innocent.

Might do good to introduce more diversity in US academia

Be cool to write a book about how the CCP/CPC realized asian americans are more and more important to the USA defense and economic structure. They then spread disinfo to the CIA about anti CPC Chinese Americans, claiming they are chinese spys. This causes the end of the university system being a relevant defense/economic buffer for the west. Kindof like a Chinese version of the men who stare at goats which was apparently based on a true story.

There are two factors that come into play here in terms of regulations.

The first, and biggest, is the International Traffic in Arms Regulations (ITAR). ITAR is the set of United States regulations that control the manufacture, sale, and distribution of defense and space-related articles and services as defined in the United States Munitions List (USML), https://www.ecfr.gov/current/title-22/chapter-I/subchapter-M.... The USML is large, and broad in scope. It also still needs to be interpreted. These interpretations err on the side of 'an abundance of caution', due to the fines from violating regulations and the perceived threat to national security. ITAR regulations and policies are complex enough that most defense contracting firms have people who specialize in just ITAR and help others in the company deal with it. I have worked projects with multiple countries and can tell you that it is a pain to dot all the Is and cross all the Ts, even when working with countries that are our closest allies. Things that you might not think would be covered often are, or are interpreted to be covered. Let's say you designed a new type of paper clip. This paper clip[ is so much better that when it comes to organizing files and paperwork processing productivity its use is considered to provide a 'material advantage' to military units that use it. That likely would be export controlled under ITAR. I'm not debating whether it should or not, that is how it is.

The other factor is that modern conflict is multi-domain, and one of the biggest domains is economics. Corporate espionage is very real, and very state sponsored, around the world. That means that things like chip designs are very sought after.

I remember going to a particular standards conference. We had a huge upsurge in one country's delegates just before the conference (roughly a 3:1 increase), and during the conference I noticed the new delegates seemed more polished and less proficient than the ones I had worked with for a while and knew. The ones I knew also seemed deferential to the new delegates. Before the conference the matter came up with my employer. I've been told such situations are the norm rather than the exception.

It is because of these situations and the level of state actor activity, that the U.S. wants to know all your affiliations, even seemingly innocent ones. You sign a legal document, in effect testifying, that the associations you documented are accurate and complete to you knowledge. The penalties for not disclosing such associations are well known because they are spelled out. They are draconian because of the U.S. concern, and the causes of that concern are real. All sorts of cases can be made for that policy, and against it, but there is no away any researcher working for the government on DOD or DOD-tangential projects is ignorant of the policy.

As an anecdote, I knew another American colleague. Young guy, had a girlfriend in Canada (a relationship he disclosed). They decided to get married, and did (something he did not disclose). When the CO of the group he was doing his research for found out about it my colleague's employment and clearance were terminated, and he was judged a permanent security risk, meaning he could never again work a government contract - effectively ending his career.

Paywall?

Just disable javascript. You don't need it to read plain text anyway.

I still don't understand what the point of the javascript on pages like this is. It's sole purpose seems to be to lower performance and add annoying popups.

Yes, this is exactly what JS is used for on 95% of today's web.

If you're on Firefox, you can also just turn on Reader view (F9) after it loads and hit refresh.

Yes, the New York Times has been paywalled for the last 10 years. What's your point?

Http://12ft.io

sadly "12ft has been disabled for this site"

https://archive.is/Z2sgI

Please read about the Cultural Revolution. To call this “equivalent “ is laughable.

> To call this “equivalent “

yet.

Call me when scholars are being massacred in the streets... Get a grip.

We've banned this account. If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future. They're here: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.

Protecting intellectual property is about as far away from the Cultural Revolution as you can get.

Please don't post ideological flamewar comments to HN. It leads to repetitive, dumbed-down, nasty discussion.

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30114691.

I don’t think they were saying that this is equivalent to the Cultural Revolution as a whole, just the “bad classification” part of the paragraph.

Please improve your reading skills.

Personal attack will get you banned here, so please don't post like this.

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

Please don't post ideological flamewar comments to HN. It leads to repetitive, dumbed-down, nasty discussion.

We detached this flamewar subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30114691 and marked it off topic.

Seriously this is next level paranoid. I wondering when will they have McCarthyism 2: Electric Boogaloo China Edition. I say a little before the next election

Given the nuclear bomb in China was helped by out-going chinese. Given china is a world power which is communist and totalitarian in nature.

Can China be treated by Soviet Union? Yes you can.

By allowing china playing the hand I can got yours but you cannot go to my market, even if you are not that political one should be very careful.

Bad to be racist. Sorry to lose the war yes war to communists and totalitarians. But with this, I still think USA will lose. The free world will lose.

I honestly don't understand what you're saying.

>>Sorry to lose the war yes war to communists and totalitarians

Like, what does that even mean?

All your Soviet Unions are belong to us.

The "_hk" at the end of their username might be a clue on their perspective.

I think English might not be your first language, it's not mine either, so let me know if I understood you correctly :

China got the nuclear bomb by sending Chinese people abroad, as spies or similar.

China is also a totalitarian communist regime, that should be treated as the Soviet Union was treated : not as a cooperative country, but as an adversary.

The current unbalanced attitude of China, for example taking advantage of the free market of the US while closing its own, should make anyone in the West extra careful, whether they care about geopolitics or not.

If the US/free world does not defend itself against China out of the fear of being called racist, the free world will lose against China, and everyone will be worse for it (given that we will live at the whims of a totalitarian regime)"

Is this a fair transcription ?

> The dismissal is a setback to the China Initiative, an effort started in 2018 to crack down on economic and scientific espionage by China.

How is this a setback? The goal is to prevent espionage, not harass and punish people for being Chinese.

Honestly, what has happened to the NYT? When did they get so bad at this? They were the most well-regarded newspaper in the world and now they read like madlibs.

It's a setback because it's another case of overzealous prosecution that fell apart because the basis was entirely false. In the end they harmed the career of a scientist because he had some affiliation with China, which, duh, he grew up there. It calls into question the basis of the whole initiative.

Note that the accusations of Dr Chen having ties to China are true. However, Dr Chen wasn’t legally required to disclose them:

> Prosecutors announced that they had received new information indicating that Dr. Chen had not been obliged to disclose those affiliations, undercutting the basis of the case.

In either case I believe ties to China are harmful, they are not a friendly country.

He was born there. So of course he has "ties". We can't really know if they are harmful or not without more information, but we do know they're the kind of ties that the government doesn't consider worthy of reporting...

Wut? Chinese American scientific collaboration is one of the most the strongest on Earth. You'll have ten of thousands of folks in scientific community having ties to China.

I mean what you do in these situations is just have NY times write an article like this on you that you can point to in job applications and any reputational damage is probably nullified.

This option is probably not open to early career scientists.

How many early career university scientists get arrested for not disclosing their ties to China? These are high profile cases with established professors at their core.

> any reputational damage is probably nullified

In this case, Professor Chen lost his research grants. He lost several grad students. He lost a year's worth of progress in his field. Do you think this NY Times article nullified those effects?

I think this only works about 1 out of 1000 times. The rest are too unknown to get articles written about them

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