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Comment by jemfinch | Hacker News Reader

He wasn't investigated by the FBI. The FBI was investigating a hypothetical Japanese spy; since he wasn't a Japanese spy, any follow-up that led to him was merely incidental.

If the FBI investigates a spy seen driving a silver Honda Civic with license plate ABC-1234, and looks into an unrelated civilian who drives a silver Honda Civic with license plate ADC-1234 in case their witness misremembered the license place, that doesn't mean the unrelated civilian was "investigated by the FBI".

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This isn't a case of a mistaken identity, the FBI found exactly the person they were looking for. It just turned out that said person wasn't a threat, after all.

I'd say determining that is exactly the point of an investigation. That fact that it ended well doesn't change the fact that the process happened, and was triggered by said person.

It is true that the FBI found the person they were looking for, and that person was the terminus of their investigation. It is not true that the article author was investigated by the FBI. He was nothing more than a MacGuffin in the overall plot.

In this specific case, the security officer made the correct decision in having him leave out this detail from the clearance form. Makes for a good story, though.

> It is true that the FBI found the person they were looking for, and that person was the terminus of their investigation. It is not true that the article author was investigated by the FBI; he wasn't

To me, these are the same, so I guess that's probably just my layman's view then.

They aren’t the same. There is a legal distinction. They were attempting to identify the source of a document.

After they found and identified who created it, the investigation was dropped before they investigated any particular person.

That’s what the word means. If they mean convicted, they should ask that instead.

I don't buy it. The FBI found his code sheet that he made, and tracked him down, and asked people about him. This is an investigation, and it's about him. The fact that they thought he was a Japanese spy simply means that they made the wrong assumption about the person they were investigating.

The investigation was about the document, not the person. If, after they had met with the guy, they started interviewing family, friends, and digging into his life - THAT would constitute an affirmative answer to the question.

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