Chinese-born chemist cleared of last conviction under US’s espionage probe
chemistryworld.com
chemistryworld.com
"A federal grand jury indicted him on charges of stealing secrets about the U.S. nuclear arsenal for the People's Republic of China (PRC) in December 1999.[1] After federal investigators were unable to prove these initial accusations, the government conducted a separate investigation. Ultimately it charged Lee only with improper handling of restricted data, one of the original 59 indictment counts, a felony count. He pleaded guilty as part of a plea settlement.
He filed a civil suit that was settled. In June 2006, Lee received $1.6 million from the federal government and five media organizations as part of a settlement leaking his name to the press before any charges had been filed against him.[2]
Federal judge James A. Parker eventually apologized to Lee for denying him bail and putting him in solitary confinement. He excoriated the government for misconduct and misrepresentations to the court.[3] "
[0] https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/gang-chen-c...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gang_Chen_(engineer)#Federal_i...
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30082313 ("In the end, you're treated like a spy, says MIT scientist"; 446 comments)
I hear about this sort of thing way too often. I say we make a new law that if prosecutors pull shit like this they get sentenced to triple the jail time/financial penalty the defendant would have had, if convicted, and pay triple the legal expenses to defendant as well. This multiplier is often used in the law as deterrent where a 1x multiplier is not deemed sufficient for the total damage and inconvenience caused.
Seriously, how can anyone be expected to trust the legal system when the state pulls shit like that without any consequences?
If course, this will likely mean prosecutors will start destroying exculpatory evidence when possible.
He was describing a case to me that involved the government suing his client over something. It turns out that the prosecutor's case was based on a misunderstanding of the relevant laws. Millions of dollars and potential jail time were on the line.
I asked my uncle "do these prosecutors, their office, or anybody face potential retribution for nearly ruining this guy's life and likely ruining his business?" My uncle replied "no, there is nothing that can be done to them." I asked "so if some asshole in a prosecutor's office doesn't like you or is a dumbass, he can just ruin your life and that's it?" "Yes," he said.
I can understand why this is. If law enforcement, generally, were subject to the same liability as regular citizens, that is all anybody would seek to do when the law looks at them. The result would be "playing it safe," and prosecutors would only seek the easy cases, leaving the bulk of crime to happen without repercussions. I don't know what can be done, and there is likely no general solution, but thinking about this makes me realize that "freedom" is not exactly a thing. At least in this case the guy could hire a good lawyer and avoid the worst.
Another way to put this is a strong "err on the side of letting the guilty walk free over putting the innocent in jail", which is a very intentional foundational principle of our justice system.
So it takes a lot but the system does self-regulate.
I think this describes the current state of affairs, although it might become more extreme if liability increases.
Man does that sound fucking god damn awful. No thank you.
I mean what can be? Either you fire every time a mistake is made or you let it slip. Though we could have a more complicated and efficient route and let it depend on the severity/reasonability of the mistake and frequency of them. But as far as I can tell, this is generally what is actually done.
> The result would be "playing it safe," and prosecutors would only seek the easy cases,
Though this is still kinda true but for other reasons. Quotas are a common contributor here. Even if there is no official quota in a LEO team there is often an implicit one. Where things like number of arrests, citations, and so on. Because we can't be completely subjective, right? Obviously the reliance on metrics (spectrum of: <are truth> - <are guides> - <lol, who cares>) varies from place to place but it would be naive to assume that these things don't play a role.
I guess I'm saying the world is complicated and you're kinda damned if you do and damned if you don't, so take Blackstone's ratio into account and maybe we should let things be a bit fuzzy because defuzzing usually only ends up making them even more fuzzy.
OOP listed a possibility in his comment:
> if prosecutors pull shit like this they get sentenced to triple the jail time/financial penalty the defendant would have had, if convicted, and pay triple the legal expenses to defendant as well
The whole justice system is currently incentivized to be as callous and cruel as possible, because there are no consequences or accountability when they're wrong. Down the individual police officers who can do anything they want because they enjoy qualified immunity.
The entire system from the beat cop all the way up to prosecutors and judges are in dire need of accountability for their misconduct.
I'd like to point out that the proposition here can both be framed as draconian and too soft depending on the context/frame of reference one is evaluating it under.
Really, the difficulty of justice reform is that people are unwilling to implement policy that has foreseeable and harmful consequences. Because they see that as (and others will interpret it as) equivalent to intentionally seeking to harm the unfortunate group. But this is the wrong way to do this. It has to be about reducing harm/crime/whatever word you want to use.
I'll give an example. Let's say you invent a drug that cures lung cancer in 100% of cases but there's a 20% chance of those that are treated will develop breast cancer. Without a doubt this is something we should do. Breast cancer has one of the highest rates of survival while lung cancer has a very low rate. But you could make an argument that you are knowingly giving patients cancer, and this would be accurate (and imagine more realistic case where the rates are not evenly distributed across demographics). You did after all design a drug that gives people cancer. I think we can all imagine such a drug being pulled because people misunderstand the consequences. And certainly real world situations are nowhere near the simplicity of this hypothetical.
I did see the parents' suggestion and I addressed it thought not explicitly. Blackstone's ratio is often quoted as:
It is better that ten guilty persons escape than that one innocent suffer.
The issue at hand here is that in law, like in many real world applications, there is no global optima. Even in a highly conditionalized optimization function that has temporal dependence, our world and morals rapidly change and our true function (under the naive assumption that it exists) is intractable.
Therefore we must account for failure. In our case we need to determine the consequences of how we respond to when {LEO,judiciaries,politicians,etc} make mistakes.
I am not arguing that we shouldn't refine the system. Nor am I arguing that we shouldn't hold these entities accountable. What I am pointing out is that there are consequences to whatever we choose to do and we need to be extremely careful with trying to understand those consequences. I'm sure harsh consequences could result in something akin to a naive interpretation of Blackstone's ratio because it would require substantial burden of proof, but the reason we would meet Blackstone's is because we would prosecute almost nothing. There's an obvious consequence to this kind of policy: any crime of sufficient complexity (or containing sufficient obscurity) would never be prosecuted. And almost certainly this would result in many crimes not even being investigated because there would be an understanding that the likelihood of the crime leading to actual prosecution is very low and due to the resources being finite. I don't think you need to be very intelligent to see how such a system would allow the wealthy to avoid prosecution in all but the most egregious of cases.
This is not to say that we shouldn't find a way to right our wrongs. That those unjustly/mistakenly prosecuted should not receive some form of compensation to right the wrongs (even if the wrong is fully reasonable in-situ. I would argue that ensuring we better compensate the wrongly convicted would put pressure on even individuals to use more caution. But I think we need to be careful and forward thinking to figure out the details here and I'm nowhere qualified to make an even reasonable guess.
It's important to remember that the reason most of the problems in the world that exist are not due to malice or due to a cabal trying to dominate the world but rather because the world is exceptionally complex and there's an asymmetry in the ease of doing what is wrong compared to doing what is right[1]. But there is a saving grace, in that this all lives on a spectrum, and pareto efficiency exists (while it might take a lot/infinite of resources to "do good" it does not to do "pretty good").
[0] A prime example is skyscrapers. You design them to fall in on themselves so that if they do fall, they do not take out neighboring towers and create exponentially more damage. But this is a key process in any engineering design and in textbooks they will often discuss bridges.
[1] A simple example might be when you realize you are about to miss your exit and too quickly merge one lane over to make your exit not realizing that there is a person you couldn't see that had to slam on their breaks. The result of which is that this can create phantom traffic experienced long after the event. You won't hear screeching, crashes, or any of that. It is the result of a cascading chain of people having to change lanes and brake to respond to this and the negative feedback loop of others making similar "mistakes" in response to trying to avoid an accident themselves. Or maybe you didn't miss your exit but are just trying to dodge an object on the road that you had no capacity to see and the truck it fell off of had no way to know, because the strap holding it in place broke because the manufacturer who made the part had a mouse get into the machine which happened because one of the workers that day had a PB&J. The point is that there's a long chain of events that in no way could you know about or reasonably consider which all need to "go right" for the final event in a chain to also "go right." They do not require malice nor even stupidity, but just life/random events. It does not mean we should spend all our time over analyzing the details and complexity, but it does mean we should be aware that this complexity exists, avoid rash decisions we we have the ability to, and to consider that there are faults and consequences to no matter what we propose (and thus we shouldn't get get upset when our ideas get pushback nor should we abandon ideas just because there are ill consequences). We can't be perfect but we can (always) do better.
I get that this feels super righteous at all... but who would be a prosecutor under such a threat? Perhaps a few idiots and powermongers.
Maybe if you also paid 10x ordinary wages you'd get some people who were just merely greedy enough to take stupid risks.
The prof's expertise is often no longer in the subject, but rather in leading a team of people in the subject and leading people in how to write about the subject. The two main advantages is that they are a constant contact and they are a key decider in who gets accepted[0]. The grad students do all the work (often including grant writing) and are going to be up to date on information. Mistakes or slip-ups are much more easily overlooked and best of all, you can transition them out in 2, 4, or up to 8 years depending on their success and suspicion level. They also have broad access to materials, are often left in the lab alone for hours, and do not rise suspicion if they go into the lab at 3am. Undergrads have similar advantages but don't have as broad access (typically) and might arise suspicion at going into the lab at 3am, but do have an advantage in being able to pass things off as dumb mistakes because everyone holds them in such low regards. And of course, janitors have all those advantages but also have keys to all the labs and offices where materials are routinely left out in the open "because the door is locked."
Of course, the best way to do knowledge transfer is to just send your civilians to the country to get educated and then bring them back. Deng's opening up of China was a major success. The fear being that they couldn't import western education without western idealologies but that was super successful.
That said, one time I was working on an ITAR project and it had to deal with two restricted technologies: nuclear and nanomaterials. This was while I was working for an aerospace company[1] and the two other domain teams were at a uni. The nuclear team's lead student was Iranian (had a green card) and the nano-team was all Chinese. It was a really interesting situation because I could talk in full with the 2 professors but anytime I had to talk to students I couldn't tell them things despite the fact that we all knew each other knew what was going on. It wouldn't require anyone saying anything directly to figure this out.
We also had the FBI visit (that's not uncommon when you do ITAR work) and they asked me to "keep an eye out" for certain things. So I guess I was a spy? (lol) They were convinced that the policy would ensure that there was no information leakage and that the nuclear team couldn't figure out what the nano team was doing, vise versa, and that neither could figure out the end goal. Then again the agents tried to convince me that they routinely break PGP encryption and that TOR is exclusively used by terrorists and drug dealers. So... I guess all this is to say that I'm not all that surprised that baseless accusations arise. The only thing that is surprising is how people can believe in a complex deep state because the truth is that government works just like your company: a bureaucratic shitshow.[2]
[0] Take for example a professor at my university. He is <south-east asian>-ian (i.e. Not Chinese/Korean/Japanese/Indian). He has 4 students and has graduated another ~5. All 4 are from the same country as he is, and 2 of the alumni are also from that country. Those 2 were admitted into the grad program by him, 2 of the other 3 were students who switched professors later on (I don't know the 3rd one), and 2/3 of them are from a neighbor country. I'm not saying these people don't deserve to be here, that they don't have the qualifications, or any of that. They do! I have no doubt about that. They were/are all great people and have done well and had good credentials. But if we're being honest here, this isn't an unbiased process. The truth is that there are a ton of equally qualified candidates to select from and when you have to make those decisions you rely on much more subjective information like your social networks and it's probably unsurprising that those strongly correlate with ethnicity (not to mention factors like "culture fit" and the fact that because the composition the whole group speaks in their native tongue which enables them to communicate better but unfortunately disadvantages anyone who doesn't. And weirdly enough, switching to English would disadvantage the group as a whole because who isn't more proficient in their native language?)
[1] This is all I can say but I'm sure plenty of you know EXACTLY what I was working on due to the intersection. In fact, some of the info is public but I'm told I still shouldn't talk.
[2] If your company doesn't work like this, well it probably will when it grows.
If it doesn’t count as income, unsure.
I don't even understand how any of this is illegal? You can be thrown in prison and have your reputation and career ruined by the government for sending an email to someone in China now?
Officially misrepresenting that state of affairs to the government with so much on the line is what's illegal, not "sending an email to someone in China."
This was started under Trump, and canned under Biden. It’s a travesty and complete circus of an injustice and a racially motivated assault on the scientific community.
There is no ban on collaborating with Chinese universities in the US. There are restrictions for some type of research (that actually extend to the other countries as well).
It's the "Martha Stewart" lesson. It may be that you have done nothing wrong. The government may stop by and ask you questions anyways. If you lie during those questions you have committed a felony.
Do NOT speak without a lawyer. In particular if you have anything worth losing. Which is more or less everyone.
> At issue in the new ruling, issued 11 July, is whether Tao’s lack of disclosure about his affiliation with Fuzhou University in China affected federal agency funding decisions. The Denver appeals court agreed 2-1 that it was irrelevant because Tao had no grant proposals pending before those two agencies in question – the US Department of Energy and National Science Foundation – at the time he made his affiliation statement.
[1] https://cen.acs.org/research-integrity/misconduct/Court-over...
https://radii.co/article/its-not-rocket-science-except-when-...
we sentenced Qian to house arrest with zero evidence or charges, and in return Under Qian’s direction, Chinese researchers developed the first generation of “Long March” missiles and in 1970 supervised the launch of Chia’s first satellite.
“I do not plan to come back,” Qian bitterly told a reporter as he prepared to leave the country. “I have no reason to come back…. I plan to do my best to help the Chinese people build up the nation to where they can live with dignity and happiness.”
For me, the UK government quite literally took away my EU citizenship. Something I was making use of, and had significant life plans for. I am far fucking beyond not impressed about that.
In the meantime I've returned to Australia and am getting things done here.
The "post hoc, ergo propter hoc" fallacy in a single sentence.
Or put it differently, how would it (counterfactually) not be a fallacy?
I also remember similar stories about crying of backstabbing and IP theft in China from some US company that was kickstarting. (I don't remember if it was an actual kickstarter campaign or bigger money involved) Turns out some later digging showed their bs was the clear reason for the broken ties and they had signed off IP and sales rights to try and squeeze out a cheaper deal. (If they suddenly reneged on their large orders the chinese manufacturer could sell the stock themselves and continue with the new dies they'd made and machine they'd bought for the deal)
It's real damn easy to pin everything on china with the language and distance barrier and they definitely do some heinous shit but disappointingly often enough it seems like our own doing here in Europe or the US coated in stereotypes or geopolitical rhetoric.
The violation of the law occurred when they shipped it internationally. I doubt they were "clueless" about the potential problems involved. I seriously doubt the receiver of the goods was either.
You think the government just does this of it's own accord?
It's a captured entity.
There's nothing to "take seriously" to begin with.
Much higher than that in these particular cases, as noted in an article linked in OP:
> A recent white paper by a non-partisan organisation of prominent Chinese Americans in business, government, academia and the arts, examined information on nearly 300 defendants charged under the US Economic Espionage Act (EEA) between 1996 and 2020 [...] found that 27% of presumed Asian American citizens charged under the EEA were not convicted of any crimes. In total, the analysis showed that one in three Asian Americans alleged to have committed espionage may have been falsely accused.
And I don't think the feds have had a better record 2020-present.
But the percentage of arrests that do not lead to a conviction is astronomical. To a certain extent, mass arrest and detainment, even of the innocent, is just how the system works.
It shouldn't work that way.
But it is the reality on the ground right now. Not only that, but it's very hard to change for a lot of reasons.
I guarantee you, your reaction will not be "oh, thats ok then, the root cause was these other bad people"
However, it is a bittersweet win. The total cost of fighting these bogus charges for the past five years cost over $2.3 million, and we still carry over $1.1 million in debt despite your generous support. Franklin has not earned a salary for over four years. Our family is deeply in debt, and I kindly request your assistance with this remaining legal defense debt.
Once again, thank you for your exceptional dedication and support. May GOD bless you and your family abundantly."
Yes... Come 2025 he may just have to pay them.
The whistleblower provided evidence of a contract between the professor and a Chinese university. The FBI investigation collaborated that evidence, including fifteen trips to China in three years. That is why this case was brought to trial.
He was not exonerated on the false statements charge. Instead, the appeals court found it was immaterial by a 2-1 decision.
This professor got a doctorate from Princeton and did a postdoc at Berkeley. He knew the rules for working on NSF and DOE grants. He didn't deserve all the happened to him, but he did lie and cover-up his connections with a Chinese university.
His "connections" were extremely minimal and not relevant to any of his grant applications, so he wasn't required to disclose them.
> That is why this case was brought to trial.
This case was brought to trial because Tao is Asian, and the Trump administration put out an order to local FBI offices to find Chinese spies in academia. In other words, Tao was swept up in a racist witch hunt. If he were a white European, there is precisely 0% chance that he would have been investigated and prosecuted for these sorts of minimal "connections" to a European university.
I can't speak for the US but I can say that Chinese people in Australia have had issues after returning to China as a result of things said here in Australia.
What's even better than correcting mistakes and feeling warm and fuzzy inside because you're better than some of the worst is to not make them in the first place, at least when they're as avoidable as this one.
> America has a great legal system if only you can afford it
Here's a case I read about over a decade ago, and never forgot:
https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2012-aug-21-la-me-in... ("Man behind bars 2 years after judge orders release" (2012))
- "But two years after he was supposed to be released, Larsen remains behind bars while the California attorney general appeals the decision. The state’s main argument: He did not file his legal paperwork seeking release on time."
> California Atty. Gen.Kamala D. Harris, whose office maintains that evidence still points to Larsen’s guilt, accuses him and his attorneys of filing a petition seeking his release more than six years after he was legally required to do so. Prosecutors question whether the judges had the authority to hear Larsen’s petition for release.
https://www.nationmaster.com/country-info/compare/China/Unit...
The only category china ranks higher in is corruption and bribery and oddly the number of judges and prosecutors employed.
https://edition.cnn.com/2024/04/18/us/organs-removed-decease...