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Comment by WillPostForFood | Hacker News Reader

Please document one or two cases. Everything I have seen has turned out to be a little more complicated than initially presented.

E.g. This story of the French researcher which started as, "A French scientist has been denied entry into the United States, apparently because the scientist had expressed a personal opinion on the Trump administration's research policy"

In fact turned out to be, "The French researcher in question was in possession of confidential information on his electronic device from Los Alamos National Laboratory — in violation of a non-disclosure agreement— something he admitted to taking without permission and attempted to conceal,”

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/21/world/europe/us-france-sc...

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They found confidential information on his phone as he was attempting to enter the US, and their response was to turn him back instead of detaining him for violating those agreements or espionage?

Does that sound plausible to you? Or even a better argument? If I was fully onboard with America is the only country that matters I would be apoplectic to find out they let a known spy just leave

None of the articles I found went into more detail than the NY Times one. What they all say in common is that the French researcher was denied entrance. If the US version is true (and I can't be sure either way), then the presupposition would be that individual was already on a DHS list, not that customs necessarily found it.

As for whether they knowingly let a spy leave, that would depend on a full timeline.

> As for whether they knowingly let a spy leave, that would depend on a full timeline.

No it does not if the defense for denying him entry was knowing that he was a spy?

Stop arguing out of both sides of your mouth. So far both proffered explanations are unacceptable.

To be clear the two answers so far have been,

1: we found personal comments of him on his phone critical of the administration and denied him entry based on that, which is unacceptable on free speech grounds

2: he was known or found to have secrets from one of our nuclear labs and was denied entry based on the fact that we knew he had these forbidden files, and we let him go. This is unacceptable on national security grounds.

You can’t mix and match from the two scenarios

That's a false dichotomy. The severity depends on what the individual attempted to remove. Nuclear secrets might be unacceptable to allow him to leave. Something more administrative might not be worth the jurisdiction hassle to prosecute but still get the individual flagged against re-entry.

Explain the false dichotomy.

If he stole documents I don’t want my government only flagging him for denial to reentry. If he stole documents from our nuclear labs I want him in cuffs.

How am I being inconsistent if your “false dichotomy” claim persists?

I didn't say anything about Inconsistency, so I will set that to the side.

My entire point is that these things are seldom so black and white as put forward. The US administration has a self serving answer, but so do the French and this anonymous scientist. Which do you think is less professionally damaging for a European, being denied entrance due to views on American politics or being denied based on mishandling of classified material?

In an ideal world, I would prefer to see any mishandling of classification prosecuted, that seldom is how it works.

Without knowing a timeline, it isn't even clear which administration was running things under which events.

Nothing in your response outlined a possibility that was not in 1 of the 2 options given by my own government.

I don't give a fuck what the French or Europeans think. I am holding my own government accountable to what are ostensibly the values we share(freedom of speech and national security) and finding them lacking. It requires zero input from the French scientist in question for me to be upset with the situation

And no, I don't need a timeline to understand this because my problem with the government's own explanation does not have a time based component

Calling it "confidential information" from los alamos is probably just a trick to evoke thoughts and assumptions that he was stealing nuclear secrets.

In reality, given the pattern of intimidation and lies from this government, it was probably something innocuous that was trumped up even just to be a violation of an NDA (e.g. maybe a draft of a not-yet-published non-unusual research paper that included an author from Los Alamos), or else this government would have emphasized the sensitive or dangerous nature of that "confidential information".

I'm having another issue with this explanation: How do border officers determine, if the information was confidential and if he wasn't authorized to have it?

I'm not saying it can't be determined, but it feels like an issue that can't be easily resolved during a border check within a few hours.

If there was a policy passed down to the thousands of homeland security officers at airports to screen phones for critical comments about Trump, is it plausible that not one person would leak that to the press? It sounds absurd.

We get ~200,000 foreign visitors flying into US airports a day. That we have a handful of people over months who had issues seems more like the normal rate, and evidence there is no weird screening policy, which would probably affect thousands, not dozens.

Hmm it's hard to say which side is true. And if he had stolen info and breached an NDA, why deny him entry? It would have been better to capture him and sue him for this.

Also I find it very hard to believe that random border guards would find such thing during a spot check.

Personally, I have found the fact this researcher himself is not complaining about this and remains anonymous to be pretty suspicious in itself.

Instead we have a French beurocrat complaining about it on his behalf himself pushing the bad messages found narrative. This all smells of cover-up.

A plausible explanation would be that the US knows confidential information ended up in France and the person who was denied entry was the only plausible vector but was not caught red handed. Instead he was shadow banned and was nabbed for interrogation at the border where he confessed. And it could well be that the border agents scraped together a story about his messages as an excuse to bounce a persona non grata to keep the diplomatic issue quiet because banning a guy for Trump hate is a better diplomatic choice. (i.e. what is to be gained from holding him vs letting France burn him for getting caught). This all seems extremely plausible to me.

In any case there's obviously more to the story and that's the point. Not knowing who this guy is really underscores there's something diplomatically delicate at play here and the US has sent France whatever message it needs already IMHO.

Put another way: if you are affiliated with France's nuclear weapons program maybe there's something work-related going on between France and the US. That's how I interpret this story.

Hmm I think the Trump criticism is the last kind of thing the border agents would make up as a coverup to be honest. It reflects poorly on the administration by reinforcing the amount of criticism it gets. I think any civil servant would keep their head down especially now that layoffs are left right and center. It's also not a valid reason to ban him anyway.

A simpler thing to make up would be a family matter, some unverifiable criminal record or whatever. Even noncooperation which is a valid reason to refuse entry. Or most likely: simply "no comment" would have done.

It doesn't help that we don't know the identity, no. But I'd keep my head down too if it happened to me. Science is a field where everyone knows everyone and it's not one where you want to be known as a troublemaker.

I agree we don't know the details and that there's probably more to the story but I don't think the criticism thing is made up.

Well, I'm just saying people claiming it was about Trump criticism is easy. For example there's another case where a UK band was denied entry and the band had to cancel their performances. Which the band played up as denied because of vocal Trump criticism. Yet buried in the fine print of the reporting they admitted they had the wrong visa to be performing in the US.

It just keeps seeming to be these things where the press is really pushing this narrative but the stories they bring always carry an asterisk.

To be quite honest I have alarm fatigue when these keep popping up. They all register as clickbait. I have not encountered a single one yet that wasn't smoke spun up for clicks and outrage.

Yeah that is a good point. And it is very unnecessary because there is lots of stuff that Trump does that is totally outrageous. And that doesn't even seem to get people worried.

I don’t believe we are reprimanding those who mishandle sensitive information any longer. Anyway, they were just joking when he concealed it. That’s just their ‘weaving’ skills on full display.

Thanks for the link, without this comment I would have totally missed it. Doesn’t change my overall view of what is currently happening but it’s a useful nuance.

Don't gaslight "it's complicated", that's like right out of 1930s Germany where people insisted everything is fine and there was some kind of just cause

We've been though only 60 days now and institution after institution is being completely dismantled.

Health, Education, Science, Weather Service, soon USPS, aid to the world with medication to stop HIV etc and food for children, all gone.

They paid a torture prison to take people out of US jurisdiction so judges couldn't order hearings, there are people who were legit seeking asylum and have obviously never been in a gang or criminals who might never see the light of day again

Russel Vought, Stephen Miller, Steve Bannon are full blown fascists following the Project2025 plan page by page.

Imagine this country in 200 more weeks.

Imagine what's going to go down once Congress and the Supreme Court are out for the summer and can't react quickly enough to all the illegal activities.

It's going to take DECADES to recover from this damage.

If this was still 2024, I'd call you crazy. In 2025, this view is not unheard of.

I think it's very important to compare it to early 1930s Germany, and not to the murderous and genocidal Nazi regime in the late 1930s and onward. It all started with smaller things and got worse really fast. But it took a few years to completely reshape the administration and change the laws.

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