3/30/2025 at 8:41:33 PM
This hasn't hit mainstream media yet. It should have by now. Disappearing people is not something the US government is allowed to do.Here's Xiaofeng Wang's bio on the Indiana University site.[1]
Google Scholar.[2]
Archived version of home page at Indiana University.[3]
If anybody has a PACER account, please check there.
[1] https://alliance.iu.edu/members/member/8580.html
[2] https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=pONu-5EAAAAJ&hl=en
[3] https://web.archive.org/web/20240930195057/https://homes.lud...
by Animats
3/30/2025 at 8:46:35 PM
We have no evidence that Wang "was" disappeared. We know that he's nowhere to be found, that the university put him on leave weeks ago [0], and that the FBI recently searched his home. Notably, the university put him on leave weeks before the FBI searched his home.That sequence is better explained by the hypothesis that Wang vanished himself suddenly and the university called in the FBI to investigate things that they found in the aftermath. (Note that that's still pure speculation, but it's speculation that better accounts for all known facts.)
[0] https://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/more-details-on-situati...
by lolinder
3/30/2025 at 8:54:27 PM
On the long list of problems caused by the government "disappearing" people (which they have objectively been doing lately) is that it destroys trust and therefore makes even valid legal proceedings seem more shady than they would in a world in which due process was a universal guarantee in practice. I don't fault anyone for jumping to conclusions implicating the government is in the wrong here rather than Wang.by slg
3/30/2025 at 8:57:19 PM
> by the government "disappearing" anyone (which they have objectively been doing lately)Notably, they haven't been "disappearing" people in the manner that would have to be happening here. Even the most egregious cases, which are very bad, have left a paper trail for lawyers and journalists to follow. This case is notable because no one seems to know where this man has gone.
But yes, point taken: the extrajudicial actions of ICE recently are absolutely not helping people stay calm in the face of something like this.
by lolinder
3/30/2025 at 8:59:41 PM
>Even the most egregious cases, which are very bad, have left a paper trail for lawyers and journalists to follow.How can you be confident in this? Is it possible that you are saying this because the only cases we know about are when they have happened to leave "a paper trail for lawyers and journalists to follow"?
by slg
3/30/2025 at 9:14:57 PM
It's clearly not true that everyone is properly documented.https://www.nbcnews.com/news/latino/lawyers-advocates-say-48...
by TheOtherHobbes
3/30/2025 at 9:25:52 PM
This article says that the communities are having a hard time figuring out which 48 people were arrested, which is a very different problem than having a specific person you're looking for and not knowing where they went to.Again: still bad, still inexcusable, but not the same thing as what would have to be happening here.
by lolinder
3/31/2025 at 12:59:54 AM
That someone is not documented doesn’t mean you get to treat everyone that way. That someone is not documented doesn’t mean they have no rights for that matter.by LastTrain
3/31/2025 at 4:03:38 AM
I think in this case they are referring to the documentation of what happened to them, not their immigration statusby lucasban
4/2/2025 at 1:01:49 PM
The bigger comment is that these people are not documented or undocumented. To be either would require due process where such documents could be produced.by radishingr
3/31/2025 at 2:51:35 PM
The label “undocumented” is utterly dishonest. “Undocumented” implies that something has been permitted, but not documented. Like agreeing to let a friend live in your basement apartment without drawing up a lease.Illegal immigrants aren’t “undocumented.” They are present in America without the consent of the American people, as expressed in immigration law.
by rayiner
3/31/2025 at 11:52:13 PM
Does the law call someone who drives without a license an illegal driver or an unlicensed driver? Someone who practices medicine an illegal doctor or refer to them as unlicensed? Someone operating without a permit is not an illegal worker but an operator without a license.by _DeadFred_
4/1/2025 at 2:43:00 PM
You could certainly say they were driving, practicing medicine, or operating machinery illegally, or indeed working illegally if they don't provide valid documents.by telotortium
4/1/2025 at 3:14:41 PM
Did you read my comment? They were driving illegally, not an illegal driver. Practicing medicine illegally, not an illegal doctor. Working illegally, not an illegal worker. See how the language of it works? They are in the US illegally, they are not an illegal person.by _DeadFred_
4/1/2025 at 5:28:02 PM
I don’t think these tendentious language games are winning as much support for your position as you think. Do you object to calling people felons, instead of saying they are people convicted of a felony? I know the idea is that by not calling someone a felon, you imply that some negative characteristic doesn’t define a person. But it’s been extended from diseases and mental illnesses, where the logic does make some sense, to legal categories, where I don’t think people ever had an issue keeping the two things apart. Also, progressives are hypocrites in that they are more than willing to call people racists instead of saying they’re merely people expressing racist thoughts or engaging in racist behaviors.by telotortium
4/2/2025 at 1:19:03 PM
> Also, progressives are hypocrites in that they are more than willing to call people racists instead of saying they’re merely people expressing racist thoughts or engaging in racist behaviors.FWIW that pattern of behavior has little to do with "being a progressive" and instead reflects the cultural norm. I'd even go so far as to posit that "progressives" are more likely to point out that, no, there's really not "a racist" but a person can hold a lot of extremely racist beliefs - the same way btw as there's really not "a progressive" but a person can hold a lot of progressive beliefs. A system can be "racist" in that it can be built on and to uphold racist attitudes or beliefs but a person can't be "racist" because racism isn't an intrinsic and immutable characteristic (neither is "progressive", "Catholic", "criminal" or "Republican", to name a few examples explicitly).
But precisely because you can't actually be "a progressive" but merely hold some progressive beliefs and opinions a lot of "progressives" uphold the same harmfully essentialist views as "non-progressives" who balk at being called out for racist opinions, views or actions by insisting "I'm not racist" regardless of whether the accusation is "you're a racist" or "you said/did something racist".
"Felon" is an obviously silly example as it's just a more specific form of "convict", i.e. someone convicted of a felony crime. It's often used in an essentialist way (but of course selectively so) but the more obvious example would be "criminal" because it is often used in a way that suggests an intrinsic essence of "criminality" even in the absence of sufficient evidence to make a legal case that would result in a conviction - or even the presence of an arguable crime at all. "Criminal" is thus distinct from "convict" in that a conviction is neither necessary nor sufficient for that label to be applied.
by hnbad
4/3/2025 at 3:23:14 AM
I don't give a crap about support of positions. A person can't be 'illegal'. They can be violating the law, but they are not illegal, unless we go back to Japanese internment camp style thinking, where the person themselves is the thing requiring incarceration.Back when I was a libertarian they were pretty big on this argument, not progressives, as libertarians were the open borders people and progressives were off on some other cause.
by _DeadFred_
3/31/2025 at 3:56:17 PM
The lack of enforcement of the law is also a kind of consent. The notion that a law as written alone represents 'people's consent' is a total non-starter in any kind of realistic system of governance, to build a claim of 'dishonesty' on top of that seems extra silly. You don't like the term, fine, you don't like the term. But let's not pretend that dislike is some kind of inevitable consequence compelled by Pure Logiks or whatever.by pvg
3/31/2025 at 4:06:07 PM
I don’t like it because it’s dishonest. The term “undocumented” implies that something has been agreed to or sanctioned, just not written down. But nobody agreed to allow illegal immigrants to come and stay here.As you acknowledge, the term embeds within it the premise that “the lack of enforcement of the law is also a kind of consent.” That is, illegal immigrants have America’s consent to be present in the country, because the government doesn’t try to hard to deport them. You can make that argument, but almost nobody would agree with your premise. So the term is smuggling an implicit premise that almost nobody would agree with if the premise were stated clearly (as you have done here).
by rayiner
4/1/2025 at 3:32:51 AM
> But nobody agreed to allow illegal immigrants to come and stay here.In 90% of cases somebody did. Somebody at the border talked to them. Somebody checked their passport or their documentation (at the border). So many "undocumented immigrants" are people who overstayed their visas, like Elon did.
They literally were documented but then they didn't keep up with the paperwork and thus became undocumented.
"Doccumented" status *is* literally just a case of keeping up with the paperwork.
Some people do sneak in but the *vast majority* come through legal ports of entry
by hmcq6
4/1/2025 at 4:50:47 AM
Plenty of people agreed, especially the many, many businesses that happily employ them. Come back with this "consent of the people" stuff when we have mandatory E-Verify.by tptacek
3/31/2025 at 4:54:41 PM
The phrase "undocumented" is bureaucratic speak for "you can't prove it.""The allegations are undocumented."
In the context of immigration, one could say "she claims to face persecution in her country of origin, but this is undocumented."
That doesn't really apply to "undocumented immigrants," because it's usually not in doubt someone is an immigrant.
If their place of birth is unknown, and might be in the United States, you could use the phrase "undocumented immigrant."
I agree it's a propaganda phrase, and does not conform to clear English usage.
But "undocumented" does not mean something is sanctioned, it means it must be proven and has not been proven.
by pyuser583
4/1/2025 at 12:01:00 AM
Does the court say that someone driving without a license is an 'illegal driver'? Nope, they say they are 'operating without a license' or 'driving illegally'. And guess what, that isn't because the courts are being dishonest.by _DeadFred_
3/30/2025 at 9:39:20 PM
Documentation is hard to do accurately when someone illegally immigrates with no documents.by throwaway48476
3/30/2025 at 11:50:28 PM
The Department of Homeland Security is not an undocumented immigrant, nor is the court system. They are required to document what they do.by mmooss
3/31/2025 at 12:30:16 AM
And many of the disappeared people were here either with valid asylum claims or temporary protected status and were following the laws to get their day in court -- at which time it would have been completely legal and appropriate to deport them if their claims were denied. Instead, we have secret police grabbing them off the street, immediately transferring them out of the jurisdiction they were picked up in and flying them out of the country to a notoriously violent prison in an unrelated country less than 48 hours after they were picked up... it's an absolute travesty and anyone who defends it should be deeply ashamed.by mikeyouse
3/31/2025 at 3:35:22 AM
Some people had 100% valid visas that were revoked upon attempting to enter, at the (arbitrary) discretion of an immigration officer for years old non-criminal issues that had been resolved.They were then detained for days rather then be allowed to exit the country.
by lokar
4/1/2025 at 11:44:05 AM
How does homeland security know who they arrested if the individual has no documents?Assuming they're not in a biometric database and from a non cooperative country like Venezuela.
by throwaway48476
3/30/2025 at 11:32:45 PM
With all the speculation, how do we know the US government 'disappeared' him. He's originally from China. How do we know that the Chinese government didn't do this (which is known to happen) and now the FBI is involved to find out what happened?by billy99k
3/31/2025 at 3:07:19 AM
Isn’t it more likely that he was out when they raided his house, heard of the raid (perhaps from the woman on the phone when she emerged from the house on the phone) and fled to avoid arrest?by more_corn
3/31/2025 at 5:12:42 AM
It sounds like he was “out” for weeks possibly, though? Seems like an overall very strange situation.by bee_rider
3/31/2025 at 8:58:14 AM
> How do we know that the Chinese government didn't do this (which is known to happen)Source?
> How do we know it was the US government
We don't but its 100000x easier for the US government to disappear someone on US soil than it is for China to disappear someone on US soil.
by hmcq6
3/31/2025 at 12:11:19 PM
Is it really that much more easier?I've heard of CCP affiliated Chinese nationals who essentially act as CCP police on foreign soil and force nationals to return to China.
by fennecbutt
3/31/2025 at 9:31:45 AM
Yes moving him to a different house would be an incredibly difficult thing for the Chinese govt to do. And of course, this would be something that he couldnt possibly do himself without some sort of secret govt involvement.by lazyeye
3/31/2025 at 9:49:40 AM
I'm sorry, are you arguing that he's in Chinese witness protection inside the US?by hmcq6
3/31/2025 at 10:25:32 AM
Obviously not. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_police_overseas_servic...by lupusreal
4/1/2025 at 3:23:48 AM
You clearly didn't read this Wiki (Wiki is not a source BTW) because it says basically the opposite of what you're implying. Same goes for everyone in this thread talking about Chinese police on foreign soil.The "CCP Police on foreign soil" aren't extracting people from the West so they can avoid persecution from the West. They're pressuring Chinese citizens to go back to China to face punishment for crimes China thinks they committed.
by hmcq6
4/1/2025 at 10:07:30 AM
You added the part about exfiltration from the country. It is possible he has been kidnapped by Chinese secret police in the country and remains in the country (at least until they manage to coerce him to return "willingly".) Anyway, nobody said anything about witness protection either, that part was your hallucination too.By the way, before you get yourself all worked up, I think the much more likely possibility is that he has disappeared for a mundane reason, such as murder, or else he has deliberately disappeared himself for some reason.
by lupusreal
4/3/2025 at 7:54:42 AM
The witness protection thing was a joke to make it clear how absurd what you're proposing is. Clearly some people got the joke.Y'all read "CCP Police stations" and your imaginations started going wild. There is no evidence nor is there even an accusation that these "police" stations are used to kidnap US citizens.
> You added the part about exfiltration
.... bro how are they going to coerce someone to leave the country "willingly" if the FBI is looking for that person? His passport is obviously going to get flagged.
And if your answer is "get him a fake passport" then congratulations, you just described exfiltration.
by hmcq6
3/31/2025 at 6:05:05 PM
No I'm arguing that moving him from one house to another is something the Chinese govt could assist with.by lazyeye
4/1/2025 at 3:20:49 AM
So what's the end game? They're being hunted by the FBI I don't think Trading Spaces™ is going to get this guy out of troubleby hmcq6
4/1/2025 at 5:33:34 AM
Exactly...nobody knows what the actual end game is at this point. So all the hyperbolic speculation is ridiculous.by lazyeye
4/1/2025 at 9:04:18 AM
Hold up, let’s not pretend these ideas are all equally feasible.Spies do flee countries. People do get disappeared. The idea that China has a presence on US soil helping criminals evade the FBI is a *conspiracy theory*.
by hmcq6
3/31/2025 at 12:35:00 AM
Why would they tacitly admit to performing warrantless searches?by SpaceNoodled
3/31/2025 at 12:52:03 AM
Did you read the article?A bureau spokesperson issued a statement: “I can confirm we conducted court-authorized activity at the address in Carmel today.
by kadushka
3/31/2025 at 7:03:08 AM
Sounds like possible espionage. Chinese spies spook easily and flee the country long before the FBI gets its shit together.by clown_strike
3/31/2025 at 2:14:13 PM
Moreso than spying, sounds like a long time US-based researcher suddenly had a reason to commit immediate espionage.Believe everyone can put together the type of events that cause sudden behavior changes like that. (Hint: money offers or family threats)
by ethbr1
4/1/2025 at 12:15:04 AM
It's all the same to me but that's often how it goes. Everyone is a sleeper agent until compelled to act by whatever means. Israelis do the same thing under the sayanim program (appeal to loyalty). Malware agents are staged until called upon using the same strategy.I don't know what motivated this guy's disappearance but you don't get quietly fired, scrubbed from public association and have the FBI raid your apartment when you're a victim of abduction. We know some sort of federal crime took place to justify the raid so my guess is the guy is not an abductee but a fugitive.
by clown_strike
4/1/2025 at 10:19:32 AM
Here's one possible way it went down: His wife kills him and hides the body. The university then fires him because he doesn't show up and won't respond to any messages. Eventually the university gets suspicious and calls the FBI. The FBI raids the apartment because they think it might be a crime scene. The reason its the FBI and not local cops is because the university mentioned that he was Chinese and working on sensitive research so the feds step in, due to them perceiving some possible espionage angle.I am not saying that definitely happened, but it's a narrative which more or less fits the facts.
by lupusreal
3/30/2025 at 11:51:27 PM
> How can you be confident in this? Is it possible that you are saying this because the only cases we know about...This is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argument_from_ignorance and is also asking someone else to prove nonexistence of a situation. Both of these are inappropriate in a good faith discussion and I believe it would benefit you to consider how you reason about these situations if you want to come to well founded conclusions.
If you have evidence, or even plausible speculation as to the government "disappearing people" you should present it here so we can all understand and respond to this, as it is extremely important. If you are just assuming that the government 'must be' disappearing people, without any evidence or even a plausible theory which you can share then you are just being hysterical.
by ltbarcly3
3/31/2025 at 6:10:35 PM
1) The current president has explicitly said that he wants to use violent force to enact his policies.2) There are numerous cases of the current administration using its discretionary powers to enact its desired policies in ways that violate norms and are quite probably illegal.
3) The administration actively circumventing record-keeping requirements, likely in an attempt to avoid detection of illegal actions.
The federal government is unbelievably powerful. Because of the jobs it is expected to do, it must maintain capabilities to do many terrifying things. For that reason, the government does not get the presumption of innocence. It has to be able to prove exactly what it was up to, and where its resources are being spent.
The reason there are so many tedious and wasteful rule-making and record-keeping and due-process requirements is exactly because it would be trivial otherwise to do things like disappear law-abiding citizens off the street and cover it up.
So when someone says "I want do do crimes A, B, and C", and then you discover that they have in fact done crimes B and C, and taken steps to conceal the potential commission of crime A, it isn't a fallacy to infer that they may have committed crime A.
by ItDoBeWimdyTho
4/3/2025 at 7:26:30 AM
I agree with everything you said here. Nothing you said disagrees with what I said. There's a fundamental difference from what you are saying, that there is a high risk, there's strong reasons to be concerned, and we need to stay on top of things and what OP said, which is that the government IS disappearing people, and the lack of evidence is actually evidence in favor of this. It's a ludicrous statement that if accepted undermines any attempt to know reality with any level of certainty. It is a fundamentally unhinged way of collecting information about the world.by ltbarcly3
3/30/2025 at 9:02:54 PM
Sure, it's possible, but it's also speculation. You can't rationally use speculated possible hushed-up disappearances as evidence to fuel further speculation: there lies the road to totally unhinged conspiracy theories.If we see more cases like this one of someone disappearing without a trace and their disappearance getting documented but not explained, I'll accept this one as evidence to fuel future speculation. Until then, speculation used to fuel speculation is a dangerous path.
EDIT: Apparently my reference to conspiracy theories is pushing buttons? Unfortunately this is literally true: the logic of the conspiracy theorist builds upon itself, with as minimal reference to exterior circumstances as possible. The lizard people did it. How do we know? Because they did it before!
If we want to be different from conspiracy theorists, we need to cultivate an insistence on reasoning from documented facts, rather than building elaborate towers out of theories alone.
by lolinder
3/30/2025 at 9:09:23 PM
My first comment was not speculation. I only speculated in my second comment to highlight how your rather definitive "they haven't been "disappearing" people in the manner that would have to be happening here" was also in fact speculation.by slg
3/30/2025 at 9:13:03 PM
Point taken.Better said: We have no evidence that they have been disappearing people in this manner. We also, clearly, have a large body of people who are on guard for any such possible evidence, so I would reasonably expect that if it were happening with any kind of regularity we would have seen it by now. There's a possibility that this is instance #1 and we see repeats. If we do see repeats, I will happily engage in speculation that this is a pattern and the government may in fact be disappearing people.
Until then, the known facts don't match a government disappearing program as well as they match other possible explanations.
by lolinder
3/31/2025 at 4:44:01 AM
> We have no evidence that they have been disappearing people in this mannerIsn't it evidence of "disappearings" that we know many people were transported to a prison in El Salvador but nobody knows who those people in fact are?
As far as I've seen from the press the government hasn't released any documentation about who they flew to El Salvador. Or have they?
If that is true then isn't it also true that this scientist in question might as well be in that Salvadorean prison, as far as we know?
by galaxyLogic
3/31/2025 at 2:23:25 PM
Given that several of the individuals were named clients of the ACLU in the lawsuit, at least some of them are known.https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/69741724/1/jgg-v-trump/
by ethbr1
3/30/2025 at 10:03:59 PM
In fairness, there was no public evidence of the Nazi death camps up until they decided to turn the prison camps into that at the Wannsee Conference either.It was only in retrospect that we learned the true horror of the Holocaust.
Given that period of history, and how it brought the world to the brink, any patterning closely similar to that (which we are seeing today) these things should be considered happening until it can be proven otherwise.
Complacency and a lack of accountability in the moment is how these things happen, and turn good people to sloth.
Saying "Trust us", just isn't going to cut it given the existing state of no credibility that is a consequence of over a half century of bad acting and abuse of authority, and the trusted news initiative (which is not trustable).
by trod1234
3/30/2025 at 10:09:46 PM
I'm totally in favor of holding the current administration accountable for what they are doing and clamping down on all the authoritarian actions as much as possible. But I'm not in favor of compromising principles to do it.There are plenty of things that they're doing that are documented that are evil. There's no need to waste energy and credibility speculating about things that aren't yet understood or documented, unless you personally have the means to investigate Wang's disappearance and shed light on what happened.
by lolinder
3/31/2025 at 12:14:04 AM
There is a point where "benefit of the doubt" is not appropriate though. Personal opinion is that point is past.by NomDePlum
3/31/2025 at 2:26:44 AM
Benefit of the doubt is relative to both the item and setting though. What prior evidence do we have that would cause us _not_ to extend benefit of the doubt to the US government in the specific context of disappearing people?I can think of plenty of examples of shady things various official bodies in the US have done within the past century, but regular occurrences of "extrajudicial kidnapping without a paper trail" isn't one of them.
If you go through proper channels and leave a paper trail then regardless of whether or not you agree with what's been done it can't reasonably said to be "disappearing" someone.
by fc417fc802
3/31/2025 at 7:49:13 AM
US did not used to do whole host thing it is doing now - like trying to destroy law companies that sued politicians. Or, removing security from former government family members while stroking hate. Or, illegally extraditing people because someone misrepresented a tattoo. Or, attacking judges the way current administration do.Or, threatening to annex Canada and parts of Europe. Or, opening damm because there is fire in a place where water does not go.
Something not happening in the past is not a reason for it to not happen again.
by watwut
3/31/2025 at 4:23:52 AM
There is never a time where it's appropriate to give up benefit of the doubt in general toward an entity. If your starting position is that they most likely did any and every bad thing you can think of, you quickly reach absurdity.by Dylan16807
3/31/2025 at 6:13:50 AM
You are wrong about that. You have never dealt with malevolent entities where that cannot be given.Decision-making, and its related presumptions change when the threat becomes existential.
Deceivers with resources who abuse the public trust and its presumptions towards individuals, take advantage of societies understanding, towards destructive ends, and continue doing so regardless. They corrupt the systems meant to protect and keep destructive outcome dynamics in check usually for personal or political benefit.
The entities are not entitled to the same benefit of the doubt when they have a history of malfeasance, and lack of credibility.
This is true of anti-trust, government corruption, and government in general when you consider the many other things like Tuskegee, or what happened to the Inuit women who were involuntarily sterilized following eugenics programs in the late 60s early 70s, along with other indigenous peoples under the guise of beneficial programs promoting public health.
You can see just how well fines do in curbing corruption like JPM's silver manipulation over a decade, or Egg price fixing over the past 10 years, or medical equipment providers who have defects that kill patients, and then claim they fix them falsely (in bad faith).
There is a point where you cannot presume innocence, especially with regards to non-person entities (like corporations), who will pay the fine and continue business as usual passing the cost on.
Eventually you hit a critical saturation point where the presumption and benefit of the doubt must necessarily flip.
When related systems break enough, there is a point where people realize the rule of law has failed, and consider alternatives like the brass verdict, and act on it.
These are not good things, but they happen when the dynamics to correct fail as a whole. When people start objectively finding foundational violations, it becomes and is a societal existential threat and should be treated as such.
Failure to react from that point forward then becomes opting out of continued survival, which is well beyond any considered point of absurdity.
Evil is blind to the natural destructive consequences it creates, and sometimes evil needs killing just as it did with the Nazi's.
When the rule of law can no longer fulfill the obligations under social contract, and act as a non-violent conflict resolution, the alternative is natural law and chaos, and it is something that no good person would wish on anyone.
by trod1234
3/31/2025 at 6:45:35 PM
You didn't address my argument though, my second sentence.It's one thing to not trust some entity and say they do bad things a lot, or to assume they're being evil in certain areas where they have established motives and patterns.
It's quite another to be so general about it that if a single person flippantly accuses them of basically anything you start off believing it. That's going too far and leads to some ridiculous early conclusions.
by Dylan16807
3/31/2025 at 7:51:16 AM
The same goes for extending infinite amount of benefit of doubt toward people who has shown who they are again and again and again. And this was going on for years here and very much empowered bad far right actors and their enablers.There is no issue of people projecting bad intention into conservatives or Trump. There is opposite issue - people excusing them forever with increasingly implausible explanations.
by watwut
3/31/2025 at 6:54:49 AM
There'd be a fair bit of noise if the Holocaust was happening today. It'd be more like Guantanamo Bay or the US's international program of black-bag kidnappings. You don't expect to know exactly what is going on but there is a wiki page [0] and regular leaks [1] even if only a relatively small number of people involved. Something like the holocaust couldn't fly under the radar in the age of the internet; there'd be leaks like no-one's business. They could get away with more radio silence in the 1950s by not having social media.[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guantanamo_Bay_detention_camp
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guant%C3%A1namo_Bay_files_leak
by roenxi
3/31/2025 at 8:05:00 AM
I disagree.There is this design process called the separation of objectionable concerns, where the task roles are designed to promote complacency through information control, the Stasi perfected it, and its used everywhere today in sensitive positions.
The most objectionable and risk related roles and tasks will be assigned to the fewest number of people with no one else being the wiser.
All other roles involved are narrowly tailored towards specific parts supporting the whole without any knowledge of doing so.
A murky transfer to a foreign prison makes for a very plausible disappearance. This is how these things are done historically, and social media is heavily controlled.
It could easily happen given what happened with regards to China and the Uyghur population.
by trod1234
3/31/2025 at 8:06:08 PM
> There'd be a fair bit of noise if the Holocaust was happening today.I doubt it. The original Holocaust denier was FDR. He didn't want Nazi attrocities to distract from the war effort.
If your main enemy is willing to participate in the coverup, that's a problem.
We regularly forget about the horrific prison camps and racial policies of North Korean, because we're more worried about them having nuclear weapons.
Same with religious persecution in Iran. If we can make a deal that keeps Iran and North Korea out of the nuclear club, and confined to their borders, it's best not to let their purely domestic attrocities get in the way.
If Hitler hadn't invaded Poland, what would have happened to German/Austrian Jews?
by pyuser583
3/31/2025 at 9:03:27 AM
> There'd be a fair bit of noise if the Holocaust was happening today.Why are we talking in hypotheticals when it literally is happening today?
by hmcq6
3/31/2025 at 9:07:25 AM
The Uyghur thing has been fairly well discussed and I assume people know everything they care to. Wikipedia is pretty comprehensive on the current state of knowledge.by roenxi
3/31/2025 at 5:41:42 PM
I was referring to the holocaust the US is currently aiding inby hmcq6
3/31/2025 at 8:57:25 PM
Gaza? You should spell things out. Regardless even more ink has been spilled on that and there doesn't seem to be any particular ambiguity on what is happening. It is major international news and South Africa are bringing court cases to the ICJ. Israel isn't doing anything subtle.by roenxi
4/1/2025 at 3:16:48 AM
Wait... so you effectively said "there's no holocaust going on" and I pointed out one and you accidentally brought up another... and I'm wrong still? What? No.All the saber rattling doesn't mean you were correct in implying there is no holocaust going on
by hmcq6
4/1/2025 at 5:11:19 AM
> Wait... so you effectively said "there's no holocaust going on"I said the opposite, there are literally multiple genocides going on. They make a fair bit of noise. There is lots of evidence of them if you care to look. They all have well sourced Wikipedia pages.
It isn't possible to wipe out a people and not have others quickly notice what is going on.
by roenxi
4/1/2025 at 8:54:46 AM
Thanks for your patience, I clearly misunderstood your previous commentsby hmcq6
3/30/2025 at 11:46:17 PM
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knowledge_of_the_Holocaust_in_..."Berlin Radio broadcast the mass-execution of Jews in Bialystok and the burning of synagogues in July 1941"
> It was only in retrospect that we learned the true horror of the Holocaust.
https://www.timesofisrael.com/how-the-world-discovered-the-n...
The full scale wasn't known but there was enough evidence something was going on.
I'm really not seeing much similarity between that period of history and this period. Godwin's law is probably more applicable.
by YZF
3/31/2025 at 1:08:54 AM
> I'm really not seeing much similarity between that period of history and this period.Unemployment ~30%, inflation/stagflation, and German industry being co-opted by multinational corporations laying people off. > Then US Unemployment 1 in 4 out of work, co-opted by corporations, laying people off and price fixing basic goods and services.
Reichstag Fire Attack blamed on the Communists. > January 6th followed by Assassination Attempt at a Rally; blamed on the left/communist/marxist and calling out Harris as being Marxist in the debates.
Hitler extolling the virtues of Hitler Youth for hours publicly. > US State of the Union address covering the Honorary SS agent, DJ Daniel, doing the same.
Propaganda Ministry by Reich Press Chamber. > Trusted News Initiative. "The sharing of bias and false news has become all too common on social media...." [Sinclair/Deadspin, 200 channels verbatim]
People disappearing, detained, moved, or killed residents (SS) > Unidentified Agents detaining people with video coverage (Tufts Student), Prisoners being flown elsewhere (El Salvador), residents being killed by police, etc (George Floyd + too many others).
Channeling Popular Anxieties and stoking fear of a communist uprising to eradicate civil liberties, and democracy. > Same
These are just a few. Its quite concerning how it looks like a failed subversion/communist takeover leads to the dynamics allowing fascism. People can't seem to agree on a set objective measure of when have they crossed the line too far, when they cross the line continually.
Its greatly concerning.
by trod1234
3/31/2025 at 4:26:34 AM
Where in the world did you get that unemployment rate?And some of the things you're listing are similar in scale while others are orders of magnitude different. A giant list like that is a mess.
by Dylan16807
3/31/2025 at 5:26:45 AM
> Where in the world did you get that unemployment rate?SGS, Shadow Government Stats.
Their estimates include the "long-term discouraged worker" which was officially defined out of existence in 1994, which was coupled with the short-term discouraged worker (U6) from BLS to get a real unemployment rate.
https://www.shadowstats.com/alternate_data/unemployment-char...
Its followed reality far closer than the watered down stats and methodology the politician's have been using over the last two decades. Especially during 2008, and they don't break it down by industry. Tech right now and going back two years is being displaced massively with no metrics for optics.
I agree, lists are horrible on HN.
by trod1234
3/31/2025 at 6:02:58 AM
I don't see an explanation of where these numbers come from. Also I would say that even within U6, someone that's forced to work part-time should not count 1:1 with someone that has no job at all.Overall labor force participation seems fine. https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/98/US_Labor...
And labor force participation is only down, what, 4% from 2000? Why does that correspond to a 14% increase in unemployment?
by Dylan16807
3/31/2025 at 6:41:14 AM
I disagree. Work is real scarce, the food stamp benefits also don't cover a full month of food, more like 1-2 weeks with grocery store price inflation (assuming you have a kitchen to prepare your food, many don't).The alternative to no work is starving, and there are people where they have been starving and unable to find any gainful employment for years. The most common excuse is being overqualified.
I've a friend who was laid off about a year ago, more experienced than I in SRE, and has had no job offers and he's applied to everything available in and outside Tech.
You got signs everywhere saying "We're hiring", and force you to do a 1-2 hour LeetCode Interview or some other BS, and then within 20 minutes after completing it he'll get an automated reply through the portal saying they've gone with another candidate; they won't take the sign down though, and when he went in person they say "You're just too overqualified", or better yet "Not a good culture fit [pre-interview smacking of ageism]. There are also tax subsidies for businesses to hire discouraged workers, still it seems like no ones doing it.
You've got most places that say they need help when in fact they aren't hiring at all. If anything there are far more people who are not counted than those on just the U6. I wouldn't agree 1:1 shouldn't count.
by trod1234
4/2/2025 at 2:00:27 PM
> In fairness, there was no public evidence of the Nazi death camps up until they decided to turn the prison camps into that at the Wannsee Conference either.> It was only in retrospect that we learned the true horror of the Holocaust.
If you think the Holocaust was just what happened in the gas chambers, I'm afraid you haven't learned the true horror of the Holocaust either.
Approximately 2.7 million Jews[0] were killed in the death camps as part of the so-called Final Solution between 1941 and 1945.
This was preceded by the so-called Euthanasia[1] campaign, which killed approximately 300,000 people deemed "life undignified for life" (mostly people with disabilities) - although the exact numbers weren't known to the public at the time, the program became so widely known following a proclamation against it by the Holy See (after Catholic authorities in Germany generally supported it) that there were actual protests agianst it in Germany.
The total number of people killed by the Nazis between 1933 and 1945 in what were later considered crimes against humanity - excluding those who died from conflict, disease, etc (i.e. from WW2 or its circumstances/effects) - is approximately 17 million[2] - more than six times the number of Jews killed in the death camps alone. Of those, 6 million were Jews: 2.7 million in the death camps, about half that many additionally included among the Soviet Citizens and POWs and another 2 million non-Soviet Jews killed outside the death camps.
Note that this number doesn't include civilian victims of the war - the Nazis specifically went out of their way to carry out mass executions in Poland and elsewhere. Many of these were carried out by the Reserve Police[3], often voluntarily with no threat or punishment for refusal other than mild disciplinary action (e.g. latrine duty) and social ostracization by their colleagues for "letting them down". Many more were carried out by the Wehrmacht on their way through the Soviet Union in case you're wondering how the myth of the "innocent German soldiers" is holding up to scrutiny.
> Complacency and a lack of accountability in the moment is how these things happen, and turn good people to sloth.
True, the full extent of the Nazi mass murders was hardly fully transparent at the time. But none of this happened out of the blue and there very much was a clear and obvious escalation visible to those who cared to see it - an escalation also easily predictable at several points throughout its course, by the way, except people (including foreign governments and foreign news organizations) very much did not want to acknowledge it for a number of reason from wanting to avoid being seen as alarmist or leftist to actively supporting parts of it and just hoping that the escalation will stop at the point where the outcomes are most personally beneficial to themselves.
The problem wasn't a lack of accountability. The problem was people rationalizing their own actions by wanting to be the good guy in their personal narrative. The Reserve Police didn't volunteer to execute civilians because of a lack of oversight, it did so because not doing so when asked seemed unconscionable when the alternative would have meant reevaluating all the horrors they had participated in up to that point.
We literally have testimonies of Reserve Police officers who participated in the killings saying they did nothing wrong and actually were the real victims for being put in such an uncomfortable position of having to carry out these killings - or in one case an officer stating that he had asked his colleagues to specifically let him kill the children as long as their mothers are killed first because then he could see it as an act of mercy to kill the orphaned children.
Hierarchical institutions are designed to create a culture of obedience. Obedience is how these things happen, not complacence or lack of accountability.
[0]: https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/at-the-kil...
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aktion_T4
[2]: https://www.statista.com/statistics/1071011/holocaust-nazi-p...
[3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reserve_Police_Battalion_101
by hnbad
3/30/2025 at 10:26:06 PM
> if it were happening with any kind of regularity we would have seen it by now.If the "unhinged conspiracy theories" turn out to be at least partially true, I'm sure we'll find out it's happening regularly, but only started within the last few weeks. This could easily be the first of the "we would have seen it" cases, not some unexplainable solitary incident.
> the known facts don't match a government disappearing program as well as they match other possible explanations.
Maybe? The known facts about the way he was removed from his university job and web presence with absolutely no explanation and being referred to the FBI when asked for reasons arguably matches better with a government disappearing program then any of the other possible explanations offered around.
by bigiain
3/30/2025 at 10:28:17 PM
Sorry to keep doing this to you, but it's a big thread and most arguments have already been made. Here's a link to the best guess I have, which accounts for the delay between university action and law enforcement action (which notably has no explanation in the government disappearing program version):https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43528036
As with everything, this is pure speculation, merely put forward as a possible explanation that accounts for all known facts. I've yet to see any other explanation account for the sequence and timeline.
by lolinder
3/30/2025 at 11:04:46 PM
Here's a report of another similar incident:https://www.dailydot.com/debug/furry-hackers-fbi-raided/
Once is happenstance, Twice is a coincidence. But I'm way more suspicious of coincidences than I was even just a few months back.
by bigiain
3/30/2025 at 11:19:33 PM
If I'm reading this right, this is a case of the FBI raiding the location of the leader of a ring of hackers and that leader going offline after confirming that the raid had happened. Unless I'm mistaken on that reading, that leaves a few key differences from what's being alleged in this thread:* The target was committing crimes which were documented prior to the raid.
* The target was able to and chose to reach friends and tell them what happened.
* The target went nonresponsive after informing their friends of what happened.
* The friends allege that the location was raided but don't even imply that the leader is in federal custody.
* The leader is pseudonymous, so we fully expect that if they decide to go offline and stop using that handle that they will disappear. That's not the same thing as a person with a stable real-world identity vanishing.
by lolinder
3/31/2025 at 2:16:11 AM
> Once is happenstance, Twice is a coincidence.Three times is enemy action
by DrillShopper
3/30/2025 at 11:02:28 PM
Someone else raised a similar point in another thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43524589Can you name any cases in recent history where someone was "disappeared" or similar by the government (the only part of this we can objectively prove afaik) and then no evidence or other proof of the person's wrongdoing ever came about, and people just forgot about it?
I could be mistaken (and please correct me if I'm wrong) but I really don't think this is a thing that happens in modern times.
by ranger_danger
3/31/2025 at 4:19:31 AM
Many cases during the GWOT. People in the wrong place at the wrong time accused of being terrorists, rendered, tortured, held without trial, or tried in secret courts with secret evidence.https://www.cbc.ca/news/world/most-guantanamo-detainees-are-...
Anyone taken prisoner must be given an opportunity to be heard, to be able to give evidence that they aren't the right guy.
(To be clear, there's no indication the subjects of this story have been so detained)
by Canada
3/31/2025 at 12:43:23 AM
In what now seems like test runs, we can look back to the summer of 2020 in the Northwest US where there were armed people in camouflage and armor putting people into unmarked vans and taking them somewhere else for a non-zero amount of time. (not charged with anything nor the masked people's government identities revealed.)I am not saying there is a conspiracy going on, simply pointing out a case that appears to have been forgotten and perpetrated by the 1.0 version of the current administration.
by 1659447091
3/31/2025 at 5:55:10 AM
Adding a link for context (too late to edit, was short on time earlier). Government admitted to doing the above and then, after the fact, named the agencies involved in tossing people into unmarked vehicles, taking them to undisclosed location, questioning them and later releasing them without charges or more information.https://www.npr.org/2020/07/17/892277592/federal-officers-us...
by 1659447091
3/30/2025 at 9:10:18 PM
Everyone that’s been looked for has been found in some jail in Louisiana before further transportOf course there are people that nobody looks for
But everyone that has inquired so far has been able to figure out location
Given the ambiguous chronology here, it seems like this professor dipped out in advance and the FBI freaked out later. So he wouldn’t be in a system if that were the case
But of course it could be FISA court related
by yieldcrv
3/30/2025 at 9:38:47 PM
The scenario everyone here is hoping for, that he was absconded in the middle of the night in a red, white, and blue painted Cybertruck by men in suits and sunglasses, is also the least likely to have happened.by donnachangstein
3/30/2025 at 9:50:13 PM
[flagged]by DonHopkins
3/31/2025 at 1:32:08 AM
"But yes, point taken: the extrajudicial actions of ICE recently are absolutely not helping people stay calm in the face of something like this."I find this kind of offensive and dismissive.
1, I don't see why stay calm is so appropriate. It's always more effective to persue any aim thoughtfully rather than thoughtlessly of course, but that's just "all else being equal" and not all else is equal. Another truth is the the greater the injury the greater the reaction is still valid, defensible, appropriate, etc.
2, calmness is pretty orthogonal to assessment. You can be perfectly calm while judging extrajudicial actions of ICE and others as utterly outlandish and intolerable.
3, How calm are the ICE agents when they show up and you try to decline their offer? Why aren't they required to "let's just calm down and talk this out and see if we can resolve this with civility..."?
by Brian_K_White
3/31/2025 at 1:54:44 AM
ICE is not the FBI. They aren't even in the same part of the federal bureaucracy (HomeSec vs DOJ). So it would behoove you not to conflate ICE's recent actions with the FBI's recent actions.by KPGv2
3/31/2025 at 2:00:50 AM
I didn't conflate anything. I said ICE and others, because these things are not limited to either ICE or the FBI or this current specific incident.And as long as we're presuming to correct each others reading comprehension, this comment was in fact in response to a comment about staying calm in the face of ICE actions.
by Brian_K_White
3/30/2025 at 11:56:44 PM
> Even the most egregious cases, which are very bad, have left a paper trail for lawyers and journalists to followFrom what I've seen, it mainly comes to public attention through family, or in a few cases, bystanders recording videos of the incident. It seems like families ask the authorities where their loved ones have gone and they don't get answers. There have been reports of people only knowing based on press photos of people sent to Guantanamo or El Salvador.
If someone doesn't have a lot of local family it seems easy for it not to be reported anywhere.
by asveikau
3/30/2025 at 9:10:28 PM
> This case is notable because no one seems to know where this man has goneIf this was simply a missing person case, wouldn't the local police be involved instead of the FBI? If it's still in the FBI's jurisdiction (odd), wouldn't they have something to say instead of nothing?
by gtirloni
3/30/2025 at 9:20:05 PM
Not necessarily -- if there's evidence of the disappearance being across state borders, FBI might get involved because that's now federal jurisdiction. Similarly, if it's someone of high profile, or involved with a high-profile organization, the local police might also choose to hand that over to the FBI to deal with since they can probably get better access.In this case, this was a professor working on cryptography stuff, which if you will recall was infamously treated as munitions by the US govt for a long time. And he is likely either a naturalized citizen or greencard holder who was originally from China, so there's both an international and potentially geopolitical aspect to it. I suspect that if the local police were involved, they very quickly handed that off to the FBI. There aren't many police forces in the US equipped to deal with that nexus of factors.
by genocidicbunny
3/30/2025 at 9:26:04 PM
The article claims his status is unknown ("Their resident status (e.g. US citizens or green card holders) is currently unknown."), but I doubt a non-citizen could be "Director of NSF Center for Distributed Confidential Computing".by formerly_proven
3/30/2025 at 10:18:38 PM
The main site of the Center for Distributed Confidential Computing[1] is up, and the chart of "principle investigators" still shows XiaoFeng Wang as the center director. But many other links on that site are broken and pages have been cut down, compared to an archive from last month.[2]They used to have a Github.[3] But now it says "No public repositories".
Here's their NSF funding.[4][5] About US$3 million. Xiaogang (Cliff) Wang is listed as the principal investigator.
[1] http://nsf-cdcc.org/principle-investigators/
[2] https://web.archive.org/web/20250120221302/https://nsf-cdcc....
[3] https://github.com/CDCC-Project
[4] https://www.nsf.gov/news/nsf-announces-awards-advance-cybers...
[5] https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=2207231&His...
by Animats
3/31/2025 at 12:15:11 AM
> Xiaogang (Cliff) Wang is listed as the principal investigator.No, you are misreading the award abstract. Cliff Wang is the program manager at NSF who is the point of contact for the investigators.
by hovav
3/31/2025 at 7:39:25 AM
Ah. Wrong box on the form. XiaoFeng Wang is in the Principal Investigator box.Was NSF funding for the project cancelled?
by Animats
3/30/2025 at 11:47:26 PM
If you know anything about that organization, please follow up. Did something happen to the organization? Did they somehow offend the administration?by Animats
3/30/2025 at 9:55:51 PM
The "center" in that means a collaborative project with multiple PIs instead of a grant used to fund a single lab. The total funding for the project in the current funding cycle seems to be ~$10 million over 5 years: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/simpleSearchResult?queryText...by jltsiren
3/30/2025 at 10:07:07 PM
You can become a police officer in California without being a citizen(*). So who knows? I doubt there's any official rule against this position regarding citizenship. Or dual citizenship.(*) Albeit with full legal work authorization.
by emmelaich
3/30/2025 at 10:23:27 PM
You're right, I've updated my comment to be less authoritative on the residency status.by genocidicbunny
3/31/2025 at 12:58:22 AM
“Not helping” is the fucking understatement of the year. That it is happening is /THE/ worst thing happening right now.by LastTrain
3/31/2025 at 11:10:57 PM
> Even the most egregious cases, which are very bad, have left a paper trail for lawyers and journalists to follow.We don't know the identities of, or even how many people have been extrajudicially rendered to the Salvadoran prison. The administration claims they're not citizens, but how would we know?
by throwaway439080
3/31/2025 at 1:54:00 PM
> the extrajudicial actions of ICE recently are absolutely not helping people stay calm in the face of something like thisTo be clear, ICE does not require “judicial action” to remove aliens so using the phrase “extrajudicial action” makes no sense. See: https://www.americanimmigrationcouncil.org/research/expedite...
Note that even when expedited removal does not apply, deportation is handled by immigration courts which aren’t really courts at all, but instead Article I tribunals within the executive branch. And many decisions of these immigration “courts” aren’t appealable to the real judicial branch.
by rayiner
3/31/2025 at 11:14:35 PM
What's to stop ICE from declaring anybody they don't like an alien and rendering them to the Salvadoran prison? We already know they're inventing false pretenses to classify people as gang members. There is no functional oversight of what they're doing.by throwaway439080
3/31/2025 at 2:13:18 PM
> ICE does not require “judicial action” to remove aliens…
> when expedited removal does not apply, deportation is handled by immigration courts
And how many of these recent cases have gone before an immigration court?
Are immigrants entitled to any form of due process?
Should they be, based on your personal principles?
by oa335
3/31/2025 at 3:57:36 PM
To be clear, immigration “court” decisions aren’t “judicial action” either. Immigration courts are entities within the executive branch, which can’t exercise judicial powers. They’re a procedural device for the executive branch to control how it exercises its discretion. The immigration laws provide very limited judicial review of immigration court decisions—even where someone appeals an immigration court decision to a real court, the government can still deport that person during the legal challenge.Immigrants are entitled to “due process”—but “due process” doesn’t mean “judicial process.” Due process is a flexible concept that depends on the nature of the legal right being asserted. Non-citizens have no constitutional right to be in the U.S. So in my view the only constitutionally required “process” is to verify whether someone is a citizen or not. And I think that can be done adequately within the executive branch.
by rayiner
4/1/2025 at 5:19:33 AM
> So in my view the only constitutionally required “process” is to verify whether someone is a citizen or not. And I think that can be done adequately within the executive branch.Why were immigration courts created in the first place?
by oa335
3/31/2025 at 11:50:06 AM
Could this be survivorship bias? Those are the cases we know about, but what are the odds that the cases we've seen just happened to be the only cases happening? Some random student being disappeared from campus hitting the news indicates to me that MANY people are being disappeared. I don't know what the rate of disappeared vs left paper trail is but I can't imagine it's a good yard stick for "close enough to be useful for approximating a count of all of the cases"by Grimblewald
3/31/2025 at 7:41:38 AM
> have left a paper trail for lawyers and journalists to followYou know only about cases that journalists follow. If there is a case journalists do not follow, there is no way for you to know about it.
by watwut
3/30/2025 at 11:56:18 PM
How do you know? Do we have a complete list of the people shipped to Guatemala? Or Gitmo?The government is blowing off judicial orders. Thats a crime. One you start down that path, you tend to keep going.
by Spooky23
3/31/2025 at 12:11:50 AM
And the cases we don't know about? When the highest powers, and some random empowered billionaires, do what they want to erode, ignore and subvert constitutional, judicial and civil right processes what sane person can say this sort of thing isn't happening?by NomDePlum
3/30/2025 at 10:07:29 PM
It doesn't really matter if the perception is that the state is arresting arbitrary people for arbitrary things.by facile3232
3/30/2025 at 10:15:51 PM
We here—those of us having a conversation on Hacker News—are capable of analyzing our perceptions and molding them to better fit the observed facts. We do not need to be victims of our own instinctive reactions.So whether or not it does matter if the facts don't line up with the speculation, it should matter.
by lolinder
3/30/2025 at 10:39:23 PM
Hacker news is not relevant to politics. I don't know why I should put effort into validating other people's perception of what is factual.Notably, "observed fact" is an oxymoron. You mean observation of something you then produce a statement to lossily refer to. Especially if the "fact" is bound to floating signifiers.
Most of the terms of the alleged "facts" are floating signifiers. Good luck.
You'll find a lot more success appealing directly to peoples' emotions surrounding materially clear situations. Eg it's obvious ripping contributing members of society out of their homes and expelling them from the country is bad for us. But it's the validation of peoples' immaterial fantasies of being raped by immigrants that sustains this material violence. Leaning into analysis of floating signifiers just enables this societal dysfunction.
Facts are useful, but only if they're actually factual. You haven't grounded any of your factual assertions in material analysis. Any factual analysis of "disappearing" is impossible as this inherently relies on your expectations of the potential behavior of the government when the government never attempted to provide a material basis for the justification of violence to begin with.
That is, whether or not you consider "disappearing" to be a valid concept very much relies on whether or not you thought the government attempted to treat people in good faith to begin with. I personally think you're a moron if you trust the state to do anything but look after itself.
by facile3232
3/30/2025 at 11:52:28 PM
Politics is, to a great extent, a consequence of social interactions such as on HN. HN is a community of relatively wealthy, well-educated, and influential people - not often the most influential, but people who are hardly powerless.by mmooss
3/30/2025 at 10:19:31 PM
> Notably, they haven't been "disappearing" people in the manner that would have to be happening here.Not that we know about yet. Someone's got to be the first of that sort of government action to be discovered and come to the notice of more than just their friends and family, and it's highly unlikely to be discovered the very first time it happened.
I'm reasonably confident that if this news manages to get covered widely enough. there's going to be a bunch of "me too" reports of coworkers or family that have disappeared under similar circumstances in the last 3 or 4 weeks. I'll be curious to see what other nationalities and professions show up in those reports.
by bigiain
3/30/2025 at 10:20:59 PM
I replied to this argument in response to a sibling. I'll link my reply instead of repeating myself:by lolinder
3/30/2025 at 9:09:04 PM
I understand why people are tempted, but I worry that jumping to such conclusions is counterproductive. If everyone who gets in trouble with federal law enforcement is considered "disappeared" in the public imagination until they make a public statement about it, we're going to end up with a lot of justified cases bundled in with the unjustified ones. The source article quotes two professors at other schools who rightly note that this story is very abnormal, but nobody in particular seems to be saying that they've lost contact with Mr. Wang. (The neighbors told local news that they rarely saw and never spoke to him in the first place: https://www.heraldtimesonline.com/story/news/local/2025/03/2...)by SpicyLemonZest
3/31/2025 at 2:45:01 AM
> the government "disappearing" people (which they have objectively been doing lately)If you know where someone is being held (like Louisiana, for example) they weren't 'disappeared'.
by easterncalculus
3/31/2025 at 9:28:38 AM
Wrong.> For the purposes of this Convention, "enforced disappearance" is considered to be the arrest, detention, abduction or any other form of deprivation of liberty by agents of the State or by persons or groups of persons acting with the authorization, support or acquiescence of the State, followed by a refusal to acknowledge the deprivation of liberty or by concealment of the fate or whereabouts of the disappeared person, which place such a person outside the protection of the law.
Arresting Mahmoud Khalil and Rümeysa Öztürk is a violation of their first amendment rights, no one in the government has acknowledged this. In addition, moving people to another state in opposition to a judges orders because the judge in Louisiana is favorable to your cause is an attempt to place someone outside of the protection of the law.
Khalil was also denied his right to a phone call or legal council for (as far as I can tell) 4 days.
But also, the government is unambiguously disappearing people
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/trump-administration-ignored-or...
And can I add, trusting the government to tell you where the person they just kidnapped is, is a pretty naive way of looking at things. They're violating our first amendment rights and kidnapping people off the street while disguising their identities and refusing to identify themselves when asked directly. What happens if they also refused to tell you where they disappeared people to?
by hmcq6
3/31/2025 at 3:04:04 AM
If they were abducted by plainclothes agents and moved across state lines (countermanding a judges lawful order) to a facility where their legal representation has no access they were, without a doubt, disappeared.by weard_beard
3/31/2025 at 3:22:02 AM
Okay, so ignoring a lawful order is unlawful. It's still not 'disappearing' someone if you know where they are. There are also some people you could argue are being disappeared because their whereabouts aren't published. That's assuming media outlets simply just aren't reporting on their whereabouts to then create that narrative. Surely US media has never done that in recent history. It's all case-by-case and it's clear that ICE is probably breaking the law at a large scale. Still:> without a doubt
With HEAVY doubt, lol. At some point redefining buzzwords to engage in political hyperbole goes further than being intellectually dishonest and presses against the rules of this site.
by easterncalculus
3/31/2025 at 11:54:19 AM
"A representative of the Turkish consulate went to ICE offices in Burlington, Massachusetts, and was informed that Ozturk was not in that office and ICE could not provide further information about her whereabouts"From recent CNN publication on the matter. At this stage I have to assume you are arguing in bad faith / shilling for a fascist government. I can only hope you're being paid to do something this debased.
by Grimblewald
3/31/2025 at 4:37:37 AM
Those actions are shitty, but irrelevant to the argument. If you know where someone is, then they haven't been disappeared.by kelnos
3/31/2025 at 11:57:44 AM
except, relevant people didn't know where she was. It took the Turkish consulate getting involved to even make progress on the matter, and the people who took her said they didn't know where she was when asked by a representative of the Turkish consulate. You don't think that's disappearing someone? It doesn't matter that she was later 'found' after media attention got too hot. It is clear as day what was attempted.by Grimblewald
3/31/2025 at 12:20:30 AM
Is there a site that keeps track of these government abductions? Are you talking about American citizens? Can you name five occurrences within the last 18 months, or whatever you mean by "lately"?by tejohnso
3/31/2025 at 1:53:04 PM
The government isn’t “disappearing people.” It’s deporting illegal aliens. You don’t need a press release every time you do that.by rayiner
3/31/2025 at 2:36:54 PM
> It’s deporting illegal aliens.There are multiple news stories of them deporting US citizens and legal residents. Here's one[0].
If citizens don't have due process, then nobody does. All it takes is the government to declare you a non-citizen; there will be no due process for you to prove otherwise.
[0]: https://www.nbcnews.com/news/latino/deported-family-us-citiz...
by albrewer
3/31/2025 at 3:14:15 PM
There was no forced deportation of US citizens or legal residents in that article. Two illegal residents chose to take their citizen children with them when deported.Their lawyer isn't claiming citizenship or residency, but poor treatment and asking for humanitarian release back into the US to get medical care of their citizen children.
I agree it is a pretty fucked up situation, but it doesn't support what you quoted
by s1artibartfast
4/1/2025 at 1:02:39 AM
You should probably notify THEM when you revoke their legal residency.by weard_beard
3/30/2025 at 9:26:12 PM
Doesn't the sequence of events read more like the University found something grave enough to put him on leave and contact the FBI, and for both the teacher and school to keep it quiet?by fracus
3/31/2025 at 10:12:51 AM
No, not really. That wouldn't explain the gap of weeks.by lupusreal
3/31/2025 at 12:50:28 PM
Yes. If (in this hypothetical) the university found something worth contacting the FBI about before Wang knew he was made, we'd expect to see FBI action first and university action second, even if the university acted immediately after. The FBI would absolutely not allow the university to tip a suspect off weeks in advance of their planned raids.by lolinder
3/31/2025 at 5:36:41 PM
Wouldn't the FBI need some time to digest the accusations made by the University and then build a case to pursue an investigation? Hearing the University has been captured by a right wing agenda and having an adversarial relationship with its teachers and students, I'm starting to think any conspiracy is plausible at this point.by fracus
3/30/2025 at 11:03:54 PM
Do we even know that he's "nowhere to be found"? "Not answering Dan Goodin's requests for quotes", or even "not responding to his grad students" is not the same thing as that.by tptacek
3/30/2025 at 11:06:03 PM
No, and that's a good call-out.by lolinder
3/31/2025 at 2:45:09 AM
That is the way it works, there is no "evidence of being disappeared", as there is no negative probe. This already happened in Argentina in the 70's, there were no record, in many cases until several years after, or never.by sbassi
4/2/2025 at 11:56:43 PM
If he vanished himself why did the university remove him from the web pages?by croes
3/31/2025 at 1:16:19 AM
Your hypothesis definitely doesn't account for the university scrubbing him from their website.by stevage
3/31/2025 at 3:02:23 AM
It accounts for it substantially better than the government whisking him away. I laid out the hypothesis in full here:https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43528036
Again, pure speculation, as is everything right now.
by lolinder
3/30/2025 at 9:48:30 PM
> the university put him on leave weeksbut then why did his students not know about it?
if normally a professor or similar is put on leave there are procedures about informing students in affected courses, replacement professors being found or courses being cancelled etc.
the fact that this procedures seem to not have been followed is strange and looks like someone wanted this to go over without much attention
that his wife seems to be affected too is even more strange
that no even vague reason is told even now is also supper strange
I mean thing about it especially given how much it has blown up there is no reason for them to not at least give a vague reason, if they don't it's because they can't (e.g. court order) or they have a good reason to not want to (which is strange by itself).
by dathinab
3/31/2025 at 12:01:42 AM
> but then why did his students not know about it?But the students do know. They are saying they can’t contact him, which is not the same as not knowing he’s on leave
by kortilla
3/30/2025 at 8:49:04 PM
[flagged]by tw04
3/30/2025 at 8:51:34 PM
If in the ensuing investigation they found out that he'd been spying for the PRC for the last 20 years and they were freaked out about the reputational implications of having been harboring a Chinese spy in a red state in the current political climate?I don't know anything for sure, my main point is that everything is speculation, but some speculation is better grounded in the facts than other speculation.
EDIT: I see you've engaged in the very frustrating practice of editing your comment to reply to my comment. This time with even less etiquette than normal, because you didn't even have the courtesy to flag upfront that it was an edit. I'm not going to play that game by replying in turn, but I do want to call it out as bad form.
by lolinder
3/30/2025 at 10:19:11 PM
> EDIT: I see you've engaged in the very frustrating practice of editing your comment to reply to my comment. This time with even less etiquette than normalYou should blame HN for that, not tw04. The site specifically promotes it.
by thaumasiotes
3/30/2025 at 8:52:59 PM
Obviously this is speculation, but one reason would be if the reasons for his disappearance would generate bad PR for the university and they were fairly sure both he and his wife were involved and won't be returningby Rebelgecko
3/31/2025 at 6:16:35 AM
This Wang looks suspicious.by suraci
3/30/2025 at 9:52:54 PM
> That sequence is better explained by the hypothesis that Wang vanished himselfThat probably isn't correct given that IU has scrubbed him from their web pages. That alone makes this look like disappearing him and his wife.
The feds unconstitutionally "disappearing" this couple doesn't exactly fit either, but based on the article, that's what fits best.
by bediger4000
3/30/2025 at 9:55:50 PM
> That probably isn't correct given that IU has scrubbed him from their web pages. That alone makes this look like disappearing him and his wife.Why?
As a possible explanation: Wang disappears suddenly and without warning. The university investigates and in the course of the investigation discovers that he was working as a spy for the PRC for the past 20 years while employed with them. They freak out, knowing that the current political climate (especially in their state) is one where they can't afford to become known as that school that harbored a Chinese spy, so they rush to try to keep everything under wraps.
Unfortunately, they have to report what they found to the FBI, which proceeds to very un-subtley raid Wang's homes, drawing media attention and possibly triggering the firestorm they hoped to avoid.
---
As with anything at this stage, this story is entirely supposition, but it does explain the known facts, and it explains them better than any other explanation I've seen floated in this thread.
by lolinder
3/31/2025 at 1:17:38 AM
He had students. The idea that the university thought they could suddenly pretend he never existed, and this would not become news, is not plausible.by stevage
3/31/2025 at 3:04:24 AM
You're assuming that the hypothetical university personnel responsible for the cleanup of the mess thought the whole thing through clearly and weren't in hardcore firefighting mode and reacting in ways that would seem to make sense at the time but didn't take all the facts into account. I see no reason to assume that level of intentionality.by lolinder
3/31/2025 at 1:41:55 AM
One thing the Streisand effect illuminates is a certain type of person is not fully able to model the consequences of trying to keep information secret. It's absolutely plausible that someone in the university administration actually believed that they could tell the FBI "please keep this secret in order to protect our reputation" and that their request would outweight the agency's other duties. There exist people that are that self-important.by endominus
3/31/2025 at 12:35:50 AM
[flagged]by KennyBlanken
3/30/2025 at 9:00:08 PM
> Disappearing people is not something the US government is allowed to doSince when? Been happening for a long time, here is just one recent-ish (2021) report:
> FFI documented 698 enforced disappearances of immigrants in Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) custody between 2017 and 2021
https://www.freedomforimmigrants.org/news/2021/8/30/detained...
Has to be countless more that aren't documented, especially when you take the entire government into account, not just one agency.
by diggan
3/31/2025 at 4:15:33 AM
These are not people that HN/Academia identifies with and thus they are not considered people with full rights. See how the goals moved from rights for every single person, to rights for documented migrants, to rights for citizens only. We are now moving faster to rights for people similar to you but make no mistake this will end up with rights for no one but the king.by csomar
3/31/2025 at 10:40:28 AM
The US has always been very divided on who is considered a US citizen.Atheists, black people, Hawaiians, Germans, Japanese- all of them have found themselves in court.
by Yeul
3/31/2025 at 11:06:22 AM
> Atheists, black people, Hawaiians, Germans, Japanese- all of them have found themselves in court.Even people who are clearly American can find themselves having to defend themselves apparently: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barack_Obama_citizenship_consp...
by diggan
3/30/2025 at 9:52:19 PM
lets also not forget how the US has a history especially in the recent ~decade or so to redefine all kind of things as "domestic terrorism" and then use it to remove very fundamental rights from people which at most are activistsby dathinab
3/31/2025 at 9:09:57 AM
> Disappearing people is not something the US government is allowed to do.If a government was disappearing people they would not do it with police raids. The last thing they would want is to take responsibility for it.
I have lived in a country where journalists and others were being disappeared, and it was done by unidentifiable people in unmarked vans.
by graemep
3/31/2025 at 9:37:56 AM
> unidentifiable people in unmarked vans.This literally happened 4 days ago to Rümeysa Öztürk
Or the "cops" who refuesed to identify themselves to Mahmood Khalil's wife?
by hmcq6
3/31/2025 at 11:03:09 AM
They were not disappeared (the links below say we know where they went), and they were arrested by people who do have legal powers of arrest.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Detention_of_Mahmoud_Khalil#Ar...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Detention_of_R%C3%BCmeysa_%C3%...
I am not saying it is the right thing to do, but it is a very very long way from someone being grabbed, bundled into an unmarked van by people who are never identified (either as individuals or who they work for), and turning up later dead - or never turning up at all.
by graemep
3/31/2025 at 2:52:29 PM
Exactly, I get a little bit uneasy with people throwing around "got disappeared" - it lands as politically charged. What that means to me is something like Khmer Rouge, or Pinochet throwing thousands of people off planes into the ocean (no parachute), tentatively it means gulag, but even with gulag, you're not disappeared, you find out this person is in a gulag somewhere (though is likely to die), having myself read the Gulag Archipeligo.I'm 100% sure the US government, most governments, have "disappeared" people in a Pinochet style, it's just more rare and likely involves deep state spycraft type things. Even in Guantanamo, people lived, and people were known to be there, and I think that is how people are using "disappeared" i.e. extrajudicial and illegal, but alive and known to be somewhere. It reminds me of people using "violence" to describe writing or speech that make people feel bad, and it's like, okay, if that's what violence means what's the word for getting punched in the face, what's the word for getting tossed off a plane.
by amy214
3/31/2025 at 6:51:41 PM
You guys are taking my previous comment out of context but that's less interesting than the fact that you have a strange definition of "disappeared".> Even in Guantanamo, people lived, and people were known to be there, and I think that is how people are using "disappeared" i.e. extrajudicial and illegal, but alive and known to be somewhere.
So you're arguing that no one was disappeared to Gitmo because some information eventually came out about a few people? Or do you really believe everyone at Gitmo was publicly identified?
A quick google reveals that Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch don't agree with you.
For one, Bush admitted we were doing enforced disappearances
> In early September 2006, US authorities transferred to Guantánamo 14 men who had been held in secret CIA custody. President George W. Bush finally admitted that, in the “war on terror”, the USA has been resorting to secret detentions and enforced disappearance, which is a crime under international law.
https://www.amnesty.org/en/wp-content/uploads/2021/08/amr511...
Some of those men had been held incommunicado for 4 years at that point.
Or, here is a list of people who, at the time, were believed to be disappeared at Gitmo https://www.hrw.org/legacy/backgrounder/usa/ct0607/4.htm#_To...
So yes, people were absolutely disappeared at/to Guantanamo Bay and you using Gitmo as your example makes me really question your definition.
by hmcq6
3/31/2025 at 4:37:33 PM
The US has definitely been involved in disappearing people in other countries - and in providing support to people like Pinochet https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Condorby graemep
3/30/2025 at 10:09:43 PM
>Disappearing people is not something the US government is allowed to do.They are allowed to disappear people simply by virtue of the fact that no one is going to stop them
by lovich
3/30/2025 at 9:10:43 PM
> This hasn't hit mainstream media yet. It should have by now.Is it typical for the media to write stories when spies surreptitiously sneak out of a country?
I speculate this guy was long gone before the feds kicked in his door. Assuming he and his wife were indeed spies of course. Right now we cannot confirm or disconfirm that, but the narrative fits it so far.
> Disappearing people is not something the US government is allowed to do.
Do you have any sources that this guy was vanned, besides the very reliable Ars Technica comments section crying about 'fascists' and random schizos on BlueSky?
by dale_huevo
3/30/2025 at 11:00:04 PM
You're asking someone for sources, after accusing someone of espionage with no sources?by sc68cal
3/31/2025 at 3:37:05 AM
Tons of people above are suggesting he was "disappeared" with no sources (and no real cases of this really happening otherwise, recent cases have all had paperwork). Seems fair to ask and suggest a more likely alternative.by runsWphotons
4/1/2025 at 5:03:46 AM
How does one provide evidence/sources for a disappearance?I can show you sources that say DB Cooper existed but there’s no evidence of his disappearance by definition so… what do you think you are looking for exactly?
by hmcq6
3/30/2025 at 9:12:11 PM
[flagged]by dragonwriter
3/30/2025 at 9:20:25 PM
Yes, apologies, original post was misworded and corrected.Everyone is assuming this guy was maliciously 'disappeared', but no evidence has been presented proving that vs. that he vanished on his own.
Everything is rage-porn speculation at this point, like a fresh airplane accident where everyone becomes an armchair pilot.
by dale_huevo
3/30/2025 at 11:52:20 PM
Sure, they "disappeared" him, then forced the University to take down his profile, email address, and office phone. Having scrubbed him from the faculty listing index, he has effectively been removed from history. He's a ghost. Never mind this Ars Technica article, or all of the other information about him on the web. I mean, I get all my news from university phone directories, how about you?by karaterobot
3/31/2025 at 1:52:07 PM
What do you mean by “disappearing people?” We had a foreign spy arrested at my kid’s school (she and her husband sold Navy secrets to China). For obvious reasons, arrest warrants don’t need to be made public. Nor is the FBI required to issue a press release when it arrests someone.It’s not even clear this professor is in government custody. It sounds like he may have gotten wind of the investigation and escaped.
by rayiner
3/31/2025 at 8:12:08 PM
This is why habeas corpus is so important. An attorney goes before the court, and demands the client be produced, and a justification be given for their detention.It sounds like such a meaningless right. But it creates a clear line between a legitimate detention and disappearance.
by pyuser583
3/31/2025 at 3:41:18 PM
> It’s not even clear this professor is in government custody. It sounds like he may have gotten wind of the investigation and escaped.Bingo. Dude vanished well before his Uni was a aware and starting making a stink.
by red-iron-pine
3/31/2025 at 2:17:46 PM
Is there a news article about the spy at your kid’s school?by laretluval
4/1/2025 at 3:14:57 PM
New developments:https://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/bizarre-turn-in-bizarre...
by frm88
3/30/2025 at 11:19:59 PM
"FBI searches two homes belonging to IU Luddy professor and library analyst" - https://www.idsnews.com/article/2025/03/iu-professor-bloomin..."FBI, Homeland Security agents search house on Xavier Court in Bloomington" - https://eu.heraldtimesonline.com/story/news/local/2025/03/28...
by belter
3/31/2025 at 3:14:34 AM
> Disappearing people is not something the US government is allowed to do.How do you mean? Is it that legally it's not allowed to, so it's obviously not what happened here -- it must be someone else or some other government or entity that "disappeared" him. Or, legally it's not allowed to, but they clearly did it and we should be alarmed?
In the past US government quite happily droned civilians, experimented on its own citizens, planned coup and coup in all kind of countries, engaged in torture and extra judicial detainment of people in Guantanamo for years.
by rdtsc
3/30/2025 at 8:57:17 PM
Occam’s Razor suggest he was exfiltrated.by CodeWriter23
3/30/2025 at 9:02:40 PM
Seems like the most likely explanation to me. If he were arrested for being a spy, presumably the DOJ would want to showcase it.by TheBlight
3/30/2025 at 9:48:03 PM
Think like a Bayesian. How many spies have been caught lately? of them, how many did the DOJ showcase?Wikipedia has a list of imprisoned spies in the USA. It is pretty sparse, the last spy to be convicted in the USA was in 2016. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_imprisoned_spies
Searching the DOJ homepage with the search term “spy” (to see which they have showcased) gives us 209 results, including a bunch of news around the 2009 conviction. The most resent news I found was from 2022 (https://www.justice.gov/archives/opa/pr/five-individuals-cha...) a very vague news which is actually more about harassing private citizen (presumably piggy-banking out of the anti-asian hate following Covid). The most resent news about actual spying against the US government was from 2020 (https://www.justice.gov/archives/opa/pr/former-cia-officer-a...) Alexander Yuk Ching Ma. He was actually found guilty in may 2024 (so he is missing from that Wikipedia list). The DOJ article about the conviction doesn’t use the word spy, so it is missing from my search, but here it is: https://www.justice.gov/archives/opa/pr/former-cia-officer-s....
Given the above, I think it is safe to bet that if he was arrested for being a spy, the DOJ would indeed want to showecase it. However, spies are very rare, and the likelyhood of OP’s case being a spy is very low. It is much more likely that he disappeared for other reasons.
by runarberg
3/31/2025 at 12:04:42 AM
A guy was arrested for being a PRC spy, stealing sensitive documents from GE Vernona. 2-3 years ago. I remember it because he was using stenography to embed documents in landscape photos sent via email.They also use various means to charge people. Lying to a federal agent is a serious crime. Almost any misuse of federal funds can a a serious crime.
by Spooky23
3/31/2025 at 12:03:53 PM
how did they catch that?by fsiefken
3/31/2025 at 12:42:12 PM
IIRC, he was sending pictures of the sunset on his jog every day, and the pictures were unusually large.https://www.theregister.com/AMP/2023/01/04/ge_turbine_china_...
by Spooky23
3/31/2025 at 2:39:50 AM
There’s 3 soldiers arrested this year.by zmgsabst
3/30/2025 at 11:45:02 PM
Sounds like entrapment or he was heavily induced (by whatever) into whatever they got him for. Maybe he'll get pardoned like Ulbricht.by atian
3/30/2025 at 11:31:18 PM
Wouldn't "murder victim" be the Occam's razor explanation? We know his wife is still living in the house. We also know that statistically speaking your spouse is the person most likely to murder you. I'm not going to say anything more than that because the obvious next statement would be one that is based entirely on speculation, but it takes a lot less speculation than all these ridiculous James Bond fanfics I'm seeing.by snickerbockers
3/31/2025 at 1:40:58 AM
> We also know that statistically speaking your spouse is the person most likely to murder you.This is slightly misleading. While it is true that the person with the highest probability of murdering you is your partner (at least, if you're a woman), it is more likely that the murder is a stranger to the victim than to be the spouse of the victim.
For example, in the FBI's 2011 dataset [1], of the 7076 murders by someone with a known relationship to the victim, 1295 were by a husband, wife, boyfriend, or girlfriend. This is compared to, of course, the 2700 murders committed by acquaintances and 1481 by strangers. From this, we can see ~18% of murders are by their partners and ~60% are by someone quite a bit further flung.
The reason why both statistics are simultaneously true is that most people have only a few partners (focusing the entire risk on a small group) where as there are many thousands of people in the latter categories (creating a very diffuse risk).
So, if you were to bet one which person murdered someone, you would do well to guess one of their partners. If you had to guess if the victim knew their murderer, you should bet that they did not.
[1] https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s/2011/crime-in-the-u.s.-...
by sweetjuly
3/30/2025 at 9:20:13 PM
I know this is HN and we love these simplistic universal laws here (Hanlon's razor being another beloved law) but Occam’s razor isn’t really applicable here, or at the very least, it isn’t very helpful, and it certainly isn’t conclusive. That he was exfiltrated by the Chinese government also requires the same number of variables as that he was disappeared by the American government. So Occam’s Razor actually suggests nothing here.Occam’s razor is a rule of thumb which suggests that if several hypotheses explain the same thing, the simplest one should be favored. When we have a missing person with several unknown variables, until we see some evidence, any guess is as good as other. And no hypotheses should be ruled out.
On HN we also like Bayesian analysis, so instead of looking for the simplest explenation, we should be asking what we already know. What is the probability that this person was disappeared by the government, given that 3 other students have been disappeared by the government lately? Given that these 3 other students were also people of color? Etc.
by runarberg
3/30/2025 at 10:18:14 PM
> 3 other students have been disappeared by the governmentIf you're talking about the students I think you are, they're detained in Louisiana and Texas. They haven't been "disappeared" in any way.
by aerostable_slug
3/30/2025 at 10:16:00 PM
Just an FYI, you do know that Hanlon's Razor isn't a law, or even a rule of thumb.It was a joke in a joke book, and has been taken entirely out of context by most people who use it to justify anything.
by trod1234
3/30/2025 at 10:20:53 PM
haha, I did not know that. The first time I saw it, it was actually used against my point here on HN.by runarberg
3/31/2025 at 1:23:23 AM
I didn't either at first, I went and looked it up after enough people started using it to nullify/discredit what I had to say in serious conversation.Murphy's Law Book 2, January 24, 1980 A book of jokes, meant to be humorous.
No previous literature related to it before then.
I can't help but laugh when people use it now, so I guess its still funny... in a way.
It says a lot about the character of a person that takes a joke and uses it in a way, that it was never intended to be used. Useful knowledge to keep in your back pocket if needed.
by trod1234
3/30/2025 at 9:45:36 PM
> When we have a missing person with several unknown variables, until we see some evidence, any guess is as good as other.Really? So that he was abducted by aliens is also on the table and has the same probability?
Obviously there can be some prior information that makes „he was exfiltrated by Chinese intelligence services“ more likely than „he was disappeared by US intelligence services“.
I’m not saying there is, but philosophically, you don’t need to know anything more than „A person with relations to china disappeared“ to be able to determine one hypothesis as the most likely one.
by echoangle
3/30/2025 at 11:06:43 PM
> Obviously there can be some prior information that makes „he was exfiltrated by Chinese intelligence services“ more likely than „he was disappeared by US intelligence services"The obvious one being if the FBI is arresting a spy they would not be doing search warrants on his properties weeks after he goes missing. They do that stuff immediately.
Instead if we're speculating, this far more sounds like the FBI are playing catch up to circumstances that became suspicious after a few weeks.
by dmix
3/30/2025 at 9:55:47 PM
I answered the exfiltration likelihood in a sibling thread. The summary is that spies are very rare and it is not a likely explanation. Keeping the Bayesian hat on we can pretty much rule out aliens. We have never witnessed an alien abduction, so the chances of this being an alien abduction is actually infinitely smaller than exfiltration.We can set the same prior probability to all the possibilities, that is fine. But given the evidence the posterior for alien abduction is very close to 0, if not just simply 0.
Given the recent pattern of behavior from the US government, we have seen quite a few people disappeared. The posterior for US government involvement is IMO much higher than exfiltration. That said, no government involvement is higher still (and is actually the hypothesis favored by Occam’s Razor).
by runarberg
3/30/2025 at 10:17:25 PM
Wrapping your conspiracy theories into pseudo-science based on wild guesses doesn't make them more likely.There is a long series of scientists in the US that were secretly working for the Chinese government. It is simply the most likely explanation that this is another instance of that.
It also doesn't make any sense that the US government would secretly "disappear", as you put it, this individual while they are openly deporting thousands elsewhere, often based on flimsy evidence. Furthermore, if you are secretly getting rid of someone, you do it to avoid taking responsibility. Why would you send the FBI to raid their residence afterwards? That immediately connects you to the disappearance, thereby sabotaging your own scheme.
by this_user
3/30/2025 at 10:25:35 PM
I did say the likeliest explanation is no government involvement, but that USA involvement is still likelier than China‘s involvement given recent pattern of conduct.Chinese exfiltration is also a conspiracy theory. In fact chinese exfiltration requires a larger conspiracy than USA disappearance. If you want to apply Occam’s Razor (which you shouldn’t), you should actually favor disappearance over exfiltration (but really you should favor no government involvement).
> There is a long series of scientists in the US that were secretly working for the Chinese government.
If that is so, can you provide me with a list. That list would actually have to be pretty long to make exfiltration the likeliest hypothesis. Like there would have to be more than a couple of dozen cases this century.
EDIT: I did quick googling to find any sources which backs your claim. This NY Post article is the strongest one (https://nypost.com/2025/02/20/us-news/us-science-labs-face-g...) it is basically a propaganda piece citing far right US politicians who claim extraordinary numbers (like 8000 scientists) without any evidence. As we know extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.
by runarberg
3/31/2025 at 6:54:28 AM
I feel that the word conspiracy is not helping to bring clarity to the discussion. Covert operations are by definition conspirations but that's not what people generally mean when they use the word conspiracy so let's just avoid using a word that might muddy the discourse unnecessary.Both the Chinese and USA governments engaged (or have been accused of engaging) in unlawful kidnapping of their own (and foreign) nationals from foreign countries over the last decades.
So I'm not sure how one can dismiss the possibility that this is indeed one of such cases.
by ithkuil
3/30/2025 at 10:04:24 PM
Nah...exfiltration does sound like the most likely scenario (to anyone with commonsense).by lazyeye
3/30/2025 at 10:18:43 PM
There are no published facts aside from this guys missing, so there can be no adequate accounting of the facts.You've misused Occam's Razor.
by trod1234
3/31/2025 at 12:01:17 AM
Yeah, good example of the maximum entropy principle, [0] in which "the selected distribution is the one that makes the least claim to being informed beyond the stated prior data, that is to say the one that admits the most ignorance beyond the stated prior data", a.k.a. the most entropy. Occam's Razor must still be constrained to known facts, and you cannot construct a "simplest answer" out of data you simply do not have.[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principle_of_maximum_entropy
by soulofmischief
4/1/2025 at 4:19:32 PM
There's plenty of other public information. The FBI was searching his house for undisclosed reasons, so most definitely they have some kind of investigation open on him. And his degrees were issued by universities in Nanjing and Shanghai, China, strongly suggesting he is a Chinese National, perhaps naturalized to the United States.That was known at the time of my post.
We now also know now at the time of his escape, Indiana University had terminated his Professorship. And has continued to disavow he and his wife.
I did not misuse Occam's razor, my knowledge of public facts simply exceeded yours.
by CodeWriter23
3/30/2025 at 8:43:29 PM
What evidence do you have that they US government disappeared him? It's just as likely that he is an escaped spy and the university wants nothing to do with him.by mvdtnz
3/30/2025 at 8:57:48 PM
I believe the term is "to John McAfee".by outer_web
3/30/2025 at 8:52:03 PM
Maybe OP is making an assumption based on recent events, it has been happening an awful lot.Has anyone checked Louisiana or El Salvador detention centres for him?
by swarnie
3/30/2025 at 8:43:44 PM
Ballot box, soap box, jury box, ammo boxby 01HNNWZ0MV43FF
3/30/2025 at 9:11:16 PM
I want to get off Mr. Bones' wild Haskell course.by cluckindan
3/30/2025 at 10:07:02 PM
Wait till everyone is in the streets and the power is out, the helis are up and the MRAPS roll in.Nothing more exhillarating than the smell of napalm in the morning.
I say this somewhat tongue-in-cheek, but also not. I live in the residential neighborhood where the George Floyd uprising took place. We had the national guard in our local park. We had military helicopters buzzing our home for 3-4 weeks straight. Curfew. Fires.
Through it all I was struck by an exhilarating sense of community and it is life affirming, if frightening.
by weard_beard
3/30/2025 at 11:14:30 PM
whats the soap box referrs to?by Muromec
3/30/2025 at 11:47:30 PM
People refer to making impassioned arguments as “getting on one’s soapbox.”Picture a small overturned wooden box that a person is standing on to yell to a crowd.
by LPisGood
4/2/2025 at 12:57:03 PM
> Disappearing people is not something the US government is allowed to do.Allowed by whom?
That's always been the problem with the (especially American) idea of a separation of power or checks and balances being sufficient to stop bad actors. The legislative passes laws, the judicative applies those laws, the executive carries them out, okay. But at the end of the day out of those three the executive is the ones with the guns. Combine this with unitary executive theory and now a single person gets to call the shots (literally, if necessary) while the other two branches become legal window dressing.
Under Trump the US has literally deported people and revoked green cards for their alleged affiliations alone - not criminal ones either as that would have had to be decided by a court, instead the pure suspicion is sufficient.
Keep in mind that having processes isn't inherently better. The Soviet Union made sure to use mock trials and coerced confessions because it desparately wanted to maintain an appearance of legitimacy. While in Hitler's Germany or Mussolini's Italy the state might have literally just killed you without a trial, the Soviets went to great lengths to create a paper trail for a legalistic justification before killing you (or sending you to a forced labor camp to die of "natural causes").
Institutions don't protect you. Institutions are just other people. If your system of governance depends on the people at the very top acting in good faith on the powers they are granted, it's really just built on wishful thinking.
by hnbad
3/30/2025 at 8:55:10 PM
Unlike the other recent disappearances and deportations to the concentration camp in El Salvador, this one does say it was with a court order.by cma
3/30/2025 at 9:43:25 PM
Great! Can you provide a link to the court order so we can see?by lucubratory
3/30/2025 at 10:25:23 PM
The article author attempted to get the court order but could not find one. This is common when the order is made as part of an ongoing investigation, or else criminals could just watch for their names in PACER to know when to fire up the shredders.by dcrazy
3/31/2025 at 5:02:17 AM
So how do we know there is a court order?by lucubratory
3/31/2025 at 3:09:37 PM
You seem to be coming from the assumption that checks and balances requires granting random outsiders full transparency into the court docket during the investigation phase. That’s not how it has ever worked, because it would tip off those being investigated.Our system allows for challenging the government’s right to execute a search after the search has happened. And it isn’t open to random interlopers who think they’ve spotted a government misstep—you must have standing to challenge a search. The architects of this system didn’t want justice to get caught up in the equivalent of a GitHub pull request war.
Eventually the warrant will become unsealed and we can all inspect it.
by dcrazy
4/1/2025 at 6:23:23 AM
Okay, so I'm not allowed to see the court order because I'm a random outsider, got it. What about the family of the person? What about their lawyer? Why can't they see the court order, or if they have seen it why can't they say so?by lucubratory
4/2/2025 at 6:48:45 PM
It would be especially detrimental to the pursuit of justice if the friends, family, and lawyers of a suspect could find out whether or not a warrant has been issued for them or their stuff before it is executed.Our system works on “trust but verify”. If the cops show up with a warrant they claim they is valid, you trust the warrant is valid, let them do the search, and later verify the warrant is real and that it was issued legally. Doing otherwise is a crime (obstruction of justice).
by dcrazy
3/31/2025 at 9:59:35 AM
We don't know 100% for sure, just from their claim. In the other high profile cases recently it was a different agency and they were open that there was no amount of due process.by cma