
Josh Marshall
Yesterday I told you about a situation at Indiana University tied to a Professor of Computer Science and cryptography named Xiaofeng Wang. According to very sketchy public reports, the FBI and DHS police searched two homes owned by Wang and a Library Systems analyst named Nianli Ma, who I assume is his spouse. Colleagues at other universities noted that Wang’s bio pages had been removed from the University website and no one seemed to know where he was. It was unclear whether he had been arrested or perhaps detained in an immigration action.
I can now report some new and as yet unreported details, which largely go to the timeline of events.
Read MoreThere’s a very weird situation developing at the Indiana University. It’s a case where there are lots of red flags but mostly a lack of information. I’ll try to give an overview. A highly regarded professor of computer science and cryptography named Xiaofeng Wang seems to have disappeared and his home was searched and swarmed over this morning by FBI agents and DHS police. On its face this sounds like some sort espionage investigation. I don’t know whether Xiaofeng is a U.S. citizen or not or a Chinese national. But I understand that he’s been at IU for about 20 years.
Read MoreWe are coming to the end of our Annual TPM March Membership Drive. And we are incredibly, incredibly grateful that it has been a big success. We set a mammoth goal of signing up 2,500 new members, to go with the 25th anniversary of the organization. And you helped us do it. We are currently at 2,777 new members for the drive, which is well beyond what we, or at least I, thought was possible. Let me especially thank all the new members reading this. Every additional member adds to the resources we hope to have to expand our reach and reporting resources in this critical year, and going forward. So if you’re considering becoming a member, I hope you will do so today. We’re continuing our 25% discount through the last day of the month. If we can get to 3,000 that will be amazing. And if you’re already a member and you’re really feeling in a TPM mood, please consider what a fellow member suggested at our TPM Happy Hour on Wednesday in New York: Email five friends who might not be members or might not know about TPM and tell them what we’re about.
Again, this isn’t a “lights are going out” plea. We met our goal. TPM is strong. Our finances are solid. But we’d like to get stronger and extend our reach (you’ll be hearing more on this front soon). And every additional member adds to that. If you’d like to join, click right here. And thank you from all of us.


This post is a second part of a post from March 11th of the same name placing Elon Musk in the tradition of the “over-mighty subjects,” a more common phenomenon a half millennium ago. The historical analogues to Musk were those magnates that were so powerful, both in wealth and the capacity to make war, that they threatened the sovereignty of the king. In America we have no king, whatever a lawless president might think, but we do have a sovereign: the American people. The analogy applies. Musk has so much power that he threatens the sovereignty of the American people, not only their right to their sovereignty but their right to be free, both collectively and individually.
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News just broke that President Trump has withdrawn the nomination of Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-NY) to serve as ambassador to the UN. It’s a good reminder that though we should never take joy from the suffering of others, there are some occasions when it’s okay. Luckily for Stefanik, she has not yet resigned her House seat. But she has given up her position as House GOP conference chair. And you don’t get those back. Rep. Lisa McClain (R-MI) now has that job. And I assure you she is not going to do Elise a solid and get out of the way. So now it’s time for Stefanik to crank up the campaign machinery again and for her upstate constituents to realize they were her second choice.
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A few days ago a friend told me that Chuck Schumer thinks he’s a minority leader but he’s actually an opposition leader. Or rather that’s the position into which history has placed him — and he doesn’t realize it or he doesn’t grasp the difference or he’s simply not able to be the latter thing. There are lots of ways to explain the disconnect or incapacity. But I thought this was a pretty good one.
Last night, in this vein, I suddenly realized there’s a backed-up line of incapacity, a traffic jam of it.
I watched the reaction to President Trump’s latest salvo, an executive order purporting to upend key elements of election administration in the United States. People have to prove citizenship to register to vote, it says. No states can accept votes by mail after Election Day — and much more. The country’s most prestigious news organizations rushed to report these as fait accomplis. The Times announced that, henceforth, Americans would have to provide proof of citizenship to vote. The Post was more or less the same.
Read MoreDemocrat James Malone just pulled off a narrow victory in a Pennsylvania state Senate special election in a bright red district where Trump won resoundingly with 57% of the vote last November. The 36th district hasn’t elected a Democrat since it moved from Philadelphia to Lancaster County in 1979, according to Lancaster Online. Malone made Musk and recent events in Washington, DC a central part of his campaign.
Let me take a moment to flag your attention to the stunning deterioration of U.S. relations with Canada. Yes, you know about the tariff fight and the fact that the U.S. national anthem gets routinely booed at NHL hockey games. But a few additional points. The Canadian Liberals were on track for a massive drubbing in an election that had to happen soon. It’s not even really ideological. The Liberals had been in power for a decade. They’ve seen the country through the pandemic and it’s aftermath. All those parties are unpopular. Ask Joe Biden. They were behind by like 25 points. Now eight weeks later, solely and entirely because of a wave of defensive (in both senses of the term) nationalism driven by Donald Trump, the Liberals look on track to win an outright majority.
Defending the country against the United States is now the sole issue in Canadian politics.
Read MoreAs I mentioned in last night’s post, security against malign actors isn’t the only or probably even the worst part of what we can now call the Signal scandal. Using Signal, in their case, is really an effort to conceal activity from the US government – with all that entails. But I’ve learned there’s another level of the scandal: the DOD recently sent around an “OPSEC SPECIAL BULLETIN” specifically warning about a new Signal exploit using a phishing-like strategy to add ‘linked devices’ to Signal communications and thus listen in on encrypted messages. The bulletin specifically notes the use by “Russian professional hacking groups.”

I haven’t had time to comment on the Jeff Goldberg story about the war cabinet planning a military campaign on the Signal app. So a few brief thoughts.
To state the obvious, in any normal administration Hegseth and Waltz at a minimum would be gone by the end of the day. So let me stipulate to all the outrageousness. But I want to focus your attention on the fact that information security is not the only, perhaps not even the main issue.
Note that no one in the chat is saying, “Hey, we sure it’s cool to be talking about this on Signal?” Or, “Should we be worried this is an insecure channel?” That and the simple logic of the matter tells us this is commonplace in the new administration. You think Mike Waltz got fat fingers and accidentally added Goldberg on the first time out? Not likely.
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