There’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.
What raises a different kind of red flag is that he was apparently also fired by the Indiana University, after which the university erased records of him from its website. That’s very, very strange. Even in a case where a faculty member was charged with espionage, you would not expect to see anything like that, at least not right away. Further, from what I can tell, people in the university community don’t seem to know what happened to Xiaofeng. In other words, did he flee and the police presence is somehow in reaction to that? Or was he taken into custody but outside any normal judicial process? Like did he get swept up into ICE’s detention centers? Normally, if you get charged with espionage you’re arrested. It’s a normal process. They have to say where you are, etc.
I want to emphasize there’s no mention of espionage from what I can tell. There’s no mention of anything. I emphasize that because that’s a longstanding issue in American counter-intelligence, PRC efforts to recruit either Chinese nationals or Chinese Americans. That comes with all the very real concerns about ethnic targeting, etc., etc. Not only are people innocent ’til proven guilty, in the normal sense, but we have no information about what happened here at all. In the current climate, I don’t think we can assume anything.
Late Update: This article says the searches were of two homes owned by Wang and a library systems analyst named Nianli Ma, who I assume is the spouse but that’s not stated explicitly.
