This case went beyond false accusations. According to the professor's lawyers [0], the government possessed exculpatory evidence and knowingly withheld it from the defense -- a theoretically-illegal Brady violation [1].

>" As my team of lawyers argued, Bonavolonta and his agents ignored basic exculpatory evidence, failed to interview critical witnesses until after I was arrested, and dramatically embellished facts in various official documents. Exculpatory information that, under the Constitution, the prosecution was required to turn over — such as a witness saying that I never was in a talent program, a Chinese government initiative to provide funding to researchers and scientists, which was one of the government’s key allegations — was withheld for months until demanded by my lawyers. While I am relieved that my case has been dropped “in the interests of justice,” I respectfully request a thorough review of this matter by Congress and the US Department of Justice to hold individuals accountable for this glaring misconduct."

[0] https://www.bostonglobe.com/2022/01/21/opinion/i-was-arreste...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brady_disclosure

As I said in another thread, you cannot expect groups to self police. The legal system will never hold these people accountable because it works against their interests to. This is basic human nature and true everywhere. This is why companies don't admit to wrong doing for dumping waste. This is why the fia doesn't admit it fixed the f1 championship. And this is why dirty cops don't go to prison.

You want change? Make a 4th branch of government who's only power and purpose is to arrest members of the other three branches when they break the law.

Of course it ain't that simple. How do you keep them from getting corrupted and arresting people they don't like? Food for thought.

self-policing aside, we've become so entrenched in crony capitalism, that we can't even get checks-and-balances right anymore between branches

Entropy isn't just a concept in physics but equally applies to institutions. Early on things work well because the mission isn't muddied and people are idealistic. Things can work well for a time with reforms here and there but eventually the rot grows and brings it down. This is in part why no empire was ever permanent. Sometimes its just better to do a reset with the lessons learned and start off just a little bit better.

They are also accusations of nothing specific. "Association with China" doesn't seem like it's specific enough to warrant sanction, all it can do it make people suspicious, which it does regardless of whether you've even done anything with China.

I accept the US is having a power struggle with China at the moment, but this is not the way to win it. People who aren't actually in favor of freedom will welcome this "record who associates with China" thing, but it goes against the high ideals of the US and makes it look like many unsavory countries.

Errr... pretty sure the allegation is more specific than you suggest. The allegation was that he was being paid by China and did not disclose this on grant applications.

Case was closed, allegation was rejected.

Witch hunt begins when allegation holds more weight then the verdict, and when it becomes the verdict, you can say goodbye to all semblance of rule of law, which surprisingly many here will condone depending on the subject.

The really, really important thing about witch hunts is that witches don’t exist. Allegations that turn out to be wrong can be really harmful, agreed there. Pretty unclear how to do anything about that without infringing on 1st Amendment rights, especially when it’s not a criminal allegation (i.e. indictments should IMO be sealed til verdict, but not all allegations are indictments).

Here, a https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moving_the_goalposts

Allegations can still be alleged even if they are later found to be unfounded.

Please do not take HN threads on generic ideological tangents. It leads to predictable, tedious, and nasty flamewar—the opposite of what we want here.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

He can certainly sue the US government for accusing him publicly without enough evidence to prosecute, and the resulting loss of compensation.

Now, it's not exactly affordable for him to do so. But that's a separate problem we should solve.

For a successful academic, making a bunch of money in a lawsuit is the polar opposite of what they want to do with their life.

If you value doing science and inventing things and mentoring students and the prestige that comes along with it, simply getting a payday isn't anything like justice. Of course, such lawsuits serve more than simply attempting to actually get justice (which is usually impossible) but to dissuade the state from doing it again to others.

Which is cold comfort when all you wanted to do was play with heat transfer. He said he doesn't even want to apply for grant funding anymore, and I can't blame him. You don't become a professor studying heat transport because you're psyched to go toe to toe with the department of justice over made up nonsense that already wasted a year of your career directly and screwed up decades of accumulated talent and reputation.

Thats interesting it briefly reminds me about how I used to care about how I made money, like I used to find the concept of actually winning the lottery to be something disillusioning as opposed to earning due to acumen, for example

Now I just view not having money as a waste of time, its literally so time consuming and expensive

When in the opposite scenario nobody cares. you’re either in the club or you’re not, on a pool or in a yacht, at the villa or not, on the shareholder list or not.

> He had five or six active research projects, and during the months that followed, they slowed and faltered. The 15 postdoctoral students he worked with were transferred to other research groups, taking their knowledge with them.

> “We are all losers, right?” Dr. Chen said. “My reputation got ruined. My students, my post-docs, they changed their career. They changed to other groups. M.I.T., the country, the U.S., we lose. I can’t calculate the loss. That loss cannot be calculated.”

How would you solve this?

He can clearly document harms, too. A top-flight research group takes a lifetime, reputation, and resources to assemble.

It depends. From that article:

“However, the Supreme Court has held that prosecutors do not enjoy absolute immunity when they act as investigators by engaging in activities associated more closely with police functions.”

The worst part is he spirit has been crushed; he can no longer work for fear of irrational and frankly random political views and actions detrimental to his health, his research, and his family. If he is to continue and regain an amount of his former life, I wager it can only occur after leaving the USA permanently.

Honestly, this is the type of response someone in the government (which?) would possibly pay good money for to mislead the prossecution – sounds like a good spy vs. spy movie except it's not funny.

He'll probably move to a top-20 research university in Europe if he doesn't stay at MIT. (I sure wouldn't.)

We're talking about the former head of MIT's mech eng department here, a member of the National Academy of Engineering and an academician of Academia Sinica. The "necessary pedigree and web of connections to really kick ass" at research don't come from your parents; they come from your advisor and your research. His advisor was Chang-lin Tien, the Chancellor at Berkeley.

Your insulting comment is shameful and does not belong on this site.

He’s tenured, why would he leave MIT? Has there been any indication the university didn’t support him?

Yeah, this is like HUAC Vol 2. Hopefully, we do not repeat that shameful period again.

It's a difficult subject to discuss. How do you prevent humans from harboring unconscious biases against people who are accused of a crime but found innocent? How do you prove that you are harmed? How much compensation would OJ Simpson be owed?

That's true and that's unfortunate. At the same time, how do you balance national security versus avoiding situations like this one? One of my takeaways from studying the McCarthy era was that there really were a lot of spies and communist sympathizers in America at the time. It wasn't some figment of someone's imagination. Likewise, I think we have good reason to proceed under the assumption that China is trying to infiltrate our institutions. Because they are.

[Impact per unit of spying] X [number of spies caught] - [impact per unit of innocent person being impacted] X [number of innocent people falsely accused] = net impact to society

Typically, the first part of the equation is wildly overestimated because by stopping spies in 1 area, they just find another way to do what they want to do and the impact happens anyways. Or the threat evolves over time but the policies do not resulting in negative side-effects and very little benefit anymore (e.g. the TSA)

This was my thought as well. The comparison isn't exact, but this feels like a War on Drugs situation: you're never going to stamp out all spying, and as you try, a lot of innocent (or at least non-harmful) people will get swept up in the process and their lives destroyed.

Now, I think policing espionage is more valuable than policing drugs, and the dynamics certainly all aren't the same. But I think the bar for making espionage accusations -- just the accusations themselves -- needs to be much higher than it is.

The “impact per unit of spying” buries a big term in there. It effects 330 million Americans, while a wrongful accusation affects just a few.

If you are really that concerned about “national security” you can just start employing American nationals only. If that is not enough and anyone looking a bit Asian can look suspicious to you then start employing only white christian americans.

This what overt nationalism and fear of losing supremacy can lead to.

But we know that this didn’t work before so that’s why America has become the place where talents from all over the world come. If we go back to how it was in 1920s then why shouldn’t go back even further and start burning witches again?

Im pretty sure Chen is naturalized, otherwise i dont think he would have been allowed back in the country. TLDR, he applied for gov grant money, and failed to disclose foreign offiliations(in China). He refused to unlock his laptop to agents after taking it on a trip to China, and later when he was offered a plea deal so he could return to work, he refused to cooperate. Subsequently charges were dropped(and Chen returned to work) because we as Americans value the right to privacy over finding out what was on Mr. Chen's laptop. It's not racist, and it's ironic you paint it that way given the modern day holocaust happening in China right now.

I’m not sure that is the right takeaway. The US espouses freedom. Unless someone is actually spying, their personal beliefs and political affiliations shouldn’t be subject to government scrutiny.

That statement is nigh ungrammatical, anyway illogical. "is actually spying" is a present tense. "shouldn't [unless]" is either a past tense, thus an illogical consequent to the present tense, or it is a hypothetical, irrealis or desiderative subjunctive in which case it merely implies that someone should not be "spying", in effect. This offers no objective criterion for the government's scrutiny, and the article does not point out what has gone wrong.

Clearly they conducted a background check and disagreed with the expert whether their findings were valid (fun fact, valid translates German valide or gültig, the latter somehow akin to guilty).

This may be well within their rights, eg. if they tried to impose harder interpretation of regulations. It can be criminal if they basicly ignored the expert for wanting to win, or it could be at least negligent if they have fundamentally misinterpreted the law. This is not strictly decidable and rests on the shoulders of the arbiters of truth.

(Another fun fact, gain say could be akin to German Gegenrede, as in against, or to French gagner as in win, German Gewinn. See also: Einrede, a legal terminus; sich etwas einreden "to ellude oneself"; -say in that sense must be akin to sake, forsaken, compare Widersacher "antagonist", akin to adv. wither, "contra")

> "shouldn't [unless]" is either a past tense, thus an illogical consequent to the present tense, or it is a hypothetical, irrealis or desiderative subjunctive in which case it merely implies that someone should not be "spying", in effect.

Could you explain this a bit more to a non-native speaker like me? I'm assuming it's not a past tense for certain. From the second definition in [1] (used in auxiliary function to express obligation, propriety, or expediency) and the examples, it seems to me "shouldn't" here could mean that "be subject to government scrutiny" is the opposite of "obligation, propriety, or expediency". I understand the sentence as: if someone is not spying, subjecting their personal beliefs and political affiliations to government scrutiny is not the correct thing to do. Then why would it

> implies that someone should not be "spying"?

[1] https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/should

There still are spies all over the place, so I don't know what's all that probative about the fact that there really were Soviet spies in the McCarthy era.