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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 theref

by slg 2y ago

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.

lolinder 2y ago
> 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.
- slg 2y ago
  >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"?
  - lolinder 2y ago
    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.
    - slg 2y ago
      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.
      - lolinder 2y ago
        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.
        trod1234 2y ago
        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).
        lolinder 2y ago
        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.
  - yieldcrv 2y ago
    Everyone that’s been looked for has been found in some jail in Louisiana before further transport Of 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
  - TheOtherHobbes 2y ago
    It's clearly not true that everyone is properly documented. https://www.nbcnews.com/news/latino/lawyers-advocates-say-48-people-are-unaccounted-ice-raid-new-mexico-rcna196773 https://www.nbcnews.com/news/latino/lawyers-advocates-say-48...
    - lolinder 2y ago
      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.
      - deleted 2y ago
        [deleted]
    - throwaway48476 2y ago
      Documentation is hard to do accurately when someone illegally immigrates with no documents.
      - mmooss 2y ago
        The Department of Homeland Security is not an undocumented immigrant, nor is the court system. They are required to document what they do.
        mikeyouse 2y ago
        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.
  - donnachangstein 2y ago
    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.
    - DonHopkins 2y ago
      [flagged]
  - ranger_danger 2y ago
    Someone else raised a similar point in another thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43524589 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43524589 Can 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.
    - 1659447091 2y ago
      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.
      - 1659447091 2y ago
        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-use-unmarked-vehicles-to-grab-protesters-in-portland https://www.npr.org/2020/07/17/892277592/federal-officers-us...
    - Canada 2y ago
      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-innocent-ex-bush-official-1.804550 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)
  - billy99k 2y ago
    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?
    - SpaceNoodled 2y ago
      Why would they tacitly admit to performing warrantless searches?
      - kadushka 2y ago
        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.
        clown_strike 2y ago
        Sounds like possible espionage. Chinese spies spook easily and flee the country long before the FBI gets its shit together.
        ethbr1 2y ago
        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)
        clown_strike 2y ago
        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.
  - ltbarcly3 2y ago
    > 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 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.
    - ItDoBeWimdyTho 2y ago
      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.
      - ltbarcly3 2y ago
        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.
- gtirloni 2y ago
  > This case is notable because no one seems to know where this man has gone If 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?
  - genocidicbunny 2y ago
    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.
    - formerly_proven 2y ago
      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".
      - jltsiren 2y ago
        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=%22Center+for+Distributed+Confidential+Computing%22 https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/simpleSearchResult?queryText...
      - 2y ago
- facile3232 2y ago
  It doesn't really matter if the perception is that the state is arresting arbitrary people for arbitrary things.
  - lolinder 2y ago
    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.
    - facile3232 2y ago
      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.
      - mmooss 2y ago
        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.
- bigiain 2y ago
  > 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.
  - lolinder 2y ago
    I replied to this argument in response to a sibling. I'll link my reply instead of repeating myself: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43527605 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43527605
- Spooky23 2y ago
  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.
- asveikau 2y ago
  > Even the most egregious cases, which are very bad, have left a paper trail for lawyers and journalists to follow From 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.
- NomDePlum 2y ago
  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?
- LastTrain 2y ago
  “Not helping” is the fucking understatement of the year. That it is happening is /THE/ worst thing happening right now.
- throwaway439080 2y ago
  > 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?
- Brian_K_White 2y ago
  "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..."?
  - KPGv2 2y ago
    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.
    - Brian_K_White 2y ago
      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.
- watwut 2y ago
  > have left a paper trail for lawyers and journalists to follow You 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.
- Grimblewald 2y ago
  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"
- rayiner 2y ago
  > the extrajudicial actions of ICE recently are absolutely not helping people stay calm in the face of something like this To 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/expedited-removal 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.
  - throwaway439080 2y ago
    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.
  - oa335 2y ago
    > 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?
    - rayiner 2y ago
      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.
SpicyLemonZest 2y ago
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/2025/03/28/fbi-department-of-homeland-security-agents-search-house-in-bloomington-indiana/82710451007/ https://www.heraldtimesonline.com/story/news/local/2025/03/2...)
tejohnso 2y ago
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"?
easterncalculus 2y ago
> 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'.
- weard_beard 2y ago
  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.
  - kelnos 2y ago
    Those actions are shitty, but irrelevant to the argument. If you know where someone is, then they haven't been disappeared.
    - Grimblewald 2y ago
      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.
  - easterncalculus 2y ago
    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.
rayiner 2y ago
The government isn’t “disappearing people.” It’s deporting illegal aliens. You don’t need a press release every time you do that.
- weard_beard 2y ago
  You should probably notify THEM when you revoke their legal residency.
- albrewer 2y ago
  > 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-citizen-girl-brain-surgery-alleges-abuse-rcna196705 https://www.nbcnews.com/news/latino/deported-family-us-citiz...
  - s1artibartfast 2y ago
    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
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]

by slg 2y ago

lolinder 2y ago

> 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.

slg 2y ago
>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"?
- lolinder 2y ago
  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.
  - slg 2y ago
    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.
    - lolinder 2y ago
      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.
      - trod1234 2y ago
        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).
        lolinder 2y ago
        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.
- yieldcrv 2y ago
  Everyone that’s been looked for has been found in some jail in Louisiana before further transport Of 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
- TheOtherHobbes 2y ago
  It's clearly not true that everyone is properly documented. https://www.nbcnews.com/news/latino/lawyers-advocates-say-48-people-are-unaccounted-ice-raid-new-mexico-rcna196773 https://www.nbcnews.com/news/latino/lawyers-advocates-say-48...
  - lolinder 2y ago
    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.
    - deleted 2y ago
      [deleted]
  - throwaway48476 2y ago
    Documentation is hard to do accurately when someone illegally immigrates with no documents.
    - mmooss 2y ago
      The Department of Homeland Security is not an undocumented immigrant, nor is the court system. They are required to document what they do.
      - mikeyouse 2y ago
        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.
- donnachangstein 2y ago
  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.
  - DonHopkins 2y ago
    [flagged]
- ranger_danger 2y ago
  Someone else raised a similar point in another thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43524589 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43524589 Can 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.
  - 1659447091 2y ago
    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.
    - 1659447091 2y ago
      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-use-unmarked-vehicles-to-grab-protesters-in-portland https://www.npr.org/2020/07/17/892277592/federal-officers-us...
  - Canada 2y ago
    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-innocent-ex-bush-official-1.804550 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)
- billy99k 2y ago
  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?
  - SpaceNoodled 2y ago
    Why would they tacitly admit to performing warrantless searches?
    - kadushka 2y ago
      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.
      - clown_strike 2y ago
        Sounds like possible espionage. Chinese spies spook easily and flee the country long before the FBI gets its shit together.
        ethbr1 2y ago
        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)
        clown_strike 2y ago
        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.
- ltbarcly3 2y ago
  > 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 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.
  - ItDoBeWimdyTho 2y ago
    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.
    - ltbarcly3 2y ago
      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.
gtirloni 2y ago
> This case is notable because no one seems to know where this man has gone If 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?
- genocidicbunny 2y ago
  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.
  - formerly_proven 2y ago
    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".
    - jltsiren 2y ago
      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=%22Center+for+Distributed+Confidential+Computing%22 https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/simpleSearchResult?queryText...
    - 2y ago
facile3232 2y ago
It doesn't really matter if the perception is that the state is arresting arbitrary people for arbitrary things.
- lolinder 2y ago
  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.
  - facile3232 2y ago
    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.
    - mmooss 2y ago
      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.
bigiain 2y ago
> 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.
- lolinder 2y ago
  I replied to this argument in response to a sibling. I'll link my reply instead of repeating myself: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43527605 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43527605
Spooky23 2y ago
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.
asveikau 2y ago
> Even the most egregious cases, which are very bad, have left a paper trail for lawyers and journalists to follow From 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.
NomDePlum 2y ago
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?
LastTrain 2y ago
“Not helping” is the fucking understatement of the year. That it is happening is /THE/ worst thing happening right now.
throwaway439080 2y ago
> 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?
Brian_K_White 2y ago
"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..."?
- KPGv2 2y ago
  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.
  - Brian_K_White 2y ago
    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.
watwut 2y ago
> have left a paper trail for lawyers and journalists to follow You 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.
Grimblewald 2y ago
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"
rayiner 2y ago
> the extrajudicial actions of ICE recently are absolutely not helping people stay calm in the face of something like this To 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/expedited-removal 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.
- throwaway439080 2y ago
  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.
- oa335 2y ago
  > 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?
  - rayiner 2y ago
    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.

SpicyLemonZest 2y ago

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/2025/03/28/fbi-department-of-homeland-security-agents-search-house-in-bloomington-indiana/82710451007/ https://www.heraldtimesonline.com/story/news/local/2025/03/2...)

tejohnso 2y ago

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"?

easterncalculus 2y ago

> 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'.

weard_beard 2y ago
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.
- kelnos 2y ago
  Those actions are shitty, but irrelevant to the argument. If you know where someone is, then they haven't been disappeared.
  - Grimblewald 2y ago
    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.
- easterncalculus 2y ago
  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.

rayiner 2y ago

The government isn’t “disappearing people.” It’s deporting illegal aliens. You don’t need a press release every time you do that.

weard_beard 2y ago
You should probably notify THEM when you revoke their legal residency.
albrewer 2y ago
> 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-citizen-girl-brain-surgery-alleges-abuse-rcna196705 https://www.nbcnews.com/news/latino/deported-family-us-citiz...
- s1artibartfast 2y ago
  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
- deleted 2y ago
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