8 ms·

>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 pos

by 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.
        NomDePlum 2y ago
        There is a point where "benefit of the doubt" is not appropriate though. Personal opinion is that point is past.
        fc417fc802 2y ago
        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.
- bigiain 2y ago
  Here's a report of another similar incident: https://www.dailydot.com/debug/furry-hackers-fbi-raided/ 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.
  - lolinder 2y ago
    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.
  - DrillShopper 2y ago
    > Once is happenstance, Twice is a coincidence. Three times is enemy action
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.

by slg 2y ago

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.
      - NomDePlum 2y ago
        There is a point where "benefit of the doubt" is not appropriate though. Personal opinion is that point is past.
        fc417fc802 2y ago
        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.
bigiain 2y ago
Here's a report of another similar incident: https://www.dailydot.com/debug/furry-hackers-fbi-raided/ 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.
- lolinder 2y ago
  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.
- DrillShopper 2y ago
  > Once is happenstance, Twice is a coincidence. Three times is enemy action

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.