The Lemmy Club

A prominent computer scientist who has spent 20 years publishing academic papers on cryptography, privacy, and cybersecurity has gone incommunicado, had his professor profile, email account, and phone number removed by his employer Indiana University, and had his homes raided by the FBI. No one knows why.

Xiaofeng Wang has a long list of prestigious titles. He was the associate dean for research at Indiana University's Luddy School of Informatics, Computing and Engineering, a fellow at the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers and the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and a tenured professor at Indiana University at Bloomington. According to his employer, he has served as principal investigator on research projects totaling nearly $23 million over his 21 years there.

He has also co-authored scores of academic papers on a diverse range of research fields, including cryptography, systems security, and data privacy, including the protection of human genomic data. I have personally spoken to him on three occasions for articles here, here, and here.

"None of this is in any way normal"

In recent weeks, Wang's email account, phone number, and profile page at the Luddy School were quietly erased by his employer. Over the same time, Indiana University also removed a profile for his wife, Nianli Ma, who was listed as a Lead Systems Analyst and Programmer at the university's Library Technologies division.

According to the Herald-Times in Bloomington, a small fleet of unmarked cars driven by government agents descended on the Bloomington home of Wang and Ma on Friday. They spent most of the day going in and out of the house and occasionally transferred boxes from their vehicles. TV station WTHR, meanwhile, reported that a second home owned by Wang and Ma and located in Carmel, Indiana, was also searched. The station said that both a resident and an attorney for the resident were on scene during at least part of the search.

Attempts to locate Wang and Ma have so far been unsuccessful. An Indiana University spokesman didn't answer emailed questions asking if the couple was still employed by the university and why their profile pages, email addresses and phone numbers had been removed. The spokesman provided the contact information for a spokeswoman at the FBI's field office in Indianapolis. In an email, the spokeswoman wrote: "The FBI conducted court authorized law enforcement activity at homes in Bloomington and Carmel Friday. We have no further comment at this time."

Searches of federal court dockets turned up no documents related to Wang, Ma, or any searches of their residences. The FBI spokeswoman didn't answer questions seeking which US district court issued the warrant and when, and whether either Wang or Ma is being detained by authorities. Justice Department representatives didn't return an email seeking the same information. An email sent to a personal email address belonging to Wang went unanswered at the time this post went live. Their resident status (e.g. US citizens or green card holders) is currently unknown.

Fellow researchers took to social media over the weekend to register their concern over the series of events.

"None of this is in any way normal," Matthew Green, a professor specializing in cryptography at Johns Hopkins University, wrote on Mastodon. He continued: "Has anyone been in contact? I hear he’s been missing for two weeks and his students can’t reach him. How does this not get noticed for two weeks???"

In the same thread, Matt Blaze, a McDevitt Professor of Computer Science and Law at Georgetown University said: "It's hard to imagine what reason there could be for the university to scrub its website as if he never worked there. And while there's a process for removing tenured faculty, it takes more than an afternoon to do it."

Local news outlets reported the agents spent several hours moving boxes in an out of the residences. WTHR provided the following details about the raid on the Carmel home:

Neighbors say the agents announced "FBI, come out!" over a megaphone.

A woman came out of the house holding a phone. A video from a neighbor shows an agent taking that phone from her. She was then questioned in the driveway before agents began searching the home, collecting evidence and taking photos.

A car was pulled out of the garage slightly to allow investigators to access the attic.

The woman left the house before 13News arrived. She returned just after noon accompanied by a lawyer. The group of ten or so investigators left a few minutes later.

The FBI would not say what they were looking for or who is under investigation. A bureau spokesperson issued a statement: “I can confirm we conducted court-authorized activity at the address in Carmel today. We have no further comment at this time.”

Investigators were at the house for about four hours before leaving with several boxes of evidence. 13News rang the doorbell when the agents were gone. A lawyer representing the family who answered the door told us they're not sure yet what the investigation is about.

This post will be updated if new details become available. Anyone with first-hand knowledge of events involving Wang, Ma, or the investigation into either is encouraged to contact me, preferably over Signal at DanArs.82. The email address is: [email protected].

Originally Posted By u/BananaBustelo-8224 At 2025-03-30 04:34:58 PM | Source

In short:

Damian Gordon has bought a house using savings earned from recycling bottles and cans.

Each eligible bottle or can recycled at a Return and Earn depository results in a 10-cent refund.

What's next?

Mr Gordon says he will continue to return cans and bottles to help pay off his mortgage

Each I is a finger, V is the thumb and index. X is crossing your index and middle finger.

Hungary’s Prime Minister Viktor Orban says he will not enforce the arrest warrant, issued for war crimes in Gaza.

• Confederacy of Independent Systems
• Gaybacca
• Trans Solo
• Darth Pronouns
• Communist Princess Leia
• Woke Skywalker
• Death Star (Pride Month Logo)
• Liberal Glup Shitto
• Jizz (Music)
• Blue Haired Woman from the Disney One

Vulpes vulpes fulva, or the American red fox to be specific, padding around in the forest and being all photogenic.

This one may have been after the ducks floating in the pond nearby but certainly in vain. The ducks were having absolutely none of it; they wouldn't even quit swimming away from me and my camera so there's no chance they didn't see Basil here coming from a mile off.

This is at absolute maximum 400mm zoom for me. Foxy might have been mostly interested in ducks, but he or possibly she was on to us certainly wasn't coming any closer despite having no qualms about crossing over the footpath in broad daylight. Canon R10, ƒ/8, 1/400, ISO 640, 400mm.

Bonus fox pictures:

I always liked calling this outfit the US Institute of War is Peace.

Snip:

Set up in 1984 and lavished with a $55M taxpayer-funded annual budget, USIP has been a haven for neocons since its inception, with figures from War on Terror and Iraq architects Paul Wolfowitz and Richard Perle to Elliott Abrams and Robert Kagan joining its board or actively collaborating with its activities.

After the 2018 death of Gene Sharp, who collaborated with the USIP, senior institute officials praised the veteran regime change operator - whose work helped destabilize entire regions, as “a pioneer of people power.”

[...]

Once the conflict in the Donbass got underway in 2014, then-USIP chief Stephen Hadley urged the US to ramp up arms deliveries to Ukraine and send Russian troops home in “body bags.”

[...]

In countries like Afghanistan and Iraq, the USIP’s activities have included nationbuilding in the wake of the US invasions, from civil society grants to training of the US-backed puppet governments’ officials, and top-down implementation of US-style electoral and governance systems, which rapidly collapsed once US occupation forces were gone.

Summary

Walmart fired Dani Davis, a 6'4" cisgender woman, after a man who mistook her for transgender verbally threatened her in a women’s restroom at a Florida store.

Davis, visibly shaken, reported the March 14 incident to her immediate supervisor but was fired for not informing salaried management, allegedly creating a “security risk.”

Davis called the firing discriminatory. After viral backlash, Walmart offered to reinstate her with back pay.

Davis, a longtime employee, is uncertain about returning, citing fears of a hostile work environment.

President Donald Trump threatened Iran with bombings and secondary tariffs if the country does not come to an agreement with his administration about its nuclear program.

“If they don’t make a deal, there will be bombing,” Trump said during a phone call with NBC News’ Kristen Welker on Sunday.

In Gaza, human shields are used by Israeli soldiers at least six times a day.

I served in Gaza for nine months, and first came across these procedures, called "mosquito protocol" in December 2023. It was only two months into the ground offensive, long before there was a shortage of dogs from the IDF's canine unit, Oketz, who were used for this purpose. This became the insane, unofficial excuse for this insane, unofficial procedure. I didn't realize then how ubiquitous using human shields, whom we referred to as a "shawish," would become.

Today, almost every platoon keeps a "shawish," and no infantry force enters a house before a "shawish" clears it. This means there are four "shawishes" in a company, twelve in a battalion, and at least 36 in a brigade. We operate a sub-army of slaves.

I recently saw that the IDF's Military Police Criminal Investigation Division opened six investigations into the use of Palestinian civilians as human shields, and my jaw dropped. I've seen cover-ups before, but this is a new low.

If the MPCID wanted to do its job seriously, it would have to open far more than even a thousand investigations. But all the MPCID wants is for us to be able to tell ourselves and the world that we're investigating ourselves, so they've found six scapegoats and are pinning it all on them.