
Florida joins U.S. government in probing foreign ties of researchers - pseudolus
https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2020/01/florida-joins-us-government-probing-foreign-ties-researchers
======
dang
All: if you comment in a thread like this, please take a moment to ensure that
you're following the site guidelines
([https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)).
Note this one: " _Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not
less, as a topic gets more divisive._ " Otherwise it's too easy to end up with
nationalistic (in this case) flamewars, which damage the container here and
don't help anything.

Some good qualities for HN threads: curious, factual, neutral.

Some bad ones: indignant, denunciatory, flamey.

------
datashow
Most Thousand Talents Program recruits are Chinese nationals studying and
working in the U.S. Some of them may have green card, but mostly are not U.S.
citizens. This is not a patriotism issue.

The money is not just the directly reward from the Thousand Talents Program.
Being a Thousand Talents Program recruit, you can easily become a professor
and lab director in China. This gives you money and status.

I knew a physicist worked in a 100~150 rank state University as a research
scientist for a decade, low pay, cannot find a tenure position. But he got in
the Thousand Talents Program, so he left the U.S. and became a professor in a
top 10 University in China.

~~~
analyst74
Why can't US schools and companies offer those scientists competitive salaries
and status, if their research is so important?

~~~
vkou
Because their research is not important. If it were, academia would pay more,
and have better working conditions. If it were, immigration to the US would be
easier[1].

That everyone is wringing their hands over this issue today is quite telling.
The people doing it aren't interested in advancing research - they are
interested in using public money to make privately capitalizable discoveries.

If a single penny of public money was used in research, the results should be
public. At that point, it doesn't matter whether or not that research ended up
going to China.

[1] Yes, it's possible for researchers to immigrate to the US. But it's not
exactly easy. It's a mountain of beurocracy, stress, legal fees, arbitrary
restrictions on travel, and a big drain on your time. Combine that with all
the other costs of permanently moving to another country, and you shouldn't be
surprised that a lot of people opt not to do it.

~~~
coldtea
> _Because their research is not important. If it were, academia would pay
> more, and have better working conditions._

This assumes academia cares for the research (as opposed for milking students,
getting grants, and so on).

~~~
vkou
Does the person making your latte at Starbucks deeply care about making
coffee, or about getting a paycheque on Thursday?

It's obviously the latter, yet cafes exist, and lattes get made.

------
ptah
It is appalling that cancer research in particular is being hamstrung with
such extreme mercenary motives as protecting IP

~~~
conanbatt
Protective IP on medical research probably means more investment is done in
medical research.

The recognition of private property in intellectual endeavors necesarily means
that more capital is invested in intellectual endeavors.

Personally I think that creating an artificial wall to make more people devote
time to entertainment, or certain research, etc is pretty dumb and would be
better not to exist at all.

~~~
ptah
the problem with capital is that is only motivated by potential profit

~~~
frockington1
Nothing is stopping you from giving all of your capital away to cure cancer

~~~
ptah
but then it would not be capital anymore

------
chulder
I worked for a lab ran by a Chinese national at an Ivy when I was in graduate
school. He would go on frequent trips to China touring major Chinese
universities. He was something of a celebrity. He did not do this at US
universities FWIW.

He had a pipeline and dedicated spots in our lab for Chinese graduate students
who wanted to do a "postdoc" in the US. He was talking to one of his non-
Chinese postdocs (with me present) who was considering taking a tenure-track
faculty position at a university. He says, "You don't want to work there." She
says, "Why do you say that?". He says, "The majority of students there are
white. You won't get any quality students."

On another occasion, I was speaking with a S. Korean member of the lab who was
well recognized at our university and in the field. He said to me, "When I
first got here, I was bullied heavily. I was told: Koreans are stupid. Koreans
are lazy. At least you're better than the white students."

This is all anecdote. But I personally saw that a lot of what we learned,
discovered, developed, or otherwise worked on in our lab was taken on the road
to share with Chinese Universities. I never once learned of something that was
brought back to help us. I was told by a couple postdocs, actually, not to
trust papers published by Chinese journals unless the same finding was
corroborated by a non-mainland journal.

We did not share this kind of information very frequently or at that kind of
volume with any other lab or university in the US. As a matter of fact, when I
discovered a variation of a protocol that was much more effective and when I
also had some preliminary findings on my own research and wanted to share this
with another lab in the US that was doing similar work (to help them, and to
learn from them - respectively). I was told I couldn't even tell them I was
working on this because we didn't want them to beat us to publish.

Science is supposed to be about collaboration. It shouldn't know borders. But
I have never seen such shady, unethical practice. When I raised concerns, I
was told to keep my head down. I'm not in that field anymore... and it's
always just a "Can you believe this happens..." story that I like to tell. But
every time I see reports like this... I expect to read my old PI's name. Odd
stuff.

------
bluejekyll
This article is written from the standpoint that something is being lost, IP,
to foreign governments. What I don’t see it saying is that something has been
lost and/or stolen.

Science being funded across borders isn’t a bad thing. Collaboration leads to
greater understanding and faster discoveries. The article doesn’t seem to
mention any positives, only painting everything as shady back room dealings
that need to be exposed. I’m curious if anyone in the science community has a
more positive perspective than the one that’s being written about here? It
seems to only mention China as the threat, but I see research is constantly
shared with European universities. Will those also come under investigation?

Basically, are the issues brought up in the article actually bad things that
we want to prevent? If these new policies are carried through, will we be
better off or not?

~~~
hourislate
>This article is written from the standpoint that something is being lost, IP,
to foreign governments.

The target here is China. They alone are responsible for the largest transfer
of wealth the world has ever seen (Trillions $$ in IP theft from western tax
payers). There is a great book called "Future Wars-Mark Goodman" that details
some of this theft of technology that the Chinese Gov and their agents have
carried out not just from the US but Europe also.

~~~
logicchains
Taking IP is not a "wealth transfer"; it's wealth copying. The productive
capacity of the original holder of the IP/technology is not decreased by
someone else also having it, although their revenue might be. This is
different from if I go and steal your factory, which prevents you from
producing whatever you were using the factory to produce. Intellectual
property and property are qualitatively different, and many people argue that
society would be better off without the former (see for instance the massive
support for SciHub and movie piracy on HN).

~~~
LMYahooTFY
>The productive capacity of the original holder of the IP/technology is not
decreased by someone else also having it, although their revenue might be.

This is the contradiction. A reduction in revenue directly translates to a
reduction in productive capacity.

~~~
paganel
Which makes us go down the slippery slope of "if I'm going to the toilet on my
employer's time it means I'm reducing its revenues". Which in turn brings us
to the employees of the most wealthy men on this planet having to literally
piss themselves on the job.

~~~
chipotle_coyote
It doesn't _make_ us go down that slippery slope. Those who slide down it are
deliberately choosing to do so.

~~~
paganel
So it's ok to go on the slippery slope of seeing IP infringement as theft (at
least I regard that as a slippery slope, and I'm not the only one), but going
further down the slippery slope thingie is not ok. So the question becomes:
who decides where we should stop the slipper slope-ness?

~~~
chipotle_coyote
Society, collectively.

I don't want to make it sound like I'm saying "why, this is simple, obvious to
even the most casual of observers" \-- what I'm saying is more that this is in
line with the kind of decisions societies and individuals have to make all the
time about what is and isn't acceptable.

I'm a fiction author myself, and I'm not against giving my work away for free!
But I don't think it's unreasonable for me to think I should be the one to
make the decision whether or not to do so -- and that means that, at some
level, I need control over the "intellectual property" of my fiction. I don't
think that having my work digitally available means I somehow automatically
forfeit the right to that control that I would have had thirty years ago when
you pretty much would have had to buy a physical copy on paper. What readers
are ostensibly paying for, after all -- or what I'm giving away, if I choose
-- isn't the medium, it's the work _expressed_ in that medium.

And, you know, there are nuances and arguments to be made around that. There's
a lot of things about IP law as it exists now I disagree with. But seriously
making the argument that we can't let a book publisher enforce their copyright
against a pirate ebook site because to do so will inexorably lead us to the
Triangle Shirt Fire -- I'm just saying, I think that's a pretty damn hard case
to make.

------
fxtentacle
US universities have been offering generous scholarships and green cards to
German PhDs for a long time, with the obvious goal of making their research
available for US companies to use.

In fact, cherry-picking the worldwide top talent is one of the core aspects of
silicon valley culture.

Why is it offensive that China is using the same approach as the US for
building their own silicon valley equivalent?

------
colechristensen
What is the problem being solved?

Intellectual property concerns _seem_ to be the issue at hand which definitely
does not grok.

If the NIH is giving out money for research, the results of that research
should be public, un-patented, free, to benefit the whole species, not
Florida, not the US.

If there are concerns about training people with funds in the US who plan to
leave, I get it. If there are concerns about sabotage, I get it. Otherwise,
wtf?

There are many arguments, but no thesis. "China bad" isn't good enough.

~~~
rshnotsecure
One argument would be that China for some time has maintained the world’s
largest biological weapons program which _dwarfs_ anything the US and the
Russians have even when combined.

In fact there is a rule of thumb from the Cold War...US - Nuclear, Soviets -
Chemical, Chinese - Biological. Indeed most plagues have originated in China
due to the population density and the prevalence of swine (there is a reason
many religions don’t consume certain types of meat and in particular pork,
it’s correlation with plague goes back thousands of years).

Besides these biological weapons which can be quickly looked up online at US
Think Tanks and places like the Army War College...China has also maintained a
pretty firm grip on HackerNews.

Twice now as a cybersecurity researcher I’ve come across Elasticsearch
clusters employing Logstash in combination with a filebeat that streams in
HackerNews topics and comments. This ingestion pipeline seems to be set off if
you hit enough “hot words” after which time an Elastalert is sent out to
presumably trigger human-in-the-loop to comment and pounce on any criticism.
Based on the architecture that I saw in both cases this is a straightforward
if not modest and not that sinister interpretation of the infrastructure. Yet
it is still very concerning in the aggregate.

In conclusion, China could use these innovations for weapons to kill not as
much us as their own people. Additionally their attempts to monitor and at
times squelch free speech abroad goes against...a lot of things that people
who live in Democracies would agree is valuable and worth protecting.

~~~
solotronics
The automated response pipeline I something I always assumed existed but
couldn't prove. Is there a way you can anonymously publish info about this?

~~~
rshnotsecure
Lol my full name is in my profile. I published about the Wyze Breach, and a
couple of other things, here:
[https://blog.12security.com](https://blog.12security.com)

These posts were rapidly put up as I wrestled with the cloud hosted Ghost
platform, so excuse the grammar mistakes.

Further posts on the topic you’re referring to, broad surveillance of the
forums, comments, and chat rooms of the internet using streaming timeseries
databases, I am working on now.

------
tehjoker
I don't fully understand what they did that is wrong? I strongly suspect this
is a pharma grift to prevent new cancer treatments from being made available
in China so they can profit off them dressed up as xenophobia and insinuation.

I guess if they are at a "shadow lab" and are not working their grants that's
something, but lol at how often professors just take time off to do consulting
for companies!

~~~
mturmon
I'm affiliated with a university, and every year for the past 5+ years I have
to fill out a conflict of interest (COI) form in which I testify that I
haven't accepted gifts or compensation from outside entities without filing a
disclosure form for that gift/compensation. I forget the exact dollar
threshold, but it's like $100. Basically anything above a coffee mug or
t-shirt.

The point of filing the disclosure is clear, if you give it some thought from
the POV of the university.

For instance, suppose a professor is performing research for NIH. When the
grant/contract application is filed, the university is promising NIH that X
research will be performed at that university. There is an agreement between
the university and NIH, and the university has the duty of monitoring funds
and activity. (This is part of the rationale for the ~30-50% overhead charge
that everyone also likes to argue about.) If it's a contract (opposed to a
grant, both are given by NIH) there are also deliverables to NIH that are
guaranteed _by the university_.

[Aside: above is pushing back against some people's notion that NSF/NIH
grants/contracts are a mostly-unrestricted dollar award to a specific faculty
member to do cool stuff; that may the the informal working-model especially
for grants to long-time faculty but it's not the letter of the law]

For this reason, the university itself has a direct interest in making sure an
investigator is not taking money from another source for the same (worst
case!) or similar research/deliverables. This is why major universities now
require COI disclosure for outside consulting, etc. -- basically anything
where flows of external funds could affect the course of work that the
_university_ is supposed to monitor.

If you read the article with this in mind, it appears that the university
discovered that these researchers had taken money from these outside entities
_without disclosure_ to the university. This is a big no-no, and it is indeed
_very_ surprising that the CEO of the entire cancer center would not have
disclosed.

In some cases, the failure to disclose is the real issue, because it gives the
appearance of "hiding something." Hope this helps!

------
einpoklum
Aren't strong foreign ties for researchers a good thing?

(shrugs)

------
trustyhardware
McCarthyism is cool again.

------
sschueller
At what point are we going to stop with this Nationalism bullshit and realize
that research, regardless of who pays for it, is good for all of mankind.

~~~
turkthrower123
As soon as we have removed all of the silly lines on the map.

~~~
excerionsforte
Everytime I see someone mentioning no nations, fictitious as it is, it reminds
me of
[https://acecombat.fandom.com/wiki/A_World_With_No_Boundaries](https://acecombat.fandom.com/wiki/A_World_With_No_Boundaries)
which was branded as a terrorist group in the game. Don't think national
boundaries will ever be erased without economic incentive and hardship in the
process. How would you refer to each land?

As far as I can see there is always going to be boundaries be it cultural,
tribal or artificial. Tendency is just there. Look at SF for instance where
there was one neighborhood that rebranded itself (The East cut).

~~~
SuoDuanDao
Nation-states are a fairly recent invention historically speaking, and their
benefits are somewhat questionable - it's entirely possible that they simply
don't provide more benefits than the price of administration.

Humans lived in city-states for most of our history, I see no reason why we
shouldn't expect the city-state to be resurgent in the current century.

------
inform880
Is this the result of a decreasing amount of patriotism across the US? Or
maybe it's just money.

~~~
tyingq
The Chinese "Thousand Talents" program listed in the article has one-time
awards of up to $150k USD.

~~~
whoevercares
That’s not a lot money..I’m pretty sure many researchers that qualifies that
program could get a 200-400k or much more sign-on package from major tech
company. The Chinese program might come with much more benefit and privileges
though that couldn’t be measured by money

~~~
jvanderbot
I think the downvotes are because it's 150k one time stipend for R&D, i.e. a
grant for research. Salaries may be separate.

~~~
freeone3000
It's because it actually is a lot of money for academia. The "make 200k-400k
signing bonus at a tech firm" is approximately the same as "just have the
truck drivers join FAANG for a 50k signing bonus" \- as in, there aren't
_that_ many positions that pay that well, there's a ton of competition for
them, there isn't enough for everybody, so the vast majority of people are
going to take this option for a variety of reasons.

------
rshnotsecure
Does anyone here have any idea what
[https://usaviationacademy.com](https://usaviationacademy.com) is? A 7,000
foot runway, they also own a total of 3 airports in central Texas...with
dozens of planes, 10 helicopters, and multiple private jets? All owned by
about 7 different business names it looks like and 7 different non-working
numbers? Apparently they teach...air to air refueling. Lol sure that is
standard pilot training for Delta.

They also conveniently left open an Elasticsearch cluster with 600,000 US Air
Force personnel PII records.

Yesterday it was posted about front companies acquiring massive resources in
the US. Who are these people?

[http://40.113.239.204:9200/airmen/_search?size=100&pretty](http://40.113.239.204:9200/airmen/_search?size=100&pretty)

~~~
dlgeek
Those aren't USAF records. They're FAA (civilian) pilot records. I think that
info is all scraped public record - see
[https://amsrvs.registry.faa.gov/airmeninquiry/](https://amsrvs.registry.faa.gov/airmeninquiry/)

If you want help getting media attention on the breach to try to get it shamed
into being closed, I'd suggest reaching out to Troy Hunt (HIBP?) or Brian
Krebs.

~~~
rshnotsecure
Fascinating and thank you. Airmen is a uniquely military term, and entering
into Wikipedia immediately brings up an article on Air Force ranks. It is
interesting 1). That the FAA uses this term as well and 1). There seems to be
an entry input for country. I guess that’s for foreign pilots? Or for US
citizens who move abroad?

