A prominent computer scientist who has spent 20 years publishing educational papers on cryptography, privateness, and cybersecurity has gone incommunicado, had his professor profile, electronic mail account, and telephone quantity eliminated by his employer, Indiana University, and had his properties raided by the FBI. No one is aware of why.
Xiaofeng Wang has an extended record of prestigious titles. He was the affiliate dean for analysis at Indiana University’s Luddy School of Informatics, Computing and Engineering, a fellow on 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 analysis tasks totaling practically $23 million over his 21 years there.
He has additionally co-authored scores of educational papers on a various vary of analysis fields, together with cryptography, methods safety, and knowledge privateness, together with the safety of human genomic knowledge. I’ve personally spoken to him on three events for articles right here, right here, and right here.
“None of this is in any way normal”
In current weeks, Wang’s electronic mail account, telephone quantity, and profile web page on the Luddy School have been quietly erased by his employer. Over the identical time, Indiana University additionally eliminated a profile for his spouse, Nianli Ma, who was listed as a Lead Systems Analyst and Programmer on the college’s Library Technologies division.
As reported by the Bloomingtonian and later the Herald-Times in Bloomington, a small fleet of unmarked vehicles pushed by authorities brokers descended on the Bloomington home of Wang and Ma on Friday. They spent most of the day going out and in of the home and infrequently transferred packing containers from their autos. TV station WTHR, in the meantime, reported {that a} second home owned by Wang and Ma and situated in Carmel, Indiana, was additionally searched. The station mentioned that each a resident and an lawyer for the resident have been on scene throughout no less than half of the search.