It's still not entirely clear to me why or how Xi was being investigated in the first place. There was a mention in an earlier post on HN that he had some incidental contact with Ross Ulbricht of Silk Road.<p>However, the indictment gives a couple hints on this topic. There are multiple mentions of FISA and CIPA, US laws dealing with national security and spying. Perhaps the US was spying on the people Xi was communicating with?<p>You can read the indictment here:
<a href="https://cryptome.org/2015/09/xiaoxing-xi-files.pdf" rel="nofollow">https://cryptome.org/2015/09/xiaoxing-xi-files.pdf</a><p>All of this seems like overkill for what was supposedly a violation of an NDA.
For those of you unfamiliar with the story, this New York Times piece describes how this all happened in the first instance. One more datum on federal incompetence: <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2015/09/12/us/politics/us-drops-charges-that-professor-shared-technology-with-china.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.nytimes.com/2015/09/12/us/politics/us-drops-charg...</a>
> carrying a maximum of 80 years in prison<p>It boggles the mind that it's even possible to manufacture such a charge. In most European countries you would get the highest sentence for the biggest crime, which although wouldn't be "accurate" either, it's a whole lot closer to what the punishment should be than <i>stacking the sentences up</i>.<p>And please spare me the "but he would never get this sentence anyway!" argument. If you were in his position and the government would tell you you're risking 80 years in prison unless you fully cooperated with it, you'd shit your pants, too, and you'd probably give up any rights you have just to not risk getting <i>anywhere close</i> to that sentence, or you would even settle and plead guilty to avoid that.
I still don't understand how the DoJ screwed up so much in this case.<p>Did they see schematics in an email and then made the wild assumption that it was nefarious? That seems absurd.
Is anyone else disturbed by the use of FISA of 1978?<p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foreign_Intelligence_Surveillance_Act" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foreign_Intelligence_Surveilla...</a><p>They basically accused him of being a Chinese Spy but instead charged him with Fraud. :|
This always happens when there is a public hysteria over a new threat. Innocent lives are very quickly ruined, charges get dropped and evidence fails to hold up in the courtroom on a frequent basis, and despite all of this the actual criminals continue to operate successfully afterwards (just as chinese espionage continues to be successful at the present).<p>The same type of failed wrongful convictions - typically involving people who are easy targets - as a result of rabid law enforcement and media fear mongering can be found in terrorism in 2000s, drugs in the 1980s-90s, biker gangs in the 60s-70s.<p>Instead of taking a logical and well-reasoned approach to the enforcement of legitimate societal problems history just keeps repeating itself.
Violating an NDA is civil, not legal FFS. The US government has no business enforcing NDAs. (It can and should enforce court orders resulting from lawsuits over NDAs.)