Riana Pfefferkorn, an attorney, is trying to bring clarity to the situation. She filed her motion Tuesday in federal court in Indianapolis.
(Screenshot of Zoom)
“We have the right to know what our government is up to, in short,” said Riana Pfefferkorn, a legal scholar and policy fellow at the Stanford Institute for Human Centered Artificial Intelligence.
“I heard about this case on the day the news came out about the search of his homes, and it was all anybody could talk about in the communities of cybersecurity scholars and practitioners I move in,” Pfefferkorn said. “Mailing lists and slack channels, everything just lit up with this story.”
One of Wang’s longtime collaborators at Purdue University said IU asked him in December to explain why he didn’t disclose his participation in the 2017-2018 grant, according to a letter obtained by WFIU/WTIU News.
That, however, doesn’t explain why IU fired Wang, a tenured professor, without established protocol — or why he’s being investigated by the federal government.
“Is this something that has to do with Chinese espionage, or does it have to do with a revival of the frankly xenophobic attacks on especially Chinese immigrant scholars that we’d seen in the previous Trump administration?” Pfefferkorn said. “Since we’re seeing a crackdown even on perfectly legal scholars and students and immigrants here in the United States as of late, nobody knew what was going on.”
Pfefferkorn, an attorney, is trying to bring clarity to the situation. She filed her motion Tuesday in federal court in Indianapolis.
“It was surprising to me to see there hadn’t been an immediate effort to try and go directly to the source, to the courts, and try to learn more information about this case,” she said. “So part of my rationale in filing this motion is that I would like to see other media organizations take an interest and step up.”
Law enforcement needs a valid reason to petition a search warrant from a judge, such as evidence of a crime. Once granted, those warrants are often under seal, at least until they’re executed. Federal courts can keep those sealed during investigations.
But the public also has a constitutional right of access to courts under the First Amendment, the motion argues.
“Now that the warrants have been executed, there is no longer any reason for continued secrecy,” the motion says. “Redactions should be sufficient to protect any privacy or reputational interests of any persons named in the warrants.”
There are several reasons a judge would not grant the motion to unseal the warrant. Law enforcement could object that the investigation is ongoing, or Wang and Ma’s own attorneys might worry it could damage their clients’ reputation and privacy.
“Nevertheless, it is very standard for warrants to be filed publicly once they have been executed,” Pfefferkorn said. “I would prefer to see the continued sealing be the exception rather than the norm in our system of typically open government.”
