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.
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
“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.
https://arstechnica.com/security/2025/03/computer-scientist-goes-silent-after-fbi-raid-and-purging-from-university-website/