Journalists scant scientists’ ethnic-profiling accusation against the federal government
DOI: 10.1063/PT.5.8186
Given widespread media attention to the principle that ethnic profiling is unacceptably un-American, why is there so little media attention to the “Scientists Not Spies” campaign?
For the issue, if not explicitly for the movement itself, National Public Radio’s Morning Edition set a rare example on 16 August by offering seven minutes of serious attention under the headline “The fine line between countering security threats and racial profiling.” Atop NPR’s online posting appears a photo with this caption:
Xiaoxing Xi, a Temple University physics professor, speaks in front of a photo of Sherry Chen, a federal government worker, at a September 2015 Washington, D.C., press conference about the spying charges against them that were dropped. Xi says his wife and daughters were marched out of their bedrooms at gunpoint when he was arrested in May 2015.
Xi was Temple’s physics chairman until those arresting officers arrived. Since then he has become a key figure for “Scientists Not Spies,” whose webpage (#scientistsnotspies) implores “Stop the reckless prosecutions.” That advocacy effort is linked to a group called Asian Americans Advancing Justice, which explicitly invokes the memory of its own voice in the controversies over Japanese American internment during World War II and in the late-1990s controversy involving Taiwanese American nuclear-weapons engineer Wen Ho Lee.
“Scientists Not Spies” condemns what it calls “a trend of overzealous targeting of Asian Americans in the name of national security.” The movement charges the US Department of Justice with failures of due diligence in ascertaining technical facts “before infringing on the rights of innocent people and irreversibly damaging their lives and reputations.” It accuses the government of wrongfully prosecuting, among others, American citizens Xi and Chen. It complains that the “government has still not publicly acknowledged any wrongdoing for its recent wrongful prosecutions, despite calls from the New York Times editorial board, U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, and many members of congress among others.”
In a 2002 book review in American Scientist, Wolfgang Panofsky—professor and director emeritus at what was then still called the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center—assessed the Wen Ho Lee case. “Political concerns and influences,” he wrote, “seem to have superseded an unbiased professional investigation of the facts by government prosecutors.” Using an adjective that NPR this month repeated when citing that case, Panofsky nevertheless also called the events in question “murky.”
But nothing has been presented as murky in the cases of Xi and Chen—and little has been presented in the media about the “Scientists Not Spies” issue that they now symbolize.
How should geopolitics and the imperative to protect US technoscientific business interests mix with international scientific collaborations? Are US researchers with Chinese connections unjustly at risk of suffering the wrenching, multidimensioned, ruinous personal chaos that follows from being surprised, arrested, handcuffed, publicly marched off, and criminally charged by federal authorities? With some exceptions like the recent NPR report, the media have so far presented only limited examination of those questions.
Top right on the 12 September 2015 front page, the New York Times broke news that Science magazine later summarized :
Federal prosecutors filed a motion Friday in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, to drop a case against a Temple University physicist accused of helping Chinese organizations illegally obtain U.S. technology. The government’s case against Xiaoxing Xi had rested on a “misunderstanding” of the technology involved and the nature of scientific collaborations, according to Xi’s lawyer, Peter Zeidenberg.
Zeidenberg also figured prominently in the recent NPR report. Science‘s summary from a year ago continued:
In a 14 May indictment , the government alleged that Xi, a well-known expert on thin-film materials, schemed to pass information about a device known as a Pocket Heater—a proprietary U.S. technology used to make magnesium diboride superconducting thin films—to Chinese entities in order to help them become leaders in the field of superconductivity. Federal investigators obtained Xi’s email exchanges with colleagues in China, and cited four messages in charging Xi with four counts of wire fraud. In June, Xi pleaded not guilty to the charges.
The Times‘s news report called the situation “an embarrassing acknowledgment that prosecutors and F.B.I. agents did not understand—and did not do enough to learn—the science at the heart of the case before bringing charges that jeopardized Dr. Xi’s career and left the impression that he was spying for China.” Later a Times editorial called it “hardly surprising that the Justice Department has given priority to prosecuting espionage cases involving China,” but charged the department with “reckless haste” and declared that “these concerns cannot justify prosecutions driven by supposition rather than solid evidence.”
The Times‘s news report quoted Xi: “I don’t expect them to understand everything I do. But the fact that they don’t consult with experts and then charge me? Put my family through all this? Damage my reputation? They shouldn’t do this. This is not a joke. This is not a game.”
The article also elaborated on some of the personal consequences, explaining that Temple removed Xi from its physics department chairmanship, put him on administrative leave, and gave him “strict rules about who at the school he could talk to,” making “it impossible for him to continue working on a long-running research project that was nearing completion.” It reported, “Dr. Xi choked back tears as he described an ordeal that was agonizing for his family. ‘I barely came out of this nightmare,’ he said.”
Reuters reported that Zeidenberg said that Xi “put his house up as collateral to secure his $100,000 bond.” The Philadelphia Inquirer quoted the view of Jim Napolitano, who replaced Xi as physics chairman: “They came close to destroying his life.” The Inquirer also reported about the effect on physics graduate students at Temple:
Napolitano said the greatest effect of Xi’s absence was on his students. Xi had nine research grants and 11 graduate students working under him, he said, three of whom were on track to graduate in December. Keeping to that schedule has been a challenge, Napolitano said.
The Times report explicitly raised the question of ethnic bias. It declared that this case, following the recent similar Chen case in Ohio, which also ended in dismissal of charges, “raises questions about whether the Justice Department, in its rush to find Chinese spies, is ensnaring innocent American citizens of Chinese ancestry.”
The Times‘s May 2015 report on the Chen case began:
On Monday, Oct. 20, 2014, Sherry Chen drove, as usual, to her office at the National Weather Service in Wilmington, Ohio, where she forecast flood threats along the Ohio River. She was a bit jet-lagged, having returned a few days earlier from a visit to China. But as she headed to her desk, she says, she had no reason to think it was anything other than an ordinary day. Then her boss summoned her.
Once inside his office, a back door opened and in walked six agents from the Federal Bureau of Investigation.
The agents accused Mrs. Chen, a hydrologist born in China and now a naturalized American citizen, of using a stolen password to download information about the nation’s dams and of lying about meeting with a high-ranking Chinese official.
Mrs. Chen, 59, an adoptive Midwesterner who had received awards for her government service, was now suspected of being a Chinese spy. She was arrested and led in handcuffs past her co-workers to a federal courthouse 40 miles away in Dayton, where she was told she faced 25 years in prison and $1 million in fines.
Her life went into a tailspin. She was suspended without pay from her job, and her family in China had to scramble for money to pay for her legal defense. Friends and co-workers said they were afraid to visit. Television news trucks parked outside her house, waiting to spot a foreign spy hiding in plain sight in suburban Wilmington, population 12,500.
“I could not sleep,” Mrs. Chen said in a recent interview. “I could not eat. I did nothing but cry for days.”
Then, five months later, the ordeal abruptly ended. In March, just a week before she was scheduled to go on trial, prosecutors dropped all charges against Mrs. Chen without explanation.
The Americans who are pressing the “Scientists Not Spies” campaign believe that as of late summer 2016, the country has failed to adequately confront, assess, and address their ethnic-profiling concern. When it comes to media attention, results of Google News searches support their belief.
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Steven T. Corneliussen, a media analyst for the American Institute of Physics, monitors three national newspapers, the weeklies Nature and Science, and occasionally other publications. He has published op-eds in the Washington Post and other newspapers, has written for NASA’s history program, and was a science writer at a particle-accelerator laboratory.