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Scientists Boycott NASA Conference Because of Ban On Chinese Participants
New submitter Eunuchswear writes "Congress has passed laws forbidding NASA from allowing Chinese nationals on its premises, so NASA was forced to reject applications from Chinese scientists to attend the upcoming meeting on the Kepler space telescope next month. This ban extends even to Chinese scientists and students working in the USA, angering many American scientists. Geoff Marcy, known for his work on exoplanets, is reported to be boycotting the conference. 'In good conscience, I cannot attend a meeting that discriminates in this way. The meeting is about planets located trillions of miles away, with no national security implications.' he said in an email to the conference organisers."
They neglect to inform you that it was signed into law by US President Barack Obama.
More egg on the Administration's face.
You mean, like poor Pluto?
Once the Chinese start colonizing other planets in advance of Americans, they will simply ban Americans from visiting those planets in exchange. ;-)
Ezekiel 23:20
We all have difficult choices to make.
Billions of Chinese cyberattacks per day on American companies are the issue. Planets trillions of miles away? Not so much. Any honest analysis shows that China is "borrowing" knowledge from the USA as fast as humanly possible. It's enough of a courtesy that we do indeed allow their citizens to study and work here. We've done a fair job of maintaining decent civil and trade relationships despite a strained rivalry. Beyond that, the Chinese government and military apparatus can always take some responsibility for improving the relationship further.
This is the responsibility of Frank Wolf, R-VA, of the Virginia 10th District. If you should live in the 10th District (in N. Virginia), contact him and let him know what you think about this.
I have met him several times, but have no idea what he really thinks he is accomplishing here.
... so I guess this will teach them a lesson about spying on other countries.
Of course, the irony of "the pot calling the kettle black" doesn't go unnoticed.
I'll file this under, "An eye for an eye makes the whole world blind. -- Mahatma Gandhi"
lolwhat.
Hitler wrote Mein Kampf, laying down his plans and attentions ahead of time. The equivalent team in America wrote "Project for a New American Century", laying down their identical intentions to use false flags, invade and holocaust a list of nations including Iraq, Iran and Syria, build a racist movement against the Muslim peoples of the Earth, and ultimately build a path to World War against China.
9/11 was the serious start of the PNAC project, but every act of significant military planning in the US since then has been aimed at fighting a future war against China. Such a scenario absolutely considers that the USA will be the aggressor.
Do you sheeple that Slashdot propagandists target never question why the US war machine is growing at a phenomenal rate EVERY year? Do you not ask why every mass media outlet in the USA pushes military friendly propaganda on every possible show- news, reality TV, Drama, kids programming etc. No-one is allowed to say they are against the US army in present day America. This is an infinity away from common attitudes in the 1960s, 70s and 80s.
When Obama's death squads executed that black woman in front of her child a day or so back, the US congress applauded the murder for tens of minutes, hooting and cheering. This is the psychopathic mindset of the sick, depraved monsters that rule over you.
Aping that infamous Twilight Zone episode, pathetic Obama drones (like most of you here) dribbled "it's good that they shot that unarmed woman dead in front of her child". In the fiction, a monstrous freak of a child has psychic powers that command the lives of all around him, leaving them no choice but to endless praise the perverted 'reality' he creates. In this real life, most of you willingly do the same when YOUR party (left or right) carries out evil atrocities in the name of 'security'.
I'm glad about this NASA story. Too many sheeple were brainwashed into thinking NASA was a civilian program, rather than a mask for America's space based weapons and military surveillance projects. Working for NASA is conceptually the same as working for those Nazi research organisations of wartime Germany. NASA is about one thing, and one thing only- the most efficient ways of murdering the greatest numbers of people on the Earth. The technology is explored and advanced for this reason alone. Useful idiots that work on NASA's space exploration programs bring massive benefits to the military side that represents 99.9% of everything NASA does.
This should not be accepatable that the US is closing many of its telescopes (temporarily) that were doing long term observations and now doing stupid things like politicizing one of the fronteers of human exploration (the search for other planets like our own). Maybe there need to be more people to write to politicians to let them know that there are voters out there that value these things?
So. Let me get this straight. A Pfc has access to diplomatic cables and other documents with TS classifications; but a Chinese scientist can't attend a conference where the results are likely to be published in papers with no classification at all.
OK, I haven't read TFA (this is Slashdot) but the summary certainly makes it sound like total incompetence. I wish I could say I was surprised.
I bet I can explain this though. It probably has something to do with what happened at Los Alamos, where a Chinese scientist walked off with some sensitive information. The way to fix that problem was to make sure the sensitive information there was properly classified and restricted to people with the proper clearance. Instead it sounds like they decided to classify... a lot of science. Once again, incompetent.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
Forbidding NASA from allowing Chinese nationals on the premises clearly has a disparate impact against people of Chinese ethnicity; therefore, this is discrimination based on race.
Under the latest interpretations of the Civil rights act; any disparate impact is discrimination.
The courts should be having a field day with this....
another death nail for NASA.. Republicans want to shut it down and spend all the money on ICBMs, NASAs original reason for being....
Instead of having it at NASA, can't they just have it at the local Holiday Inn?
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
From TFA:
The recent Congressional action refers to a broader law passed in July which prohibits Nasa funds from being used to participate or collaborate with China in any way. The law has raised fears among some Nasa-funded scientists that they will have to sever ties with their Chinese collaborators, and no longer take on Chinese students. weve embraced this schitzophrenic notion that theyre both an ally as well as an enemy. our Frienemy manufacture entire lifestyles for americans, from phones to computers and even the next great bridge to replace the golden gate
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eastern_span_replacement_of_the_San_Francisco%E2%80%93Oakland_Bay_Bridge
To insist your second largest trading partner is so prone to espionage as to warrant eviction from, historically, a great font of collaborative international scientific research of the modern era, misses the point entirely. to insist somehow they might glean some kernel of knowledge from NASA that they would not otherwise discover as a nation that manufactures supercomputers, high speed maglev transportation, and the worlds largest power plant ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Gorges_Dam ) is laughable.
this legislation was concocted by the republican party. Any woman or man of science should remember this as "the party that cant." In the past we hosted 7 astronauts aboard the russian space station MIR. Yet somehow today, the country that hasnt moved missiles into cuba, hasnt started proxy wars, and hasnt ginned up anti-american rhetoric is now so dangerous as to be inadmissable in the eyes of a party that as far as i can tell, stopped researching China after the cold war.
Good people go to bed earlier.
Wolf thinks he's accomplishing pandering to the conservative majority of his district, and he's absolutely right. Remember, politicians and bureacrats most often make decisions that serve their own interests, not the interests of those they ostensibly represent or the public at large. There's a whole school of economic thought called "public choice" that studies this phenomenon.
Space game using normal deck of cards: http://BattleCards.org
China DID in fact put pressure on them regarding laws and such, however nowhere near as heavy-handed as on the mainland.
My friends had been sort of worried about it when it first happened but said after a number of people were out protesting in the streets that the Mainland government didn't crack down on them and instead simply began pushing more 'mainland styled' laws to be approved.
Sadly we lost touch when they headed off to college or I might have more insight into the aftermath.
Oh.
GO!
What did we tell you?
Even the USSR behind the Iron curtain had better and freerer information flow than the states do now.
Uh, can't they meet at a Hyatt down the road?
Look for a reason to smile you jaded #*^ *(%$
Sadly we lost touch when they headed off to college...
That's exactly what China wants you to believe.
Ask Canada for example what it's like to burn down the capital of the USA.
The only war you won was won by the "Cheese eating surrender monkeys". You were well grateful there, weren't you?
Those outerspace guys are still around? Who knew!
but the congresscritter responsible for this probably doesn't read history. The U.S. kicked out a Chinese scientist who went on to be China's equivalent of Werner von Braun. After arresting him for smuggling secret documents that turned out to be tables of logarithms.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qian_Xuesen
NASA can't 1) be the space engineering source for DoD and 2) be the open space science community for the world. TFA misses the point that political support for these measures was created when NASA knowingly broke rules on employing foreign nationals on classified projects.
Like every other scientist, space scientists need to decide how comfortable they are working on secret projects. In the end, if you take the money, you take the restrictions too. NASA should hand anything Congress wants classified over to other agencies and focus on the pure science.
You have never been to Hong Kong it seems. Totally different place than mainland China, not only because of Cantonese, but also extremely fast internet with no internet filtering, cool movies and very cheap prices. I know a lot of people in Shanghai that travel over there just for shopping. Hell you actually need a different visa to get over there so I don't know why you think the Chinese government changed Hong Kong somehow.
they have this planet, so they're the ones to laugh last.
NASA Schmasa.
Scientists don't understand how deceiving a good spy can be. I bet the PLA has lots of young, sexy Chinese grad students in America, seducing older, male professors, bugging their computers, taking photos to send back to the mainland, establishing relations with Americans to use in the future for blackmail. Anna Chapman was the tip of the iceberg. This blocking of a conference is a minor side effect of the big policy changes set in place by Congress.
Having said that, Russia probably has better rocket tech than America.
Lawmaker: NASA broke law with visits by China officials :
Wolf chairs the House Appropriations subcommittee that funds NASA. He's been one of China's loudest critics in Congress, particularly regarding the country's human rights record and its reported proclivity for spying.
Wolf does not want the United States to work with what he's called an "evil" government. He said the White House has bypassed his 2011 national security measure by using federal money to pay for joint space and technology ventures with China.
Last month, Wolf and Rep. Lamar Smith, R-Texas, chairman of the House Science, Space and Technology Committee, wrote to FBI Director Robert Mueller expressing concerns about the possible leak of highly sensitive technological information to China from the NASA Ames Research Center in California.
Lawmakers accuse Obama prosecutors of lying about espionage probe at NASA :
Congressional leaders are challenging a U.S. Attorney's denial that the Justice Department shut down a federal espionage investigation involving the illegal transfer of U.S. space defense weapons technology to foreign countries, including China, The Washington Examiner has learned.
Melinda Haag, the U.S. Attorney for Northern California, also denied that she had ever requested authority to prosecute anybody as a result of the espionage investigation.
But Sen. Charles Grassley, R-IA, and Representatives Lamar Smith, R-TX, and Frank Wolf, R-VA, say Haag's denials don't square with evidence they've reviewed and they wonder if Justice Department or White House officials interfered with a potentially explosive espionage investigation or if "politics played a role in the prosecutorial decisions made in this case."
NASA locks out foreigners, orders security review following concerns of Chinese spying :
Perhaps it’s the ambitions of the space agency that make it such a target for espionage. Wolf told Discovery News earlier this week that “the Chinese have the most comprehensive spying program in Washington that has ever been. They make the KGB look like they were the junior varsity or freshman team.”
Subject that makes him an expert on who and what is a national security risk.
Hong Kong's social and political organization is protected by treaty for a period of time after the transfer from the UK. (50 years I think.) After that the Chinese government can do what they want, which will be to introduce "socialism." There is some small chance they will tread lightly due to Hong Kong being the "goose that laid the golden egg," but I wouldn't count on it. The Chinese government is patient. In a few decades Hong Kong will be just another part of China.
much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don't even know that fire is hot - George Orwell
A few issues here:
So ... if it was being held off-site, a lot of NASA folks wouldn't be allowed to go. Hold on at a NASA site, and the Chinese and anyone who has a name on a government watch list can't attend.*
* Note that I did not say 'is on' the list. The whole argument about how there are only a few people being watched is crap when some have multiple aliases, and those names match lots of other people ... like my neighbor's kid who hasn't been allowed to check in online for flights since he was 2 years old ... because he shares a first & last name with an IRA member
Build it, and they will come^Hplain.
Hong Kong will make a deal with the USA! Hong Kong US territory!
It's because of all the money that Hong Kong makes. The "one country, two systems" slogan really means "those guys make a lot of money and we don't want to disturb them too much" which is why Hong Kong and Macau are Special Administrative Regions but Tibet is left in the dark.
Although I don't believe the Chinese government charges Hong Kong any tax, so they're not directly benefiting from it directly. I suspect they're trying to use Hong Kong as a gateway investment vehicle for foreign investment and then try to lure them into mainland China with lower labor costs once they learn all the secrets.
Nowadays, you never see anything stamped with "made in Hong Kong" anymore; it's all financial and technical/logistical services now.
Chinese should be treated in the same way foreigners are treated in china, which is downright lousy.
Yup, modded down for expressing an opinion and an argument that some "moderator" didn't like. When I have mod points, I never do such a thing. Why, I don't know though. I stubbornly cling to the idea that mods shouldn't be censors.
if anything the chinese government is going for creating more areas like macau and hong kong.
like shanghai free trade zone with lifted internet filters and other projects going to similar direction.
why? because it's fucking good for business!
that, and that chinese wealthy want more areas like it and the wealthy wield power there the same as anywhere.
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
I'm personally quite offended at what the Bush-Obama intelligence agencies are doing TO AMERICANS (Our intelligence agencies are SUPPOSED to be keeping an eye on EXTERNAL threats but NOT going after American Citizens within the US) but I have absolutely no problem with them looking at non-Americans JUST AS FOREIGN GOVERNMENTS ALL DO TOO. It was too funny to see all the recent European outrage over US spying followed by the small admissions from England, Germany, etc that they too were spying similarly...
That said, however, what the Chinese have been doing is using their spy agencies to steal technology from American companies for use by Chinese companies who then either supply the tech to the Chinese military (requiring the American taxpayer to then fund a new wave of military tech development) or use it to undercut the very American companies it was stolen from (I have personal experience with this - a company I worked for found itself competing against a Chinese product I had designed for them ... which had been stolen and cloned by the Chinese company and then sold back into the US market at a very low price point (below the cost of manufacture in the US)). In either event, the American taxpayer is under NO obligation to help undermine his own security or employment just so some egg-headed space scientists (who live off the taxpayer money) can pretend to have collegial relationships with Chinese "peers" (who are probably spies)
Wanna hug a Panda? Do it on your own dime!
If Congress is concerned with Chinese nationals being on the premises of NASA and other government research sites, just hold the conference off-site. Surely there is a local Holiday Inn with a conference room nearby.
Very few politicians are looking out for the middle-class taxpayer... but Frank Wolf is. All this airheaded "information wants to be free" and "all countries are equal and want peace" stuff is fine if you are a child or a beauty pageant contestant... but in the real world, different countries have different agendas which are at odds with each other. The idea that the American middle class taxpayer should spend hundreds of billions of tax dollars developing various technologies so that [A] Americans can have good jobs and [B] Americans can have the security provided by a high-tech military, and then some idiot in a lab coat can give ANY of it away to his "colleagues" from a hostile country is appalling. Nobody should have to fund some scientist's pretense of being "above it all" and not "soiled" by "politics" or "nationalism" no matter how much favor it might buy at the Noble committee or some other place.
If the space telescope guys wanna sell-out their fellow citizens, let them do it honestly... by surrendering their American citizenship and defecting to the apparently much more free and open China, where all their freedoms and research aspirations are apparently much more likely to be protected...
Meanwhile... on a planet trillions of miles away, the secret Chinese-American War rages on.
The only ones allowed to work there are working in service of the Iranian revolution and the violent spread of Shia Islam. The good, secular, Iranians left in a large exodus in the 1970's (many came to the US and Canada) much like the massive brain drain of Germany in the 1930's. The US got some excellent scientists, engineers, and entrepreneurs from Iran in that 1970's wave. Anybody stupid enough to cooperate with the "good" scientists (who have all been "educated" by, and lived most of their lives within, that system) in Iran today is likely to be the one who, being aboard a hijacked plane, is "surprised" that the hijackers are Muslim...
The American "Geophysical" Union needs to be boycotted since they, El Presidente and Ejecutivos and Miembros de la Junta have managed to turn a respectable society of Geophysicists into a Circus of Alarmists, Environmentalists and Climatisimists.
Death to AGU, Muerte a AGU.
Que tus acciones pecaminosas y transgresiones que ganar una pequeña celda en el infierno.
}:D
It is sort of what you suspect, but less "steal the secrets" more "protect the goose that lays the golden eggs".
Foreign companies can set up headquarters in Hong Kong ( one Hong Kong office + one or more employee paid in Hong Kong + pay corporate taxes in Hong Kong ) and then have the legal protections as a company in Hong Kong cover some of their business dealing with their mainland china factories/subsidries/etc. I know at least a couple of companies that set up headquarters here in Hong Kong and then have factories in mainland China. The "One Country, two systems" slogan allows for better legal protection for foreign investment into One Country if you set up your headquarters in Hong Kong.
Mainland Chinese laws on foreign investment allowed the foreigners to get screwed over more than a few times by a small and nasty subset of the mainland Chinese business people, Hong Kong laws are much better for foreign investment and by allowing the "One Country, two systems" Mainland China got to have the foreign investment without needing to change their own laws drastically, the only big change in Mainland foreign investement laws was that any Hong Kong company had the right to have some legal protections in One Country fall under Hong Kong jurisdiction. One of the small and nasty subset found that out when he got ordered to appear in Hong Kong courts for his court case with a foreign company headquartered in Hong Kong, he tried to not show up so the Mainland Chinese government escorted him into Hong Kong for his court date, he lost badly in Hong Kong courts but most likely would have won under the laws of Mainland China.
Oh and yes I know small foreign companies that operate factories in Mainland China but have their headquarters in Hong Kong.
Because all you need to invent is money...
The vast majority of important inventions or discoveries on the last several centuries were made in the Western world. And that's going to change just becuase some else gets a few bucks? Many of the inventions in the west were made by individual or small, barely-funded, groups. It's the culture more than anything else.
But feel free to keep telling yourself that it's your people's time, if that makes you feel better about being you.
There are several nice conference centers in Canada that are available to host this and in the fall the changing colours of the leaves are really quite nice to see.
Undetectable Steganography? Yep, there's an app fo
You know what is better for national security than the most sophisticated and technologically advanced weapons?
Staying on friendly relations with other countries.
This is the sort of action you would expect from some small dictator-run country not one of the biggest countries in the world.
If you combine it with the arguments on funding which has resulted in the government effectively shutting down for the last few days and the absolute fortune being spent on making the Internet a less secure place (AKA NSA spying on everyone) then you end up with a picture of a country where the government organisations are completely out of the control of those who are supposed to set the rules.
This is not acceptable in a connected world. The spying is particularly galling, (I know GCHQ are up to their necks too) but I EXPECT that individuals not carrying USA passports should have some rights - if only the human right to privacy unless there are overriding needs in individual cases/investigations. This wholesale hoovering up of my data is plain wrong. The outright lying of some of the senior agency staff to oversight committees and FISA courts is completely unacceptable and should lead to long prison sentences, but it won't and another nail is hammered into the USA state coffin.
So I'm now generally avoiding products, hardware and software designed and manufactured in the USA - not hard anyway considering the collapse in manufacturing there and outsourcing to China of most of the supply chain.
My recommendation for the last couple of years to clients has been to avoid Cisco and Juniper etc at the Internet gateway or areas with uncontrolled traffic and shove something else (preferably open source/IPTables based) there and review the rules very carefully. The recent news has just strengthened my view that you can't trust hardware where you can't arrange for an independent and public review of the code - IMO in general the threat of a public disclosure of a back door or designed-in weakness from a code review is sufficient to keep the vendor honest. The recent news has just reinforced my views.
Andy
or is there? (cue creepy music)
Table-ized A.I.
China is a known for theft, espionage, and sabotage and yet this generation doesn't believe that 'Red China' ever existed, nor that it still exists.
Wake up young and ignorant and listen to your elders as they have lived in reality, not just a computer generated game.
China has systematically stolen US technology including aeronautics and rocketry technology. This ban is completely appropriate. Unfortunately this is incidental fallout, but it was prompted by targeted Chinese spying.
We should kick all american scientist out of europe's science project, nay, the world's science project, since the NSA and America is spying on us and misusing it to favorize their own industrial firms.
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
... dumb-asses. Dr. Marcy's observation is typical in not getting it; it isn't about the conference content, it's about the location.
"Consensus" in science is _always_ a political construct.
Science is non political? thats all bs. I suppose all you have never heard of security. I don't mean Social Security but national security. The way I read his bill is to promote manufacturing in the US of A. To not have Chinese or Russian or pakastanini parts in a F-22 fighter, or in the litorial blue water network. How about American parts in American vessels, in government buildings, in government networks, etc.
Why? I thought you idiots were smart enough to know better. Never heard of a backdoor? Example, how about if you had a hellfire missle, one meant to take out a small target, like a tank on a battlefield, the missle guidance system uses chips, which are suppose the enemy was pakastan, who made the chips, and had a countermeasure for items using that chip, could use the countermeasure to avoid the incoming device? Who would win that battle?
But you science guys would never do that kind of stuff, would you? And you trust every other science guy to do the same? Never heard of peer review? Come now open those ears, open those eyes, it's today not some left over bit of pill you took yesterday.
China best represents the natural condition of man, namely collectivism and tyranny. It took millennia of blood, sweat, treasure and courage to carve out a realm of individualism and liberty which is best represented by the USA. This can be so easily undone. I take it that most of the readers here have ethanol metabolism issues which would indicate that they would choose collectivism and tyranny because it guarantees them things like food, clothing and shelter all because they were fortunate enough to have acquired plaques on the wall.
... what really need are laws keeping Congress out of science. Of course, government funding is needed, but in the area of administration Congress can't even keep their own house, (or their own House), in order.
When you consider how blatant China is in their theft of information and technology, why is this even being debated? Chinese nationals shouldn't be allowed near any government facility.
'In good conscience, I cannot attend a meeting that discriminates in this way'
Being scientific has not taught everyone the valuable lessons in life, like what our enemies would love to do to us with our own technology. That just doesn't make sense.
Well, the Reeps are creeps but this isn't so bad. Time to stop letting our research trickle away to China to be copied like everything else. And, no we're not broke, but thanks all the same!
If China would stop trying to steal technology from the U.S. then they would be welcome.
I'd say the two are tied together. The money was also in the U.S. because they encouraged domestic manufacturing, R&D, and other such jobs.
Nowadays the offshoring of jobs, the "screw R&D we'll just crank out the same stuff with slight updates, it's more profitable", and the terrible mess that is the U.S. patent system has had a huge detrimental effect on innovation. No innovation, no great new products. No great new products, and there's no reason to buy from the U.S. anymore since other countries produce better, cheaper goods.
Created a test, a test to weed out the bad politicians from the good ones. Not a test of political, historical, etc. knowledge but a test to determine purely whether that person is someone we truly want as a politician in terms of 'will he act the part of the people's representative or a stupid SOB with nothing to offer then his lust of greed and power and to further his/her own agenda and not that of the people'.
FFS I'm so sick of reading news like this, why can't it be happy news for once, you know the kind that would read 'NASA works with China to send people to the Moon and Mars' .. how fucking awesome would that sound like! But no we can't have that. It'll have to be news about 'NASA being forced to ban China from a meeting because politicians are bigots/racists towards others while the whole motherfucking world disagrees'.