Stanford University cybersecurity scholar Riana Pfefferkorn filed a motion Tuesday to unseal the warrants used to execute searches of IU professor Xiaofeng Wang and Nianli Ma’s homes last week. She filed the motion in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Indiana.
“In the absence of any more information, the mystery swirling around government raids of a Chinese immigrant academic’s homes has prompted speculation and rumor – which this Court is in a unique position to alleviate,” Pfefferkorn, who is a policy fellow for the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered AI, wrote in the motion.
Pfefferkorn argues the warrants should be released to honor principles of open access, citing the First Amendment.
She continues that unsealing the warrants would pose little harm to the case, as potential evidence would have already been removed from Wang and Ma’s homes in the search and specific details on other targets of the investigation could be redacted.
The FBI searched Ma and Wang’s homes in Carmel and Bloomington on Friday. Neither IU nor the FBI have commented on the reason for the search.
