On April 1, U.S. District Judge Barclay Surrick threw out a lawsuit that was brought by the ACLU on behalf of Xi Xiaoxing that claimed that the FBI wrongly accused him of espionage.
Xi is a Chinese-born, naturalized American citizen who is a physics professor at Temple University. He lives in Penn Valley.
According to a 2017 ACLU press release, “In May 2015, FBI agents came into Xi’s house with guns drawn and led him away in handcuffs in front of his wife and daughters. The government accused Xi of sharing information about a superconductor device known as a “pocket heater,” relying on email exchanges between Xi and scientific colleagues in China that the FBI had obtained. The government claimed that those communications violated a legal agreement Xi had signed with the company that owned the pocket heater in which he had agreed not to share the technology.
The intercepted emails, however, were not about the pocket heater, but concerned a different kind of superconductor technology that has been public for years. In September 2015, prosecutors were forced to drop the charges. But the damage to Xi and his family was already significant. As a result of the charges, Xi was placed on administrative leave, suspended from his position as the interim chair of the Temple Physics Department, denied access to his lab and the graduate students working under his supervision, and had to pay substantial legal fees to defend himself.”
U.S. District Judge Barclay Surrick said Xi’s claims involved judgments and decisions about the investigation and prosecution that are matters of discretion, and that his constitutional rights were not violated.
“What happened to Xi and his family is very unfortunate,” Surrick wrote. “Nevertheless, it is the obligation of this court to simply apply the law as it presently exists to the facts.”