 The risks. Thank you. I'll turn it over to Ann. Thank you very much. I'm Director Ray. My name is Ann Lin. I'm the Lieberthal Rogel Professor of Chinese Studies here at the University of Michigan and an Associate Professor of Public Policy here at the Ford School. My question is about the FBI's role in investigations of Chinese-American faculty, university faculty, scientists. Several cases against Chinese scientists have gone to federal court in the last two years only to have juries find those defendants not guilty or federal judges dismiss many of the charges. Other ongoing cases have been dropped by prosecutors before going to trial. So advocates for these faculty would say that the failure to convict here is because the evidence was never very strong against them to begin with and they accused the FBI of presuming that routine academic engagement with scientific colleagues in China is evidence of a crime or of mistaking university-sponsored collaborations and grants for money that is illicitly going into scientists' pockets. Now, presumably, you would disagree. So what do advocates misunderstand about these cases or do you think that the evidence against these faculty has been stronger than juries and federal judges have found? Well, thank you for the question. I welcome the opportunity to talk about the topic because I think there are, to your point, I think there are a lot of misconceptions out there. And let me start with we base our cases on the facts and the law. And sometimes our cases are successful and sometimes they aren't. We do not, and this is very important, we do not base our cases on race, ethnicity, or national origin and we haven't. Now, let me add to that. It is the case that the Chinese government, the Chinese Communist Party, is engaged in what it considers an international talent war to try to leverage and steal intellectual property and sensitive research and data from countries all over the world, not just the United States. And we've seen that time and time again. And so as part of our responsibility to work with, underline, with universities to try to help protect that information, that's our responsibility. But one of the things that I think people often don't understand about our work in this area is that actually very little of it results in criminal prosecutions. It's an awful lot of what our folks are doing in this particular space on the China government threat in the academic setting is in partnership with universities on things like how do they improve their own safeguards to protect research? How do they ensure transparency about research and funding relationships a professor or visiting academic might have with a university back in China that may be affiliated with the Chinese government's military? So a lot of what we do is working with them in that setting. Sometimes there are, we also work with grant-making entities because an awful lot of this research is funded by the US taxpayer. And I think it's appropriate for universities and the US government to make sure that there's transparency with the university and the relevant grant-making agencies to understand what kind of relationships exist between the scholar and the Chinese government, which has, as I said, in response to a different question, a very different objective in the way it views the world, including suppression of human rights, including theft of intellectual property, including military dominance. Sometimes there are civil or administrative remedies that come out of it. Sometimes universities take action themselves because they conclude that it's a relationship that they take as consistent with their terms and their values. But then sometimes there are criminal cases. You mentioned some that we lost, some that we dropped. There, of course, have been quite a few that we won as well. And I respect the decisions of juries and judges that have found against us just as I trust others to respect the juries and judges that have found for us in those cases where it's gone the other way. And I would just make a point here, which is the fact that we sometimes lose cases actually speaks volumes about the integrity and independence of our justice system. I actually think it's a mark in our favor as a country that the government loses cases. I'd be willing to bet you that our counterparts over in China don't lose very many cases. And it ain't because they're better than we are. So there is a stark illustration of the differences between the two systems. And that brings me to another point since I'm speaking in a university setting, an awful lot of what the Chinese government is also engaged in in the academic arena threatens the very kind of academic freedom that I think you're rightly focused on in a different way. The same kind of repression that we see from the Chinese government back at home in mainland China is essentially an export into the United States. There was an example I could give you, although they're countless of them, from another university, another major university, also in the Midwest, where you had a student who was posting stuff about in favor of a tribute to the Tiananmen Square protesters who were killed. This is a Chinese-American student in an American university could have been sitting in a room just like this. Within 24 hours of him posting this stuff, the Chinese intelligence services back in China paid a visit to his parents, threatening them. So of course they called their son and like, dude, what are you doing? And so, and then there was a protest that was gonna be held to call attention to some of the repression that was occurring back in China and they had an online rehearsal, not unlike I'm sure some of the protests that some of you or your classmates may have been involved in. And within like hours, the Chinese intelligence services back in China knew what this Chinese-American student had been doing and they again paid a visit to his parents. So this is repression of academic freedom and speech here in the United States and the victims of it are Chinese-Americans or Chinese visitors and that's a point that I've been trying to make everywhere I talk about this threat. I wanna be crystal clear about this. This is a threat that's about the Chinese government and the Chinese Communist Party. It is not about the Chinese people and it sure as heck is not about Chinese-Americans. In many cases are at the top of the list as victims of the same kind of activity. We have countless cases now where you have the Chinese government essentially sending people over here to threaten, harass, stalk, blackmail, surveil Chinese dissidents who have been calling out the behavior of the Chinese government. And so we want to make sure as the FBI that we're helping those people protect themselves from that threat. We feel like that's part of our responsibility as well and it happens not just in the academic arena but in other spaces as well.