YHK - yet another hacker news clone

US Customs supervisor busted for stealing hardware from Homeland Security PCs

23 points Levitating 54 minutes ago 13 comments

like_any_other 37 minutes ago | parent

The source said Liu was apprehended at Bangor International Airport (BIA) trying to catch a flight back to China, though the court records do not confirm the nature of his apprehension. - https://www.themainewire.com/2026/09/chinese-national-accuse...

Oddly the Tom's Hardware article, authored by "Zhiye Liu", omits this. But it's not really relevant - I'm sure there are lots of people with names like "Steve Robinson" or "John Wayne" in supervisory roles at China's CBP-equivalent, and staffing their news media.

Sarkie 29 minutes ago | parent

"But it's not really relevant" correct

earth-tattoo 19 minutes ago | parent

Bleeding heart self hating white liberals will not understand. It's time to put real Americans in all critical jobs.

walrus01 29 minutes ago | parent

If you've ever driven through the land crossing border in either direction at Calais, Maine (and St. Stephen, NB), they're both really tiny and sleepy places. It's astonishing to think that he wouldn't get caught. Like, you cripple the PCs of a place where your colleagues use them on a day to day basis and think nobody is going to notice? Real genius move there, bud.

pushcx 28 minutes ago | parent

Many years ago, I arrived to my half-height cubicle at a Fortune 100 company to see that my desktop PC case was ajar. I set the CRT aside, opened it, and realized that the RAM had been removed. My neighbor explained what must have happened: another employee must have needed to double their RAM from 8 to 16 MB. Requisitioning an upgrade was a weeks-long bureaucratic process that required approval by one's manager and IT, perhaps prompting a review of per-team resource allocation. Repairing a broken PC was a trivial help desk ticket; my PC was restored in an hour or two.

walrus01 13 minutes ago | parent

Reminds me of the kids in my high school who stole individual 4MB 72-pin SIMMs out of a bunch of computer lab desktop PCs to upgrade their approximately equivalent generation motherboard/CPU home systems to whatever was their max capacity, in an era when a 16MB RAM desktop PC was a high performer. Shortly after all the PCs got locks on them.

geetee 23 minutes ago | parent

Why in the world is U.S. Customs and Border Protection hiring foreign nationals?

walrus01 18 minutes ago | parent

I'm fairly sure you need to at least be a Permanent Resident to get hired, which makes you a US Person (it's a distinct legal definition). Permanent residents are also able to join the military and have been able to do so for a long time. There's enough of them that during the peak of the Iraq War they even held in-country citizenship ceremonies at major bases for people who had filed and completed their citizenship paperwork.

jeffbee 16 minutes ago | parent

For the same reason that foreign nationals can join the military, including the Coast Guard that has an overlapping mission: it's a nation of immigrants and for centuries until very recently most Americans readily recognized the value and necessity of recruiting foreign people into various posts.

like_any_other 12 minutes ago | parent

> for centuries until very recently most Americans readily recognized the value and necessity of recruiting foreign people into various posts.

You forgot to mention that, for those centuries, US immigration was effectively whites-only, until the 1965 Hart-Celler act (that politicians promised wouldn't change this!): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hart-Celler_Act