Political Watch

[Angrboda]

The case involves a former Twitter employee, Ahmad Abouammo, who gave confidential information to Saudi Arabia in 2015 to help it crack down on dissidents. After sharing that information, Abouammo left his job at Twitter in San Francisco and moved to Seattle.

In 2018, FBI agents came to interview him at his house, and he produced a false document to mislead them about his culpability. He was later convicted of acting as a foreign agent, among other crimes, during a trial in San Francisco. Most of his convictions were not at issue in this case.

The question for the justices was whether he could also be convicted in San Francisco of an obstruction charge based on his falsification of a document in Seattle.

The justices unanimously agreed that the obstruction conviction was invalid, overruling lower courts. After all, the Constitution of 1789 required that defendants face trial “in the State where the said Crimes shall have been committed,” and the Bill of Rights added a requirement that the trial be in the same “district” as well.

As Justice Elena Kagan explained for the court, this wasn’t just a minor detail. “Venue in criminal cases mattered more than might be supposed to the Nation’s Founders,” she wrote. “Prior to the Revolution, Parliament enacted measures to try allegedly treasonous colonists in England, rather than in their home colonies. The legislation was so roundly despised as to make it into the Declaration of Independence.”

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/...secutions/

[Angrboda]

Trump’s Secret Police Spying on Americans? It’s Darker than We Knew.

But you can get a far more vivid picture of these undercover surveillance operations—and how brazenly they were conducted against American citizens—if you read deep into the court papers. The documents—which are attached as exhibits to a motion filed by lawyers for one of the protesters facing prosecution—include investigative reports that were transmitted by the undercover agents themselves about meetings they infiltrated.

It’s jarring, revealing stuff. The reports show that covert agents surreptitiously attended well over a dozen protest meetings organized by groups like the Sunrise Movement and various small socialist organizations. In some cases the agents secretly recorded the gatherings.

What’s more, in at least one case, an undercover agent may have tried to influence the conduct of meeting organizers. One report from an agent describes a meeting in late January of the Sunrise Movement at a Minneapolis public library. While spying on the proceedings, the agent seems to have learned that the organization’s intention was nonviolent: As the agent notes in his own investigative report, “it was made clear” at the meeting that the organization is “focused on peaceful protests.”

Yet after this discovery, the agent then approached a meeting organizer and made a surprising proposition. The agent told the organizer “he works in construction” and is willing to build things to assist “with more direct action protests,” the report reads, adding that the agent stressed “that going to jail did not bother him.”

That sounds like the agent may have signaled a willingness to engage in something illegal, to bait the group into moving in that direction, argues Kevin Riach, the lawyer for one of the protesters who is being prosecuted, Isaac Sant.

“This is an effort to entice someone who’s shown no inclination to commit a crime into committing one,” Riach told me. “What this tells us is that there wasn’t actual criminal activity to be investigated. They had to invent it. That’s not how this is supposed to work—not in this country, anyway.”

[BrianSoddingBoru4]

Sometimes, the spying is low-tech and local.

Florida Congressman Caught Rifling Through Homeowner’s Mail

Republican U.S. Rep. Randy Fine will not face federal charges after he was caught Sunday on a security camera peeking inside the porch mailbox of an Ormond Beach home and flipping through each letter, .

On the security video, Fine — wearing a red hat and blue shirt from his campaign — is seen walking into the front porch, ringing the doorbell, then looking around for a moment before opening the wall-mounted mailbox and rifling through individual letters.

The porch scene was first reported by the news website The Space Coast Rocket. Fine’s office later confirmed to TMZ that it was the congressman seen on the Ring camera video.

Boru

[Angrboda]

Who are these guys?

Just as a reminder, here’s the nickel tour: The Houthis started out in the 1990s as a religious movement in northern Yemen that became a motley group of Islamist fighters waging civil war against the government in the 2010s. They believe their power emanates from God. They declare death to America and Israel and “a curse upon the Jews.” Supplied by Iran, they battled a Saudi-led coalition until the United Nations brokered a fragile peace in Yemen in 2022. The following year, they started attacking shipping in the Red Sea.

Nicholas Kulish, who writes about technology and war, yesterday took note of the conventional image of them: “Men on the backs of pickup trucks, firing AK-47s into the desert air.”

But, Nicholas reports, they’re growing more sophisticated. A report from Anthropic last week suggested that people in northern Yemen — that’s a Houthi stronghold — had used the company’s A.I. assistant to “develop guided weapons,” specifically a multistage ballistic missile with a range of 1,200 miles. “The would-be weapons designers were careful to avoid the company’s safeguards,” Nicholas wrote, “hiding the true purpose of the guidance systems they were designing from the very system helping them design it.” That’s a long way from guys in sandals carrying long guns in the bed of a Toyota Hilux.

What do they want?

Vivian answered that question, too. “The Houthis describe themselves as the liberators and legitimate leaders of Yemen,” she told my colleague Katrin Bennhold. That pits them against Yemen’s Saudi-backed government. “They also want money, like access to Yemeni oil revenue and war reparations from Saudi Arabia, among other things. And they’re picking this moment to make a big push,” Vivian said.

How far that push is going to take them, and how effective their entrepreneurial battlefield tactics are going to be, remains an open question. The Houthi rebels have proved adept at battling far wealthier and more powerful actors — and forcing them to stand down.

Keep an eye on the Houthis, then. A former U.S. special envoy for Yemen was blunt about them last week. “They use every opportunity to build their capability, to test their capability, such that they are now the most lethal nonstate actor in the entire Middle East,” he said.

- New York Times