Klippenstein. He's counting on you not looking up the elements of a FARA violation charge. You can't accidentally violate FARA simply by opposing AI; you have to literally be an agent of (that is, under the direction of) China, and a felony violation has to be willful.

The DOJ announcement is surely in supremely bad faith, as is everything else in Trump's DOJ. But this kind of breathless response is exactly what they're hoping for by publishing this stuff.

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nixon_why69 3 hours ago | parent [-]

You're right that there is supposed to be a legal bar for being "directed by" a foreign government, but would you want to gamble on the jury pool setting the bar that high?

Look at the hacker news comment section any time China comes up, and then consider that the average American is considerably less sophisticated.

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tptacek 2 hours ago | parent [-]

Yeah, if I'd had no knowing contact with elements of the government of China, I'd take that bet every day of the week and twice on Sundays. I don't even think it'd get to a jury.

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nixon_why69 2 hours ago | parent [-]

Ok, that covers you, but there are 100M party members, any Chinese-descended or Chinese-married person in the US probably has a connection to a party member.

"Have you, now or in the past, had contact with a member of Chinese Communist Party?" sounds really scary compared to "Is your uncle a mid-tier director at Huawei?" even though they're describing the same fact.

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tptacek 2 hours ago | parent [-]

If you want to formulate a bank-shot argument about how this preys on people of Chinese ancestry, I'm fine with that. All I'm here to say is that you can't plausibly be charged with a FARA violation simply for arguing or protesting for a policy position that China happens to want you to take; the DOJ bears the burden of proving that you knew you were coordinating with China, directly, and, if it's a felony, willfully (that, is, voluntarily, deliberately, with a purpose to break the law).

Read Klippenstein's piece again. Does he want you to know this?

	▲	nixon_why69 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		You can't plausibly be arrested by ICE if you're in the US legally, in theory, but look where we are. I'm afraid that a paranoid, worst-case, bad faith assumption isn't something we can handwave away anymore.