Comment by tptacek
3 days ago
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.
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.
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.
You can beat the rap, but you can't beat the ride, and as outright fascism flourishes, you might not even manage the former. When you spend years in an ICE gulag because your speech crosses some nebulous line, it will matter very little what legal rights you think you have.
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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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