Technically these particular criminals — oddly, these days, defined as anyone doing anything that displeases a convicted fraud and rapist — don’t want to be aerosolized.

We can't gas enemy soldiers, it's war crime, it's a reason for invading foreign countries... but our own people? No problems.

After this I kinda see why some protesters started wearing the silliest outfits possible.

But man oh man going after anyone with means who tries to help people who the government decides looks like an illegal immigrant is hell of an escalation. Can't have people keeping government accountable.

By way of a more relatable analogy, imagine if some prominent HN'er were indicted for writing HN comments promoting $(some security or privacy tool), in broad generalities. In this analogy, a perfectly legal software tool, one which other HN'ers use all the time to protect themselves. Indicted, on the theory that posting about it to HN meant that they've materially helped $(some terrorist group or whatever) in their secure communications.

Imagine, in this analogy: that they've expressed no criminal intent of any sort; that the indictment had the shape of a purely conjectural, "But perhaps they meant to support terrorists?"

A person who's broken no explicit laws, nor expressed desire to commit or aid crime, being criminally prosecuted for a hypothetical.

Popehat is right to condemn his former coworkers in the federal prosecutors' office. This is Kafkaesque.

Not making any comments on this specific case, it may well be total authoritarian garbage. But Popehat is not a reliable commentator. The specific point is "The U.S. Attorney’s Office has charged Orellana with conspiracy to commit civil disorder." The bizarre thing about conspiracy is that, well, I'll quote ... Popehat:

This has led to much comment and confusion. Some of it is contrived and in bad faith, some of it reflects honest concern or confusion. The thrust of it is this: wait, some of the acts on that list aren’t crimes, are they? And aren’t some of them speech protected by the First Amendment?

Political theater and propaganda aside, there are some reasonable questions here: how can a tweet (like act 101) or statements at a press conference (Act 3) be a crime?

The answer is that they’re not crimes — or, at least, that’s not what the indictment claims. They’re overt acts. ...

So you can think of an overt act as a sort of evidentiary requirement, and overt acts as evidence of a criminal conspiracy, not as the crime themselves. These days the custom is for prosecutors to use the overt act requirement to tell the story of the case at length in the indictment. Prosecutors also use it as a gambit to make it more likely that evidence will be admitted at trial (it’s a strong case to admit evidence of something if you’ve called it out as an overt act), and often try to connect every defendant to an overt act, even though that’s not a requirement, just so the defendant can’t say at trial “look, I didn’t even commit an overt act.”

Once you view overt acts as a sort of evidence, it’s easier to see why they don’t have to be crimes themselves, and why they can even be acts that would otherwise be not only legal but protected speech.

Of course like a true principled defender of liberty, Popehat only explains this stuff to his audience when the defendants are people he considers unsympathetic.

https://www.popehat.com/p/overt-acts-and-predicate-acts-expl...

The charges were dropped not too long after this piece was written. It sounded unwarranted and it appears that it was decided to be unwarranted.