> He was served with a search warrant that was missing dozens of pages and gave no reason for the raid; the case records related to the warrant have been sealed, so there’s no way of telling what the point of the search was.
Can't you file a compliant against search warrants in the US? How are you supposed to file such a complaint if you don't even know what it's about?
The basic logic is nonsense, and scary, and quite authoritarian: Fight a bad warrant now and risk getting shot, or let them do potentially illegal things in your private space, take all your assets, and with a magical pile of money you have hidden away, fight it in court.
Someone has to fight it or this stuff will keep happening. If they get away with it they'll keep doing it. They're pushing the limits, and seeing how far they can go. It has to stop.
> Afroman is responding to a raid against him in his own way:
Because the courts never do anything to hold the government responsible unless there's political pressure. Lucky for him he's in a position to generate publicity and pressure without dying in a bulldozer.
I’m fine with this though. Area 51 is mostly for testing new military tech. Doubtful there is anything there with a strong public need to know. These are secrets they should be allowed to have and protect. Dudes hobby was publishing as much as possible about classified things… play stupid games win stupid prizes. If there was some public good served or some important need to know… sure that’s worth consideration. If it was some much more mundane “secret” or publishing something that should be free to know or had a significant public interest, sure.
But it’s not, it’s feeding off Area 51 conspiracies for funzies and well I’m not so upset if that gets your raided by the FBI.
If you don’t want to legitimize and strengthen these over the top responses, don’t test the exact boundaries of things which are pretty defensibly legitimate. (Like details about a classified aircraft test facility)
Not a lawyer, but actually if you read up a lot of the legal analysis and court documents surrounding the FBI search of Mar a Lago and subsequent appeals by Mr Trump to request his stuff back and to stymie any investigations.. the list of things Trump’s lawyers were unable to prove or failed to do (enumerated rather effectively in the final appeal court ruling on the Special Master case [1]) lays out basically what legal recourse a person actually does have to object to a search (which is approved by a court, so generally presumptively legal). Which is not much - the FBI is allowed to pursue investigations, and presumably they are still doing that. This was fairly recent. He’s only really going to be in a position to complain about not getting his stuff back if they conclude their investigation without charging him and still don’t hand it back.
But still, the analysis in the Mar a Lago case of the ‘Richey’ factors seems like it maybe could be argued that this guy has some merits to asking for his stuff back in precisely the ways the Trump case lacked (disregard for constitutional rights, with respect to his first amendment speech in particular; pressing need for access to the seized property, as demonstrated by his mention of tax records etc.; lack of a remedy at law, given that he hasn’t been given notice of any pending charges and is missing part of the warrant, etc). So maybe he has a case.
Whether he has the money to make that case is a different matter.
I think he's hinting at government overstepping its boundary to intimidate private citizens for something that (may or may not) isn't illegal but unsavory to those in power.
It's clearly illegal to steal and receiving and transporting stolen goods is likewise illegal. The individuals behind the theft have already pled guilty and their guilty pleas tell a sordid story of Veritas paying them to move goods they knew were stolen and soliciting them to acquire further items.
He will likely only escape prosecution because he has plenty of money to fight it and the fig leaf of journalism to hide behind.
Stolen goods that just happened to be a diary in which the daughter of the current US president claims he took inappropriate showers with her when she was a child.
Evidence is only as trustworthy as its chain of custody. In this case the chain of custody flows through 2 convicted thieves who stole the goods to an inveterate liar who financed the crime. If it said water made things wet I'd have to check.
>Stolen goods that just happened to be a diary in which the daughter of the current US president claims he took inappropriate showers with her when she was a child.
Edit: I'll also highlight that I'm trying to find any verifiable proof of this claim via other sources and am coming up empty-handed. Tucker Carlson said it on FOX, and Daily Mail repeated his own report, but at no point is the page of the diary that contains that content ever actually displayed - it's literally just "Tucker Carlson said so", and I think that any reasonable person on either side of the political spectrum would know enough about Carlson to know that you can't just take him at his word with something like that. There does not seem to be verifiable proof of the existence of what you're referring to. Do you have something a bit more concrete to support your claim?
The quote about Ashley Biden being afraid is in fact fabricated, as far as I can tell. But that seems par for the course for Snopes, to debunk a related claim and completely ignore the primary claim. Here's a photo from the actual diary: https://preview.redd.it/4esvp92f60y71.png?width=385&format=p...
Allegations of a fake diary would very well lead to real raid. Attempting to solicit crime even if crime didn't happen would be you guessed it ... a crime.
Lastly and most relevantly the diary being real in no way validates information received by unreliable sources about the contents of what they stole. A strategy older than civilization is to mix truth and lies.
Is any of that something I really had to tell you?
Was he flying his drone over restricted airspace? If he's potentially declassifying top secret military information, he should have known this was coming.
He states that the raid was likely related to photos but denies that the photos were taken inside the base.
> According to Hellow, an agent present at the Vegas raid told her: “Your boyfriend took pictures of a military installation—that’s against the law.” In a blog post on Dreamland, Arnu similarly said that all he was told about the investigation was that it was “related to images posted on my Area 51 website.”
> Taking an unauthorized picture of a defense installation (such as a military base) is a federal misdemeanor offense—on par with hunting or fishing in a wildlife refuge. It carries with it a punishment of a $1,000 fine and up to a year in jail.
> However, Arnu maintains that he never broke the law and that the government’s case against him—whatever it is—has zero merit. “I had some photos [on my website] of Area 51 that were about two years old,” said Arnu, which he believes were the reason for the raid. “They were legally obtained. There’s absolutely nothing illegal about them,” he said. “Most of these photos were not taken by me, I just published them [on the site].” He adds that they were “not classified photos” and that they “were not taken from inside the boundary”—that is, the area inside the perimeter of the base that is off-limits to civilians. Arnu says the photos had already been widely circulated on other news websites and TV shows, making it inexplicable why the government would target him and him alone.
> Taking an unauthorized picture of a defense installation (such as a military base) is a federal misdemeanor offense
But what if it isn't? The oft-cited law doesn't actually forbid taking photos, rather their improper publication or distribution. The cops stretch "whoever reproduces" to include the taking and saving of a picture onto a memory card, but that is a huge stretch that hasn't properly been hashed out by the courts. Simply seeing something and photographing or sketching it, if standing in a public space, is very likely not a federal crime.
"...whoever reproduces, publishes, sells, or gives away any photograph, sketch, picture, drawing, map, or graphical representation of the vital military or naval installations or equipment so defined, without first obtaining permission of the commanding officer..."
I tried driving around area51 and trying to find the actual place, you have to go on foot over some rough terrain before you can even see it unless you have really good offroad tires and somehow the unmarked pickups with guys holding automatic guns don't stop you.
But what struck me as remarkable was how everyone from randos helping with broken down car to people in restaurants and starbucks near by kept asking if I was trying to take pictures or spying or whatever. No one assumed I was looking for aliens, they were concerned if I might be a russian or chinese spy.
> Google Earth’s imagery isn’t blurred (surprisingly!) - though how manipulated it might be is anyone’s guess.
It doesn't need to be blurred or manipulated, all that's needed to preserve the secrecy there is to only use the photos where the planes are inside the hangars.
There was a cartoon towards the end of WWII (Bugs Bunny?). It was pure propaganda but depicted a bomb powerful enough to destroy an entire island. The creators got a visit from the men in black. Clearly, they were being investigated for possible Manhattan Project leaks. But the investigators wouldn't even have know about nuclear weapons. All they know is that someone put out a film that was eerily similar to something secret. They would simply be told "go find out who they talk to and where they got the idea". Today that would be "grab his computer before he deletes anything".
My point: If you make up stories, occasionally they might coincide with reality. The people tasked with protecting secrets cannot tell the difference. The only issue here imho is the violence of the raid, but that is part of the larger problems surrounding all police actions. What in WWII was a polite knock on the door, today is a swat team driving a tank though your living room.
Both the cartoon and the novel are satirical, but I think you are probably referring to how accurate the cartoon was to how The Plan was first revealed to the protagonists in the novel.
Similarly, Tom Clancy was questioned by the FBI after ‘Hunt for Red October’ was released because of the technical details within the book were eerily close to classified info at the time.
Funny story about the resulting film: The navy so loved the book that the film was given total military support. Access to submarines, b-roll footage ... they hoped it would be TopGun for the rest of the USN. But then came Crimson Tide (1995). Mutiny on a Russian nuclear submarine? Fine. Mutiny on a US nuclear submarine? No.
I'd argue it's not a true action flick - it's really a spy thriller in disguise. Great flick though! "One ping..." Spy Games is another underrated espionage thriller.
If you learn British English as a second language, that’s the accent you have. Apparently most of the non-star actors playing Soviets were Eastern European/Russian so it would make sense that they didn’t have American accents.
As you progress though your accent becomes more English and less your first language. If they're learning in the American sphere, you don't notice the second accent, if they're not...
I really like running across a person developing an American Southern accent with their English learning.
> If you learn British English as a second language, that’s the accent you have.
Depends what you learn from. If you learn English from the British then sure. As you might in Europe.
But if you learn from Americans, or even from American TV, well, that's what you'll learn.
There's no one "British" accent though, people learning English in a region of England or Scotland do and should pick up the local accent. What works is correct, speaking like a local is what works.
There was a documentary on Discovery Channel some 10 years ago which analysed the link between Hollywood and the US army. If the army liked the script ( heroes, only enemies bad, other propaganda) they will supply military equipment for free. If not, good luck elsewhere.
> Similarly, Tom Clancy was questioned by the FBI after ‘Hunt for Red October’ was released because of the technical details within the book were eerily close to classified info at the time.
I believe if you independently create a design for an atomic bomb, the government takes the position that it's automatically classified and you cannot distribute it, even if you have no connection to the government or already-classified information.
Clancy performed a mountain of research and a lot of interviews to prepare his work. The details were not "eerily close," they were more or leas accurate. HfRO is not at all similar to a coincidental Bugs Bunny cartoon.
Interesting. One could create blog posts with hypothetical military plans/devices from different locations and test which locations get raided. Sort of military a/b testing
It will happen this way. You may be walking. Maybe the first sunny day of the spring. And a car will slow beside you, and a door will open, and someone you know, maybe even trust, will get out of the car. And he will smile, a becoming smile. But he will leave open the door of the car and offer to give you a lift.
I was going to respond with the story about how British WW2 intelligence were alarmed to find code words for the D-Day operation showing up as answers in a newspaper crossword puzzle, quite coincidentally.
But then I read that story again and it was not nearly so coincidental as was reported back in the day when I first heard about it. It's actually an interesting lesson in opsec. The compiler was physically close to soldiers preparing for the operation, and his pupils were filling in the grid with names they were hearing on the streets. So not really coincidental at all.
>The only issue here imho is the violence of the raid, but that is part of the larger problems surrounding all police actions.
It is also an issue that this man's possessions have been seized without due process or any sort of explanation. He has not been indicted, let alone convicted of a crime, yet the government violently broke into his home and stole all of his computers and electronic possessions, including his private, sensitive medical and financial information. The idea that some secret judge can sign some secret warrant and a gang of armed men can break into your home, assault you, and steal your possessions without any recourse available to you should be incredibly chilling to everyone who believes in due process and a free society in general.
> The idea that some secret judge can sign some secret warrant and a gang of armed men can break into your home, assault you, and steal your possessions without any recourse available to you should be incredibly chilling to everyone who believes in due process and a free society in general.
Maybe you don't live in a democracy, but in a democracy they call it "collecting evidence".
The advantage of this method is that, even if they find nothing about your presumed crime, they might find things which might incriminate you for something else, or just plant evidence.
Totally agree. I'm not arguing we throw away the Bill of Rights. I like your other point, it will always be difficult to balance those rights while protecting military/security interests. It will always be touchy.
It's one thing to go to your city/county police/government and complain loudly about rights violations, provoke confrontation, etc. This is where due process matters most in my opinion, general rule of law and due process in day to day life.
It's another thing to provoke military and national security apparatus and assume you'll get the same basic response from law enforcement.
I think any wise adult would know its a touchy area, best to steer clear unless you have a good reason to provoke. The people that do so are usually (not always) spies or combative/mental/tinfoil hat people with some sort of imagined axe to grind. Fuck around and find out. Better them finding out than me.
You should definitely not wear a short skirt while provoking the military and national security apparatus.
I mean, yeah, it may be no surprise what happens to you, and maybe you want to not do it, but when you say "fuck around and find out", you are excusing them.
What I'm saying is that national security is serious business, America has real enemies, and people seem to forget that and just shout "rights". I mean, if I was an enemy agent I would absolutely take advantage of due process rights afforded here to blur the line between espionage related activities and civil freedoms. It's an attack vector that's easy to exploit in freedom loving countries, one the feds and spooks pay close attention to.
If you go poking around a restricted base, taking photos, flying drones, don't be surprised when men in black start showing up in your life and making things difficult. I mean, is he purposely trying to make it look like he could be a foreign intelligence agent? I don't see how he can act surprised when they knocked down his door.
> but when you say "fuck around and find out", you are excusing them
No, it's more like I'm not excusing Arnu. His actions created this sticky situation. It was totally avoidable.
From the article:
> the hobbyist researcher says that America’s UFO mythology is little more than a smokescreen to hide the much more mundane reality of what goes on at Area 51: the testing of classified military projects and aircraft.
OK so he openly admits that the classified stuff is why he's so interested in Area 51.
> Most of these photos were not taken by me, I just published them
"Not my fault"... really?
> He adds that they were “not classified photos” and that they “were not taken from inside the boundary
Yeah he's a genius and is confident he will get off on a technicality
> One of the first things they wanted to know was: “Are there any booby traps on the property?” To Arnu, it seemed like a pretty weird thing to ask.
Sounds like this guy was purposely digging for dirt, got right up to the line, then acted surprised when the national security apparatus responded.
> Of course, Arnu had one particular hobby that he felt might be of interest to federal investigators: he had spent the last two decades tending to a popular blog about “Area 51
Hmmm... yeah maybe that's what this is all about. SMH
I don't have sympathy for the guy in the article. He's an instigator. And an idiot. Play stupid games win stupid prizes.
There are much bigger violations of due process in this country worth paying attention to.
This is not a military autocracy. Neither the military nor law enforcement should have any special privileges with regards to violating the law or the established rights of the citizens. Too many supposedly intelligent people have given up on the fight to keep "the law" within the bounds of the law, and it's escaped those bounds like kudzu.
>But national security is a completely different world than regular law enforcement. To me this situation just screams "fuck around and find out"
Only in a police state. In a free society governed by laws, it doesn't matter why the government claims it needs to do something. Your Constitutional rights are sancrosanct. If the government can simply ignore your rights, the law and the Constitution by simply saying "national security", then in reality you have no rights, there is no law and the Constitution is meaningless.
He posted a very high res photograph of the base on his blog, I saw it on Reddit and I'm sure its floating around still. Basically taking aerial reconnaissance photographs of an active military base, not hard to understand why he got raided.
Sure but typically raids like that require breaking a serious law. Otherwise there's serious chilling effect for anyone documenting gov when there's a threat of no-knock raids by federal agents.
> Taking an unauthorized picture of a defense installation (such as a military base) is a federal misdemeanor offense—on par with hunting or fishing in a wildlife refuge. It carries with it a punishment of a $1,000 fine and up to a year in jail.
If he was getting a little too invasive then why not warn him first or charge him for the above?
I'm guessing he posted some public images pushing the limits, pissed off the feds who wanted more than a small fine, and they built up some narrative about spying which they sold to a judge for a warrant. Then they didn't find any evidence they were fishing for and left the case open.
Which is not illegal. If I take a very high res picture of your house from the street, that’s not illegal either, although you probably wouldn’t like it
You’re implying he used his drone (which he mentions in the list of confiscated stuff) to fly over Area 51 and take aerial photos which he then put on his blog ?
He denies that he was the one who took the photos in question …
85 comments
[ 4.2 ms ] story [ 146 ms ] threadCan't you file a compliant against search warrants in the US? How are you supposed to file such a complaint if you don't even know what it's about?
Will You Help Me Repair My Door?
https://youtu.be/oponIfu5L3Y
Why You Disconnecting My Video Camera?
https://youtu.be/ISe3IVBBbyU
Because the courts never do anything to hold the government responsible unless there's political pressure. Lucky for him he's in a position to generate publicity and pressure without dying in a bulldozer.
https://youtu.be/p6kKKsXbJcM
But it’s not, it’s feeding off Area 51 conspiracies for funzies and well I’m not so upset if that gets your raided by the FBI.
If you don’t want to legitimize and strengthen these over the top responses, don’t test the exact boundaries of things which are pretty defensibly legitimate. (Like details about a classified aircraft test facility)
(People vs Larry Flint)
But still, the analysis in the Mar a Lago case of the ‘Richey’ factors seems like it maybe could be argued that this guy has some merits to asking for his stuff back in precisely the ways the Trump case lacked (disregard for constitutional rights, with respect to his first amendment speech in particular; pressing need for access to the seized property, as demonstrated by his mention of tax records etc.; lack of a remedy at law, given that he hasn’t been given notice of any pending charges and is missing part of the warrant, etc). So maybe he has a case.
Whether he has the money to make that case is a different matter.
[1] https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/23323316-11thcircuit
He will likely only escape prosecution because he has plenty of money to fight it and the fig leaf of journalism to hide behind.
https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/ashley-biden-diary-afraid/
Edit: I'll also highlight that I'm trying to find any verifiable proof of this claim via other sources and am coming up empty-handed. Tucker Carlson said it on FOX, and Daily Mail repeated his own report, but at no point is the page of the diary that contains that content ever actually displayed - it's literally just "Tucker Carlson said so", and I think that any reasonable person on either side of the political spectrum would know enough about Carlson to know that you can't just take him at his word with something like that. There does not seem to be verifiable proof of the existence of what you're referring to. Do you have something a bit more concrete to support your claim?
Lastly and most relevantly the diary being real in no way validates information received by unreliable sources about the contents of what they stole. A strategy older than civilization is to mix truth and lies.
Is any of that something I really had to tell you?
> According to Hellow, an agent present at the Vegas raid told her: “Your boyfriend took pictures of a military installation—that’s against the law.” In a blog post on Dreamland, Arnu similarly said that all he was told about the investigation was that it was “related to images posted on my Area 51 website.”
> Taking an unauthorized picture of a defense installation (such as a military base) is a federal misdemeanor offense—on par with hunting or fishing in a wildlife refuge. It carries with it a punishment of a $1,000 fine and up to a year in jail.
> However, Arnu maintains that he never broke the law and that the government’s case against him—whatever it is—has zero merit. “I had some photos [on my website] of Area 51 that were about two years old,” said Arnu, which he believes were the reason for the raid. “They were legally obtained. There’s absolutely nothing illegal about them,” he said. “Most of these photos were not taken by me, I just published them [on the site].” He adds that they were “not classified photos” and that they “were not taken from inside the boundary”—that is, the area inside the perimeter of the base that is off-limits to civilians. Arnu says the photos had already been widely circulated on other news websites and TV shows, making it inexplicable why the government would target him and him alone.
But what if it isn't? The oft-cited law doesn't actually forbid taking photos, rather their improper publication or distribution. The cops stretch "whoever reproduces" to include the taking and saving of a picture onto a memory card, but that is a huge stretch that hasn't properly been hashed out by the courts. Simply seeing something and photographing or sketching it, if standing in a public space, is very likely not a federal crime.
"...whoever reproduces, publishes, sells, or gives away any photograph, sketch, picture, drawing, map, or graphical representation of the vital military or naval installations or equipment so defined, without first obtaining permission of the commanding officer..."
https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/797
Those are pretty squirrely words when you're flying a drone outside the fence but 1000' up.
But what struck me as remarkable was how everyone from randos helping with broken down car to people in restaurants and starbucks near by kept asking if I was trying to take pictures or spying or whatever. No one assumed I was looking for aliens, they were concerned if I might be a russian or chinese spy.
Watching Area51Rider’s YouTube channel might satisfy readers desire to wander about near the border, though.
It doesn't need to be blurred or manipulated, all that's needed to preserve the secrecy there is to only use the photos where the planes are inside the hangars.
My point: If you make up stories, occasionally they might coincide with reality. The people tasked with protecting secrets cannot tell the difference. The only issue here imho is the violence of the raid, but that is part of the larger problems surrounding all police actions. What in WWII was a polite knock on the door, today is a swat team driving a tank though your living room.
I see what you did there ...
That doesnt seem to hold true for the ESL accents almost anywhere in the world, though. Most people's accents sound like their native tongue.
I really like running across a person developing an American Southern accent with their English learning.
Depends what you learn from. If you learn English from the British then sure. As you might in Europe.
But if you learn from Americans, or even from American TV, well, that's what you'll learn.
There's no one "British" accent though, people learning English in a region of England or Scotland do and should pick up the local accent. What works is correct, speaking like a local is what works.
I believe if you independently create a design for an atomic bomb, the government takes the position that it's automatically classified and you cannot distribute it, even if you have no connection to the government or already-classified information.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Born_secret
But then I read that story again and it was not nearly so coincidental as was reported back in the day when I first heard about it. It's actually an interesting lesson in opsec. The compiler was physically close to soldiers preparing for the operation, and his pupils were filling in the grid with names they were hearing on the streets. So not really coincidental at all.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D-Day_Daily_Telegraph_crosswor...
It is also an issue that this man's possessions have been seized without due process or any sort of explanation. He has not been indicted, let alone convicted of a crime, yet the government violently broke into his home and stole all of his computers and electronic possessions, including his private, sensitive medical and financial information. The idea that some secret judge can sign some secret warrant and a gang of armed men can break into your home, assault you, and steal your possessions without any recourse available to you should be incredibly chilling to everyone who believes in due process and a free society in general.
Maybe you don't live in a democracy, but in a democracy they call it "collecting evidence". The advantage of this method is that, even if they find nothing about your presumed crime, they might find things which might incriminate you for something else, or just plant evidence.
But national security is a completely different world than regular law enforcement. To me this situation just screams "fuck around and find out"
I prefer that sentiment over:
It is probably difficult to have a Bill of Rights in a country that needs to do clandestine military aircraft research.
It's one thing to go to your city/county police/government and complain loudly about rights violations, provoke confrontation, etc. This is where due process matters most in my opinion, general rule of law and due process in day to day life.
It's another thing to provoke military and national security apparatus and assume you'll get the same basic response from law enforcement.
I think any wise adult would know its a touchy area, best to steer clear unless you have a good reason to provoke. The people that do so are usually (not always) spies or combative/mental/tinfoil hat people with some sort of imagined axe to grind. Fuck around and find out. Better them finding out than me.
I mean, yeah, it may be no surprise what happens to you, and maybe you want to not do it, but when you say "fuck around and find out", you are excusing them.
If you go poking around a restricted base, taking photos, flying drones, don't be surprised when men in black start showing up in your life and making things difficult. I mean, is he purposely trying to make it look like he could be a foreign intelligence agent? I don't see how he can act surprised when they knocked down his door.
> but when you say "fuck around and find out", you are excusing them
No, it's more like I'm not excusing Arnu. His actions created this sticky situation. It was totally avoidable.
From the article:
> the hobbyist researcher says that America’s UFO mythology is little more than a smokescreen to hide the much more mundane reality of what goes on at Area 51: the testing of classified military projects and aircraft.
OK so he openly admits that the classified stuff is why he's so interested in Area 51.
> Most of these photos were not taken by me, I just published them
"Not my fault"... really?
> He adds that they were “not classified photos” and that they “were not taken from inside the boundary
Yeah he's a genius and is confident he will get off on a technicality
> One of the first things they wanted to know was: “Are there any booby traps on the property?” To Arnu, it seemed like a pretty weird thing to ask.
Sounds like this guy was purposely digging for dirt, got right up to the line, then acted surprised when the national security apparatus responded.
> Of course, Arnu had one particular hobby that he felt might be of interest to federal investigators: he had spent the last two decades tending to a popular blog about “Area 51
Hmmm... yeah maybe that's what this is all about. SMH
I don't have sympathy for the guy in the article. He's an instigator. And an idiot. Play stupid games win stupid prizes.
There are much bigger violations of due process in this country worth paying attention to.
This is not a military autocracy. Neither the military nor law enforcement should have any special privileges with regards to violating the law or the established rights of the citizens. Too many supposedly intelligent people have given up on the fight to keep "the law" within the bounds of the law, and it's escaped those bounds like kudzu.
Only in a police state. In a free society governed by laws, it doesn't matter why the government claims it needs to do something. Your Constitutional rights are sancrosanct. If the government can simply ignore your rights, the law and the Constitution by simply saying "national security", then in reality you have no rights, there is no law and the Constitution is meaningless.
> Taking an unauthorized picture of a defense installation (such as a military base) is a federal misdemeanor offense—on par with hunting or fishing in a wildlife refuge. It carries with it a punishment of a $1,000 fine and up to a year in jail.
If he was getting a little too invasive then why not warn him first or charge him for the above?
I'm guessing he posted some public images pushing the limits, pissed off the feds who wanted more than a small fine, and they built up some narrative about spying which they sold to a judge for a warrant. Then they didn't find any evidence they were fishing for and left the case open.
IANAL, but perhaps one could give some insight into 18 USC 795 and 18 USC 797.
He denies that he was the one who took the photos in question …
Usually, self reporting of innocence isn't given much weight. Perhaps that's what they were trying to verify?
things was different then