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Drone photographer pleads guilty to Espionage Act charges


The grad student, a Chinese national, was arrested in January.

Fengyun Shi, a Chinese citizen and graduate student at the University of Minnesota, was arrested in January after a drone he was flying got stuck in a tree in Newport News, Virginia. It appears to be, national security law expert Emily Berman previously told me, the first known prosecution under a WWII-era statute banning the use of aircraft to photograph sensitive military sites. I previously spoke to a colleague from the University of Minnesota who was surprised to learn that Shi was even still in the US, adding that he’d effectively abandoned his studies months prior to his arrest.

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