The USA's Department of Justice press release starts innocuously enough: "25th April LOS ANGELES – Serbian law enforcement authorities have arrested two foreign nationals, Cui Guanghai, 43, of China, and John Miller, 63, of the United Kingdom, at the request of the United States, the Justice Department announced today."

(we aren't late, by the way, the DOJ's mailing list only delivered this release to us today, a week after it was issued).

The story goes like this (sprinke "allegedly" liberally as you read). Someone who the DoJ has been careful not to name but calls "the victim" decided that Xi's trips to the USA were not to his liking. Cui and Miller decided that his protests were inappropriate and that they should do something about it.  

Beginning in October 2023, Cui and Miller enlisted two individuals (Individual 1 and Individual 2) inside the United States to carry out a plot to prevent the victim from protesting against President Xi’s appearance at the Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) summit in November 2023. The victim had previously made public statements in opposition to the policies and actions of the PRC government and President Xi.

What Cui and Miller didn't know was that Individual 1 and Individual 2 were affiliated with and acting at the direction of the FBI.

In the weeks leading up to the APEC summit, Cui and Miller directed and coordinated an interstate scheme to mount surveillance on the victim, to install a tracking device on the victim’s car, to slash the tyres on the victim’s car and to purchase and destroy a pair of artistic statutes created by the victim depicting President Xi and President Xi’s wife.

No one seems to have noticed that if they bought the statues and destroyed them, they were destroying their own property and the victim suffered no monetary loss.

A similar scheme took place in the spring of 2025, after the victim announced that he planned to make public an online video feed depicting two new artistic statutes of President Xi and his wife. Cui and Miller paid two other individuals (Individual 3 and Individual 4), approximately USD36,500 to convince the victim to desist from the online display of the statues. Unbeknownst to Cui and Miller, Individual 3 and Individual 4 were also affiliated with and acting at the direction of the FBI.

Again, if he was being paid to not display the statues, what harm is there? It's difficult to see that the victim has suffered in any way other than by being made aware of the "stalking" - and it was the FBI that told him about that. 

This is where I have trouble with this case which is, of course, at a very early stage of prosecution.

Exactly how Cui and Miller came to identify four people who were willing to take action against someone who was critical of the president of China is not known. The interesting thing, for me, is that somehow two people outside the USA were able to get in touch with people willing to commit minor criminal offences (and things that are not, so far as logic goes, criminal at all).

How did they find conspirators in an open world and how did they vet them (not very well, obviously). Were they just naive and took anyone who answered an ad on a bulletin board or somesuch? There are thousands of bulletin boards, many of which are not web based and therefore difficult to find.

The only conclusion I can come to is that the FBI, through its network of affiliates that monitor the internet, including the non-web parts of it, are everywhere.

That's a fascinating prospect because it bodes will for the detection and interception of all manner of illicit transactions.

But it raises serious questions of personal privacy. Are we all under constant FBI surveillance, which of course has access to trackers in our pockets?

I can see why the US DoJ wants to prosecute Cui and Miller but can someone stalk someone who has no idea they are being stalked, and just how do two blokes in Serbia find four people to commit petty crime in the USA in such a way that they come into contact with not one but two FBI teams?

I'm finishing this article and I'm still shaking my head trying to make sense of it.