“This morning, when I was putting on my socks, I thought: ‘I could be killed in a matter of weeks or days.’”

Ali Al-Ahmed

it follows a certain logic. The U.S. government claims the right to conduct vast electronic surveillance outside its own borders in the name of national security. Other countries say they have the same right to snoop here. And a U.S. court ruling last year gives them cover.

“What we’re essentially doing is we’re giving other countries carte blanche to surveil not just their own nationals (inside the United States) but our nationals within the United States,” said Nate Cardozo, senior staff attorney on the civil liberties team at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a group that advocates for privacy and free expression in the digital age.

The United States is a traditional haven for those demanding political change in their homelands. Foreign nations sometimes view these communities as sources of instability.

“Many states have historically been paranoid about diaspora communities and have used various means to track them,” said John Scott-Railton, senior researcher at the internet watchdog group Citizen Lab. “With the plummeting barrier to entry for conducting some kind of monitoring, many states have just said, ‘Great. This is exactly what we need to sort of claw back visibility of our diaspora.’ ”

One national security lawyer described the international legal status quo as “anomalous” but said he expected little change.

“Persons in the United States are legally and effectively protected against unlawful surveillance by

Under most circumstances, foreign governments are exempt from civil lawsuits under principles designed to maintain good relations between nations.

Still, an Ethiopian-American who filed suit in 2014 under the pseudonym of Kidane charged Ethiopian agents with infecting his computer at his Silver Spring, Md., home with spyware. Forensic experts found that the spyware was operated from the Ethiopian capital.

A federal court rejected Kidane’s claim and the D.C. Circuit in 2017 upheld the ruling that he did not have grounds to sue Ethiopia because the African nation sent no agents to U.S. soil, and its hackers operated from Addis Ababa, the Ethiopian capital.

Sarah McCune, a U.S. lawyer and independent consultant for Amnesty International, called the ruling “problematic” and said, “Any foreign government that sees that, or is aware of that, will feel that they are relatively free to be engaging in that type of abusive behavior.”

Others in the Ethiopian diaspora say they believe they’ve been targeted as well.

Seenaa Jimjimo, an activist in Chicago, said she was bombarded with suspicious email prior to political change in April, when a new