Amber Neely
A federal jury has convicted a former Apple employee for threatening to injure FBI agents after a short trial.
Court records obtained by Kron4 state that Brian Broderick former Apple employee believed the company was spying on him. While on medical leave, he sent multiple threatening emails to his coworkers, as confirmed by several employees who reported the matter to the Santa Cruz police.
Broderick then contacted the FBI repeatedly in 2021 and 2022 to report multiple issues, including allegations against Apple. Apple filed a restraining order against the man in December 2021, which was granted for three years.
The Santa Cruz Police Department claimed that Broderick was paranoid and suffering from a mental health crisis. As a precaution, the SCPD obtained a gun violence restraining order against him and seized a gun from his storage locker.
When an FBI agent followed up on Broderick's reports in May 2022, he replied with "escalating and derogatory emails" to FBI San Francisco Division agents.
One email, sent in June 2022, showed Broderick claiming to be an "American who is literally hunting an idiot traitor." He warned agents that they had 24 hours to act on his allegations against Apple or "I go beyond taking your livelihood."
He later posted a video of himself surveilling an FBI office.
Broderick could face up to five years in prison. Sentencing is scheduled for June 24.
In November 2022, a former parts and services buyer at Apple pleaded guilty to over $17 million in fraud against Apple. He was sentenced to serve three years in prison and pay more than $19 million in restitution.
In May 2023, the Department of Justice charged a third ex-engineer over the alleged theft of self-driving car tech in 2018, after the engineer tried to hand Apple's trade secrets over to a Chinese autonomous driving tech company.
Christine McKee
AppleInsider Staff
Chip Loder
Malcolm Owen
William Gallagher
8 Comments
Reading the article, even though it doesn't describe his origins, I sense an implicit "Florida man..." CA has its fair share of crazies too.
After Jan 6 there are many people who think they can threaten the FBI, capital police, or military at will.
jan 6
We're definitely living in a crazy time. Mental illness was already on the rise, but went into overdrive after 2019. Combined with more harmful drugs circulating, brutal economic stresses, increased senses of entitlement, and now scary, unnecessary wars, it's all pushing us to our limits, directly and indirectly. We're not through this yet, but the solution starts with us, on an individual level. We can't turn to governments and companies to fix this for us, or as an entity to blame. We need to look inward, and begin the changes for ourselves.
Probably good rule of thumb to live by.