Former Apple engineer found guilty of threats to FBI agents

SANTA CRUZ — A federal jury has found a 32-year-old former Santa Cruz man guilty of threatening two FBI agents.

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The conviction of Brian Broderick on a charge of transmitting a communication containing a threat to injure came down March 8, after a one-week trial before U.S. District Judge Edward J. Davila.

Before the threat, Broderick, a former Apple software engineer, reached out to the FBI’s San Francisco division several times in 2021 and 2022 and made allegations concerning Apple, according to a release from the U.S. Attorney’s Office in California’s Northern District.

Then, on June 1, 2022, Broderick emailed two FBI agents and said he was “literally hunting” the “idiot traitor” FBI agent who had previously contacted him. Broderick warned the FBI: “You act on this in … 24 hours, or I go beyond taking your livelihood.”

The same day, Broderick posted to his YouTube channel a video he recorded of himself taking surveillance photographs of an FBI office’s vehicles in Alabama.

In addition to his interactions with the FBI, Broderick drew the attention of the Santa Cruz Police Department. According to the department’s December 2021 court filings seeking a firearms restraining order against Broderick, an Apple employee alerted the police that Broderick was sending “aggressive e-mails and text messages to Apple employees regarding his belief that Apple was spying on him and had a conspiracy against him.”

In an affidavit, police detective Elizabeth Howard-Gibbon described interactions between Broderick and his neighbors, former co-workers and apartment management company. She wrote, “l believe Mr. Broderick is showing behaviors consistent with an individual going through an emotional crisis.”

Broderick’s sentencing hearing is scheduled for June 24. He faces a maximum sentence of up to five years in prison.