It is a random Tuesday night, and you are relaxing on your living room couch scrolling through your social media feed. You read an article about foreign corruption and decide to make a post criticizing the government responsible for it. You make fun of a politician you don’t like, share a clip from an interview with your favorite political talking head, crack a joke about a pressing social issue, or make a plug for the blog post that you just finished writing. Then, you head to bed without giving it a second thought. This is America, after all, and the First Amendment is always there to protect you from the government.
Well, to protect you from our government.
Under the First Amendment, the United States cannot retaliate against you for constitutionally protected speech and expression. But the First Amendment does not necessarily protect you from a bureaucrat in Brussels, a judge in Brazil, or a police force in Hong Kong. Consider the case of Saad Ibrahim Almadi.
Almadi was a retired engineer living in Boca Raton, Florida. A dual U.S.-Saudi citizen, Almadi had lived in America since the 1970s and, over the past several years, had made around 14 posts criticizing the Saudi Arabian government. Those posts raised concerns about the destruction of older sections of Mecca and Jeddah, issues surrounding poverty in Saudi Arabia, and a few mentioned the assassination of the U.S.-based journalist Jamal Khashoggi while he was visiting a Saudi Arabian consulate in Istanbul. He voiced the same kinds of political grievances that millions of Americans talk and post about every day. And for years, nothing happened.
Then, in November 2021, Almadi took a trip to Riyadh to visit his family. He was arrested almost immediately after he landed and accused of “harboring a terrorist ideology.” In October 2022, a Saudi Arabian court sentenced him to 16 years in prison, followed by a 16-year travel ban preventing Almadi from leaving the country. An appeals court later increased his sentence to 19 years with a 19-year travel ban. Since Almadi was already in his 70s at the time, this meant that he would likely never return to the United States. He was eventually released after the charges against him were dropped in March 2023, but his travel ban remained in place.
Almadi did not make it back to the United States until November 2025, four years after he had left, and only after the Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman personally visited the White House. His crime? Criticizing a foreign government from American soil.
It’s easy to write this off as an example of the repressive nature of an authoritarian monarchy. Surely a fellow liberal democracy, especially one that claims to have a proud tradition of free speech and expression, would never treat someone like that, right?
Unfortunately, Graham Linehan serves as an example of how even democratically elected governments regularly try to punish politically disfavored speech that occurs outside their borders. Linehan is an Irish comedy writer responsible for shows like Father Ted and The IT Crowd. He has been living in Arizona while he works on his next project. In April 2025, Linehan made a handful of posts about transgender activists. In several different posts, he advised women encountering a transwoman “in a female-only space” to “make a scene, call the cops and if all else fails, punch him in the balls.”
Later that year, Linehan took a flight from Arizona to Heathrow. When he stepped off the plane, five armed police officers arrested him for his comments, seized his bag and devices, and told him he could only post bail if he promised to stay off X.
Thankfully, in May 2026, the Metropolitan Police apologized after an internal review found that “at times, both the investigation and arrest phases lacked the diligence one would expect.” But the message had already been conveyed loud and clear: Even comments you make outside the country have the potential to land you in jail.
