[PUBLISH] In the United States Court of Appeals For the Eleventh Circuit

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No. 20-12667 ____________________ UNITED STATES OF AMERICA, Plaintiff-Appellee, versus TIMOTHY J. SMITH,

Defendant-Appellant.

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Appeal from the United States District Court for the Northern District of Florida D.C. Docket No. 3:19-cr-00032-MCR-1 ____________________ USCA11 Case: 20-12667 Date Filed: 01/12/2022 Page: 2 of 20

2 Opinion of the Court 20-12667 Before WILLIAM PRYOR, Chief Judge, GRANT, and HULL, Circuit Judges. WILLIAM PRYOR, Chief Judge: This appeal concerns whether an accused can be tried in a venue where he did not commit any of the conduct elements of the charged crime. Timothy Smith is a software engineer and avid an- gler who obtained the coordinates of artificial fishing reefs in the Gulf of Mexico from a website owned by StrikeLines, a business that sells those coordinates. Smith remained in Mobile, Alabama, during the relevant events, but he was tried in the Northern Dis- trict of Florida, where StrikeLines’s office is located. The jury con- victed Smith of two counts—one count of theft of trade secrets and one count of extortion—and the district court enhanced his sen- tence. We vacate Smith’s conviction for theft of trade secrets and related sentencing enhancements for lack of venue, affirm the ex- tortion conviction and related sentencing enhancements, and re- mand for resentencing. I. BACKGROUND Tristan Harper and Travis Griggs own a business called StrikeLines. StrikeLines sells the coordinates of artificial reefs placed in various locations in the Gulf of Mexico by commercial and recreational fishermen. The reefs create attractive fishing loca- tions, the coordinates of which are usually not shared to prevent overfishing. StrikeLines has its office in Pensacola, but the servers where its website and data are hosted are in Orlando. USCA11 Case: 20-12667 Date Filed: 01/12/2022 Page: 3 of 20

20-12667 Opinion of the Court 3

StrikeLines obtains artificial-reef coordinates in two ways. First, StrikeLines harvests data from public records. About a quar- ter of the coordinates on StrikeLines’s website come from public records, but Strikelines does not sell these coordinates. It offers the coordinates from public sources on its website for free. Second, StrikeLines obtains the coordinates for private reefs by launching boats equipped with sonar equipment from its base in Pensacola to trowel through the Gulf of Mexico and discover the reef locations. After processing the raw data collected by sonar, StrikeLines offers the private reef coordinates on its website, where each coordinate is sold only once, for between $190 and $199. The defendant in this case, Timothy Smith, is a software en- gineer who lives in Mobile, Alabama. He fishes from 1,200 to 1,500 hours a year. He was prompted by a friend who is also an avid fish- erman to look into StrikeLines, and he first visited the website in 2018. When Smith visited the StrikeLines website, he used a web application called Fiddler, which allowed him to see the coordi- nates of private artificial reefs. Smith later accessed the coordinate data again after additional security measures had been installed. Smith noticed a photograph of someone he knew on the StrikeLines website and contacted that acquaintance with the goal of being put into contact with the owners of StrikeLines. Smith suc- ceeded, and a series of conversations between Smith and the own- ers of