It's hard to make yourself a target to highly qualified subgroups of intelligence people, for reasons rightful or not. Simply committing or conspiring for crimes with e.g. extremist terrorist groups won't do that(not recommending to do so, obviously).
Journalists and political activists seem to manage this feat with comparative ease (as shown by OP, but not only) without even doing anything illegal. There's a meaningful question about who else might end up being targeted, that we wouldn't necessarily know about all that easily.
How do you define illegal here? Because a lot of journalists do illegal stuff from the POV of their country. What is the difference between a journalist/political activist/terrorist? Violence?
