Marty McFly: Doc, you don't just walk into a store and-and buy plutonium! Did you rip that off?
Dr. Emmett Brown: Of course. From a group of Libyan nationalists. They wanted me to build them a bomb, so I took their plutonium and, in turn, gave them a shoddy bomb casing full of used pinball machine parts.
I'd argue yes, simply because many anti-terrorism laws are vaguely enough written to make receiving money from, providing support to, or heck even communicating with (in some circumstances) terrorist organisations can be illegal. Plus then you have wire fraud, regular fraud, and a bunch of other financial crimes.
The real question however is not "is it legal," the real question is "will anyone prosecute me?" Jay-walking and speeding are illegal too, but people often do it because they know their chance of being caught and punished is relatively low.
If a prosecutor knew you scammed a terrorist organisation, while I'm sure they could find something to nail you with, they might decide it isn't worth while. But then again, misunderstandings seem highly likely with this kind of scam, and they might claim that you yourself thought it was a real explosive device or planned (future tenths) to build one.
So I guess, even if you "could" I don't know if you "should." It only can really bite you in the butt.
It would be fraud, unless the seller believed that it was actually a weapon because intent comes into play. But the victim would have to come forward to file a complaint with a legal authority. Which is possible because there are examples of people going to police after being scammed in a drug deal.
I wish it would happen, it would make for an entertaining case.
> It would be fraud, unless the seller believed that it was actually a weapon because intent comes into play. But the victim would have to come forward to file a complaint with a legal authority.
No, they wouldn't; its not generally mandatory, as a matter of law, for the victim to enter a complaint for criminal prosecution to proceed, though often the government will prefer a complaining and actively cooperative victim, since that both demonstrates that there is a problem to address and makes prosecution easier (since the victim will be an important source of both direct evidence and information that will lead to evidence.)
I understand, but I'm speaking more along the lines that the authorities wouldn't know of the crime in the first place, unless it was reported by the victim.
Now, if the government happened to be conducting surveillance on the transaction, then what you describe would come into play.
Yes, its illegal. There are plenty of cases where members of organized crime families (stand in for terrorists) have been convicted of illegal activities which harmed other members of the same or different organized crime family.
That said, if you do it under the guise of an intelligence operation then its ok apparently. Also you would be bound by jurisdictional laws, so if you did that in international waters I'm guessing you could make a case for it not being an issue.
Further, I doubt anyone would try to prosecute you for pulling a fast one on terrorists, but the terrorist organization is by definition one that doesn't respect the rule of law, borders, or individual human rights, so the lack of prosecution would be the least of your worries.
Taking money from someone under intentionally false pretenses is fraud. (18 USC § 1001.) Under the law, an intentionally and materially false statement relied upon by another constitutes fraud.
Intentionally meaning you did so under the condition you knew the weapons were fake and not real. Materially meaning the mis-representation of the guns as real was material to the transaction.
Police are empowered and sometimes licensed to act against the law in the pursuit of justice. Anyone who has observed police officers running stop signs (lights or not) knows this.
Google translate helps see it says mostly the same as the English-language article, albeit with less detail.
The Google-translated Arabic language version of the Evolution article also seems reasonable (though I didn't read it in detail, so it may contain errors or oversimplifications). I wonder where do most Arabic language wiki editors come from.
Funny! According to the Law of the Similars, a micro doze of some agent counters whatever ill that would result from a macro doze of the same agent. So a homeopathic nuke would be the cure for radiation poisoning!!!
The reported poor performance of both red mercury nuclear devices and the ADE 651 are due to the integrators' failure to power them with the output of a properly-calibrated Turboencabulator.
From some point of view it is awesome, but personally that bomb detector is a kind of fraud I seriously believe should be punished much harder than cold-blooded murder. The producer is making shit ton of money on knowingly exploiting countries and putting many people at risk. I wonder how many lives this device has already claimed.
I don't know that "awesome" is quite the word for this. If these things work at all, they work as dowsing rods, and not even the most fanatical New Ager claims that everyone in the world can dowse. (Claims tend to be more of the "1 in 100,000" variety.)
More likely, these things just don't work at all, for anyone, no matter what unlikely theories about the world might or might not be true... as shown by the Wikipedia article, which relates cases of contraband passing frightening numbers of checkpoints operating these pieces of junk. One Iraqi general was fond of them, but apparently he was heavily bribed...
It's been established it didn't work, don't try to convince me. The 'awesome' part I was mentionning was the capacity for people to believe some less than rational assertions.
I wonder if Western sources discrediting it doesn't actually just lend credence to it. From Daesh's POV it's like "Hah! Nice propaganda attempt America! But we know the true power of Red Mercury!"
But what to believe and what to ignore? Because that documentary called "Star Trek" showed us the true potential of red mercury. They clearly tried to disguise it's true nature by calling it "Red Matter", but we can see through such obvious lies.
Yeah, as soon as I saw that I wondered how many poor slaves are being bled to death, or have had intravenous injections of mercury, or have been otherwise abused chasing after the 'Blood of the Slaves.'
I'm desperately hoping that, despite the name, "Blood of the Slaves" mercury isn't actually produced from slaves. ISIS injecting slaves with mercury to produce magic metal that summons genies would be a new low -- although I wouldn't put it past them to do it.
I am not worried about a nuclear weapon, dirty bomb. The likely attack will be chemical if they deviate outside of guns and explosives. It was proven in Japan so that direction isn't unlikely.
Did you even read the article? It talks about the legend of "red mercury", a magical substance that is more powerful than a neutron bomb, and various groups (including daesh) misguided attempts to procure this non-existent substance.
It's a really fascinating look at how people continue to believe in myth.
Normally, selling weapons to terrorists would be illegal. But these aren't actually weapons.
And normally, scamming people would be illegal. But you're scamming terrorists trying to carry out an illegal transaction.
I'm sure the answer is, yes, it's illegal. But it's an odd situation and I'm not quite clear as to how it works out.