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Comment by robotblake | Hacker News Reader

  if a and (b1 or b2 or b3) and c
    terrorist = true
  end

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(A) involve acts dangerous to human life that are a violation of the criminal laws of the United States or of any State

So an attack designed to destroy an unoccupied building would not be terrorism under the structure you describe above.

I think that the law would still hold detonating a bomb in an unoccupied building as 'dangerous to human life' if you didn't follow all of the safety precautions that a real building demolition would have to follow. If you put a bomb in an abandoned building at set to detonate in 2 hours and then flee the scene, there's not guarantee that someone won't enter the building in the interim.

You could make that same argument about someone driving above the speed limit...

How many people are breaking the speed limit in an effort to 'coerce the civilian popular and/or US government policy?'

That's not my point, my point is just that the logical structure attributed to the definition is not accurate.

The definition does not state that all of the clauses must be satisfied for something to qualify as terrorism, and as I showed above, satisfying a single clause is trivial (and clearly not terrorism).

I think that you should ask a lawyer about that before jumping to those conclusions. This may be some sort of gap between legal-speak and plain English. There are a lot of terms that diverge in meaning between common usage (even 'traditional' definition) and legal definition.

Logic would dictate that the meaning of that is "if A and (B[1] or B[2] or B[3]) and C", but it's not explicitly there.

It looks to me like the definition is intended to be intentionally vague while appearing narrow.

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