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Comment by andreygrehov | Hacker News Reader

Wrong. The "protesters" were conducting counterintelligence to locate where ICE was operating. The plan was to disrupt the operation. Like it or not, this is against the law. Period.

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I know you want to frame it a different way, but the articles you are posting don't describe anything that's illegal.

I'm not framing anything. There are screenshots of the chats where people literally say "ICE vehicle has been identified, everybody, go there!". This is called interfering.

The "interfering" this are describing is your framing. You want it to be interference in a legally actionable way, but it simply isn't.

18 U.S.C. § 111 - Assaulting, resisting, impeding officers (including federal agents)

18 U.S.C. § 1505 - Obstruction of Federal Officers (this includes ICE itself - obstructing or interfering with an ICE arrest is a crime)

18 U.S.C. § 118 - Obstructing, resisting, or interfering with federal protective functions

18 USC 111 does not apply here. Forcible action is an element. The action doesn’t have to be itself the use of force; it’s sufficient that a threat being some action that causes an officer to reasonably fear bodily harm. But obviously the actions we’re talking about on this subthread fall well short of that definition. If they didn't the law would be unconstitutional.

Those other two laws seem like an even weirder fit for the fact pattern in this subthread.

But that's not the end of the analysis. The legal line isn't 'force or nothing'; it's intent + conduct. Speech and observation are protected, but coordinated action intended to impede enforcement is not.

If "ICE vehicle has been identified, everybody go there" is followed by mobbing vehicles, blocking movement, inducing agents to disengage, or warning targets to evade arrest, that crosses from protected speech into actionable conduct.

Is that your theory, or is there case law that backs it up? From what I saw the bounds on 18 USC 111 are quite narrow indeed: I found a case where the defendant _fired at federal agents with his shotgun_, and the appeals court threw it out because the jury was incorrectly instructed that they could use the fact that he shot at them when considering he misled them afterwards. But actually, the jury was not allowed to do that. https://law.justia.com/cases/federal/appellate-courts/F2/199...

Quote: (1) speech can be prohibited if it is "directed at inciting or producing imminent lawless action" and (2) it is "likely to incite or produce such action."

See Brandenburg v. Ohio (https://www.oyez.org/cases/1968/492)

Brandenburg v. Ohio was decided in favor of the appellant. As I suspected, there are no cases of a US court interpreting your theory of the law on 18 USC 111.

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