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Comment by maxerickson | Hacker News Reader

Some guy comes into your restaurant and eats a meal. Pays cash. Leaves. He was ICE. You're now subject to charges from the state of Minnesota?

That sounds like maybe not entirely the best idea.

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Some guy comes into your restaurant and eats a meal. Pays cash. Leaves. He was a sanctioned Russian. You're now subject to charges from the state of Minnesota?

Yes, you appear to see the point I am making.

It's not a real point. It's only illegal to support a sanctioned person if you know or should have known they were sanctioned.

Yeah you aren't getting the point. I'm not saying that the proprietor would be at risk for unfair prosecution, I'm saying the policy would be useless because it is easy to avoid if you don't take it to an absurd extreme.

I guess I should have spelled it out in the initial comment.

There's already a law against helping a criminal flee a crime scene, but the criminal may still buy a train ticket and the train company isn't liable unless he told them he was a criminal, but anyone who knew he was a criminal and helped him anyway goes to jail. This is nothing new.

No, I mean that it wouldn't hamper ICE all that much unless you took it to an extreme. An onerous policy inflicted on the people of Minnesota that accomplished little in the way of disrupting federal operations.

I think it would. They crashed out over a single cancelled hotel reservation. These aren't hardened troops that can set up a bivouac in a random clearing, they're accustomed to all the niceties of modern life. If all hotels refused to serve them, if they couldn't buy groceries because their cards were declined, if the state blockaded their detention centers, they'd find their job much harder.

If only the courts has some experience arbitrating intent and negligence.

You've truly found a loophole.

My point is that the OPs goal of preventing transactions with federal employees is impractical, so I'm not sure what you want me to say here.

You could talk about the goal of drastically diminishing transactions with federal employees.

Was the customer wearing a mask of the style the violent invaders use to hide their faces from legal accountability? If so, then yes it sounds like the restaurant owner should have suspected they were one of the gang and not served them.

If they removed their mask before getting to the restaurant, and the restaurant owner had no other reason to suspect them, then the restaurant owner is in the clear. But hopefully someone took a picture of their face so they can be on the early admission list for Nuremberg 2.

It's not illegal to support someone who's a terrorist if you don't know they're a terrorist.

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