For example, the charges against Mr. Warsame, conspiracy and providing material support to terrorists, are standard criminal charges, but their validity as war crimes is under a cloud.
It deserves no such accolade, however, for its sub-standard criminal drama, its scattershot satire, or the stultifying missions it presents to players.
In standard criminal cases, you can't torture suspects to obtain a suspect's confession because the information is inherently untrustworthy.
Hacktivists, unlike the standard criminal hackers, claim to seek political change rather than financial gain — a distinction that rarely earns them much sympathy before the law.
As a social psychologist I believe that one major reason is that some people are thinking about this national event using the same moral intuitions they'd use for a standard criminal case.
It partly explains too why Congress refuses to allow their cases to be heard by standard criminal courts (which have handled other high-profile terror cases competently and without incident).
Such steps are allowed in standard criminal investigations without specific evidence of wrongdoing, and officials say they want to authorize the same investigative steps in terrorism inquiries as well.
So instead of sexual tension, we have entertaining and cheerful presentations of plot flourishes that are still outlandishly fantastical -- a standard criminal on "The Avengers" might travel through time or be invisible.
But civil liberties advocates, who have pushed for the repeal of secret intelligence warrants under the library records provision, argue that federal authorities can already use standard criminal warrants at libraries if they have evidence linking a suspect to terrorism.
The Minnesota agents had sought the warrant under the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, or FISA, which sets a relatively low standard for the evidence required for searches of suspected spies or terrorists; standard criminal warrants require a much higher standard of evidence.
