It raises a good point, though. Once upon a time, executions took place in public where citizens could observe what their government does in their name.

Compared to the shame with which the US kills people, you almost have to admire Saudi Arabia's public beheadings. At least it's honest, and actually provides some deterrent value. Good old-fashioned barbarism has its advantages.

if a murderer should be released or escape from prison

I've never understood this argument. If a murderer is legally released, that should mean that on our best evidence, we believe the offender is unlikely to reoffend, or that we didn't have sufficient evidence to incarcerate them in the first place. In either case, having executed them first is an abomination.

As for the escape argument, saying that we should kill people because the prison system sucks at its primary job isn't exactly the most persuasive line of thinking I've ever heard. (Or is the argument that we should pre-punish inmates for escaping before they do?) That's quite apart from the fact that almost exactly nobody escapes from correctional institutions these days; they're pretty much all from work release or work camps.

I don't really see a criminals behavior changing if there isn't a death penalty [...]

Well, there's always the broken windows theory. If we live in a society where it's normal to believe that some people don't deserve to live, this could (in theory) result in more homicide.

Precisely what problem does execution solve that "life without possibility" doesn't?

It's certainly not cost; executing someone costs far more than life does.

If it's prison overcrowding that's the issue, we have better ways to manage that, like not incarcerating so many non-violent offenders.

There is no way that a public sector developer can make anywhere near $210k. Contractor, perhaps. Employee, no chance.

On the contrary, it fits definition 2 perfectly, definition 3 slightly, and definition 1 not at all. Copyright infringement is appropriation without right. It is not taking property.

I think that the confusion is that it's more-or-less correct to call it "stealing", but it is not correct to call it "theft". "Theft" is a legal term, and "stealing" is not.

It's spelled "cockatoo". HTH!

If you look at the long-term trend, you can see that 1995 was an unusually non-violent year. If you take a rolling average, there is a distinct downward trend from 1997 (the first year of the buyback) onwards.

We should work with the Muslim community to help people who are at risk to become productive members of society.

To put it another way: There is no clash between privacy and security. Privacy is security.

The word "security", or any variant thereof, appears exactly once in the US Constitution: "The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated [...]"

Regulations don't always appear in Lexis. They aren't laws, but they are laws.

Unfortunately, these are the same people that are easily exploited and swayed into terrorist acts.

If they're that malleable, then they should be able to be steered into being a productive member of society instead of being a criminal. The FBI had a choice about which they could do. They chose the one which would give them a headline and a story on Slashdot.

It's not even the number of arrests that's the issue, but the number of crimes prevented.

Better to prevent a crime by steering a vulnerable person away from a life of crime in the first place than to arrest them for a crime you set up.

Clergy of all kinds often have qualifications in psychology or counselling, because that's part of the job description. This is just a guess, but I'd say that while "nutjob" isn't a diagnosis, the mechanism by which said nutjobs are spotted is "science".

That doesn't make him less dangerous.

What makes him dangerous is filling his head with dangerous thoughts. The vast majority, if not all, of the people whom the FBI have entrapped in the past are some of the more vulnerable members of society: people without a strong social support structure, part of a marginalised community, often poor, often unemployed, and so on.

It's a fundamental axiom of modern policing that the best way to stop crime is to stop people from becoming criminals in the first place. If someone is at risk of becoming a criminal, the best thing you can do is divert them away from that as early as possible. For the FBI to turn a non-criminal into a criminal is not just a failure, it's sociopathic.