Providing material support for terrorism
crime in the United States
In United States law, providing material support for terrorism is a crime prohibited by the USA PATRIOT Act and codified in title 18 of the United States Code. Penalties include fines and up to 15 years in prison, per section 2339A, and up to 20 years if the convict knows that the organization supported was designated as a "terrorist organization" by the US State Department, per 2339B. Moreover, the sentence can be increased to "any term of years" or life "if the death of any person results," where 'the term “person” means any individual or entity capable of holding a legal or beneficial interest in property'. The four types of support described are "training," "expert advice or assistance," "service," and "personnel."
In June 2010, the United States Supreme Court upheld the law in an as-applied challenge in the case Holder v. Humanitarian Law Project, but also left open the door for other as-applied challenges. The defendants in the case had sought to help the Kurdistan Workers' Party in Turkey and the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam learn means of peacefully resolving conflicts.
Criticism
The material support provisions have been criticized by rights groups as violating the First Amendment, as they criminalize activities like the distribution of literature, engaging in political advocacy, participating in peace conferences, training in human rights advocacy, and donating money and humanitarian assistance, even when the support is intended only to promote lawful and non-violent activities. The provisions are vague and wide-ranging, and impose guilt by association by punishing people not for their own acts but for the acts of those they have supported. The Secretary of State's power to designate groups as terrorist has also been criticized as being too broad, giving the Executive too much discretionary power to label groups as "terrorist" and criminalize their supporters. The American Civil Liberties Union note that: "Federal 'material support' and conspiracy statutes allow the government to secure convictions without having to show that any specific act of terrorism has taken place, or is being planned, or even that a defendant intended to further terrorism."
David D. Cole, in his book Terrorism and the Constitution, stated that:
... after lying virtually dormant for its first six years of existence, the material support law has since 9/11 become the Justice Department's most popular charge in antiterrorism cases.
This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “Providing material support for terrorism” as crime in the United States. Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated May 25, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q7252540. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 2010.
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This entry incorporates text from “Providing material support for terrorism” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.