If I'm about to do something that will cause a stock price to move, can I legally profit from it?

Question

For example, suppose that instead of flying planes into the World Trade Center, Osama bin Laden had decided to fly planes into Microsoft Campus. He can therefore predict with high confidence that MSFT will crash. Can he legally buy MSFT puts prior to the event?

Related: Can someone short a stock if they have information that is likely to cause the stock to drop? But the scenario above seems significantly more dramatic than the one described in this question (in particular, flying planes into Microsoft Campus is illegal).

Answer 1

The question doesn't have an answer at the level of generality at which it is posed in the title. Sometimes it is legal, sometimes it isn't.

In the narrow sense, if Osama bin Laden did that, it would probably have constituted securities fraud through market manipulation (not insider trading) in addition to terrorism, solicitation of mass murder, airline hijacking, an act of war, etc.