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In some states it is illegal to defend against civil forfeiture practices using hidden compartments in your vehicle to store 100% legal property (e.g. cash, jewelry, confidential information)

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Interesting article about a guy who was sentenced to 24 years in federal prison for building hidden compartments for customers of his car stereo shop:

https://www.wired.com/2013/03/alfred-anaya/

as opposed to people actually using those compartments in an illegal fashion. Out of control government...

From the article:

    > "calculated ignorance of illegal
    > activity is not an acceptable excuse"

I.e. the court's argument is that he was perfectly aware that he was building these for drug cartels. If we take that judgement at face value I don't see the problem with this. You don't get to wink wink nudge nudge your way out of being a knowing accomplice to a crime.

By that logic, shouldn't gun companies be prosecuted for the crimes committed by the drug cartels who use their weapons?

Given the current state of affairs in the US and the publicly available statistics on gun crime, one could argue that continuing to manufacture guns is knowingly supplying criminals, no?

It's a slippery slope..

A better analogy is an FFL knowingly selling firearms to cartel members, which is already illegal.

That's absurd. The legal test is whether a reasonable person could have known that they were an accomplice to a crime.

The article makes it clear that this man knew he was building these for cartels, and tried to weasel his way out by claiming he'd never seen drugs with his own eyes, but had seen almost a million in cash from some very shady guys.

This would be like running a "Taxi service" that catered to Balaclava wearing gentleman exiting a bank, claiming that you had no idea you were helping with a robbery. Perhaps they're just really ugly businessmen in a hurry? Would that mean nobody could drive a Taxi anymore? Of course not.

You were downvoted but you make a good point, and I think your example is better than mine.. Point taken.

No. The guy in the article wasn't prosecuted for every hidden compartment he made, just the ones he made that he was well aware were going to be used for illegal activity. Just like guns, the vast majority of them won't be used for anything illegal, even though some of them will be. But the moment you knowingly and willingly facilitate criminal activity, you become a party to the crime. That's true with guns, secret compartments, candy bars, or anything else.

Which states?

OH and CA both have laws on the books against creating (hidden compartment) or operating a vehicle with a hidden compartment if it's intended for something illegal. Drugs and guns is the common justification, but I wonder what would happen if you had say 15k in cash in a compartment.

Dont. Excessive free cash is very typically seized.

I don’t think we have enough data to say it’s ‘very typically seized’ - certainly it is at times, and in egregious and outrageous fashion, but I don’t think ‘very typically’ is accurate.

I personally have on many occasions had well in excess of 10,000 on my person and have never had it seized.

And you were pulled over, and it was discovered?

I mean, even if you were, that constitutes X data points, which is hardly representative.

You're asking him to prove a negative. The onus should be on you.

Not at all - one can very reasonably assume that 'very frequently' means after it has been discovered during a traffic stop, in which case it is valid to ask how often djrogers has been in that situation.

A mostly unrelated and offtopic comment: It's been a misconception that the $20 and $100 U.S. Dollar bills contain some RFID-like passive tracking capability embedded within the "ribbon" security feature. If you want to have an expensive and uneventful couple minutes, put a $20 in a microwave for a few seconds to "disable" the chip, but be sure to have a cup of water around. The foil-beanie wearing crowd claims that the result of the microwaving, which burns Jackson's face, is proof. Nevermind the actual fact that a majority of the ink on the front of the bill is on Jackson's face, and that the ink contains metal used for pigmenting and other proprietary security measures which is likely the reason it smolders or catches fire first.

Anyways, the reason I bring this up is to highlight the paranoia of some that think that long-range RFID scanners can actually locate large stacks of highly valuable "untraceable" currency, which might be used by the highway patrol to identify potential targets to pull over for civil asset forfeiture reasons.

https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/cache-point/

The stacks of cash with the ribbon and magnetic ink can be scanned for. Think of those plastic and metal ribbon security stickers stores use.

His main point was we don't have enough data for the 'very typically' label. To prove this, you need some sort of data.

Instead lostcolony was asking for evidence that this is not the case, implying that we should accept 'very typically' with no evidence, and expect proof of absence to change our minds.

Actually, no, I wasn't asking for evidence that this was not the case. I was asking for why we should treat djrogers' personal experience as evidence for why it isn't 'very typical'. Does his personal experience even match the criteria smrtinsert implied? And even if it does, why should we consider it, giving how few data points it is, of such poor sampling quality (given a single subject).

I was asserting nothing about how typical seizure is or isn't, just how poor djrogers' supplied anecdotal data was.

@lostcolony didn’t ask anyone to prove anything. I just read his comment; he merely asked for clarification.

Without a conclusive study, the only proven conclusion is that "large amounts of cash are sometimes seized, sometimes not". However, a study could reveal that this happens very typically, or not very typically (for some definition of typical). In either case, that is not proving a negative.

That's exactly my point. Stating that seizure is 'very typical' as fact, and if someone says you have no evidence, the retort shouldn't be "Prove it isn't."

No one said I had no evidence (the original statement for this subthread wasn't mine), and my retort wasn't "prove it isn't", but "your supplied anecdotal data is not actually helpful".

I totally agree the original post to this subthread supplied no data. That's obvious. But to counter it with badly qualified anecdotal evidence does nothing to actually counter it.

Did police ever search you, find that cash, and not take it? Congratulations on your privilege. Lots of other people, including those without bank accounts or other means of moving their wealth around, have lost money this way.

More than $10k in cash is considered "evidence of criminal activity" in many jurisdictions.

It's one thing to have a few bank envelopes with $10k in cash and a withdrawal receipt in a zip lock bag or something that's pretty obviously non-criminal. It's another thing to get pulled over in a $90/day rental with $15k hidden under a blanket in the trunk. The latter will almost always end up getting seized.

* http://www.slate.com/blogs/crime/2013/12/09/secret_compartme...

* https://www.wired.com/2013/03/alfred-anaya/

Ohio, California, Georgia, Illinois, and Oregon.

http://reason.com/archives/2014/02/16/the-crime-of-having-a-...

http://policelink.monster.com/training/articles/2191-hidden-...

https://leb.fbi.gov/articles/legal-digest/legal-digest-inves...

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