DEA seized father’s life savings at airport without alleging any crime occurred | Hacker News Reader

DEA seized father’s life savings at airport without alleging any crime occurred

washingtonpost.com

60 pointsantongribok23 comments

The legal theory that spawned (civil) asset forfeiture is just bananas, "oh we're not seizing property without a trial we're charging the money/car/property itself with the being connected to a crime so we can take it." How has this survived any contact with a court? It's owned by someone... you're seizing it from them...

See the classic US vs $124,700 in U.S. Currency. [0]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._$124,700_in_U...

Unfortunately the practice is as old as the republic itself. It comes from British law where the owners of vessels are unreachable by the courts but their property (the ship) is attainable. The case law on this is very extensive. A law permitting the practice against ships smuggling contraband was one of the earliest acts of the continental congress.

Even if your an originalist it's extremely difficult to argue the founders didn't intend to permit the practice.

In the case that the owner can't be reached at all is one of the few cases I think it's probably ok, but the second someone comes forward and says I'm the owner I think you have to either charge them with an actual crime or let it go because it's gone from a random item to someone's property. And today that's a majority of the cases because the police are either taking the money from someone (because it's suspicious to have cash) or the item is registered somehow (car, boat, etc).

In the circumstances you mentioned, the owner of said property would be breaking the law. That's different from the current practice.

Not necessarily. They may have no knowledge of the smuggled cargo on their vessel. Without knowledge or intent it's hard to argue they are guilty of smuggling by mere ownership.

But someone is breaking the law and could be charged with the crime, in this case the people operating the ship. The ship question is also more complicated than 99% of the asset forfeiture cases because it involves owners and operators where sooo many of these cases just involve the cops confiscating cash because they decide it's large enough to try to steal under the pretext of it being maybe connected to a crime. [0]

The case of cash in particular is galling because if it's connected to a crime then the owner must also be connected to that crime so charge them with something and don't go through this weird sideways process where the owner suddenly has to prove the negative case that their property isn't connected to a crime.

[0] Because that's the heart of what's happening, it used to be that CAF didn't happen that much because only the Feds can really do it and none of the money got kicked back to local departments. Years back that got changed and suddenly local cops were much more interested in confiscating and filing these kinds of cases.

This kind of abuse of power makes my blood boil. It's an utter shame things like this are allowed to happen, and the TSA, police, and DEA agents involved should be ashamed. This should have never needed to be resolved in court.

Common sense to me would have been to record her identity, do a quick criminal background check, and if nothing came up let her go on her way (with the cash). Then if necessary, the DEA could keep a closer eye on her future travels or business dealings to watch for suspicious patterns. But to just take someone's money with no justification is ludicrous!

If you want to help fight against these sort of injustices, considering donating to the Institue for Justice. They are available as an option for Amazon Smile. Read more about civil asset forfeiture on their website:

https://ij.org/issues/private-property/civil-forfeiture/

Now THIS is what bitcoin is good for.

Unfortunately, the shady applications overwhelm apparently legitimate ones like this.

Bitcoin won't fix a corrupt system simply by existing. The corrupt system will just adapt.

How do you store your private keys to prevent the government from simply seizing those?

Memorize it in the form of a BIP-39 mnemonic[1]. 12 words are enough to encode 128 bits of entropy and a 4 bit checksum.

[1] https://github.com/bitcoin/bips/blob/master/bip-0039.mediawi...

I’m sure the government would love to be able to remove cash as a payment option. They’d love to have every single monetary transaction recorded somewhere, and cash is the only way to transfer actual currency to someone else without a record of it.

Too bad for them that crypto currencies now exist.

I think crypto is a boon for law enforcement because every fragment of money can be traced since its inception.

Paywalled/subscription/sign-in demanded.

https://outline.com/8puDsc

Thanks!

Downvoted?

Sigh

If it's been a while, I'd recommend re-reading this site's guidelines:

> Please don't comment about the voting on comments. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

That's a very ostrich attitude to the problem though.

Allowing toxic behaviour to persist and shutting down discussion of the problem.

I'm just wondering why pointing out a flaw, that I'm grateful if someone answering, which is ultimately useful for the community as a whole gets downvoted.

Downvoting doesn't give any feedback to the poster what they did wrong. I'm all for good feedback, shutting down that discussion does greater damage in a meritocracy IMHO

I think every downvote should have a reason given, and show who did it.

After more thought, I believe a downvote ought to cost the downvoter a point of karma.

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