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Comment by mikeyouse | Hacker News Reader

The place was apparently owned by an extremely shady criminal who's on wire admitting to laundering millions of dollars for customers of his safe deposit boxes and a litany of other crimes;

https://www.thedailybeast.com/co-owner-of-shady-beverly-hill...

The business recently pled guilty to laundering for drug traffickers:

> The company admitted that it recruited drug traffickers as customers and used the illicit proceeds to run the business. It also acknowledged that people at the company sold cocaine, arranged drug deals at the store and instructed customers how to structure cash transactions to dodge currency reporting requirements.

https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2022-03-03/beverly-...

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So what? I once hosted in a place that turned out to be a hotbed for spammers. But Spamhaus actually did the legwork required that there was an exception for our servers.

So, it's an extremely useful detail and a positive contribution to a thread that is dominated by conspiracy theories about how the government wants to abolish private property and make us all eat bugs. The parent comment didn't express an opinion about the process used here.

All it takes is one.

I don't have an opinion about this raid, and I don't know that we know the parent commenter does either. What I do know is that most people with very strong opinions on this thread likely haven't read even the whole Reason article, let alone did their own digging about the raid, and when people take the time to do that and share with the thread, we should be careful to celebrate it rather than cross-examining it.

Fair enough. But given an X number of safety deposit boxes to assume without further prior evidence that each and every one of them must contain money that was illicitly obtained seems to be a bit coarse as well. The article certainly does not suggest transparency with regards to the way the raid was conducted.

Neither me nor the parent commenter have argued that the process used in this search was legitimate. All I know about it is what I read in the Reason article, and the details the parent commenter contributed to the thread. We should try not to hang unrelated debates off of positive contributions to threads; the details here are very useful and deserve not to be drowned out.

Nobody is being 'drowned out'. I see a big difference between the owners of the company and the owners of the contents of the vaults.

And this is the distinction that I was trying to address with my first comment. It is perfectly possible that long time users of those vaults (not a rare thing at all in that particular line of business, ask any bank) did not visit the place for a long time and found that they had unwittingly parked their money with a bunch of criminals even though when they entered into the contract that was not even on the horizon.

My point was - in case it wasn't clear enough yet - that if Spamhaus, a non-commercial entity that must have been positively drowning in inbound information - could do the legwork to figure out that exactly one of a class 'B' block of IPV4 addresses was used legitimately and without any prompting by us or anybody else as far as I am aware that it would stand to reason that the authorities could - and should - do the same thing.

That the owners of the company operating the vaults were criminals is similar to the owners of the DC where we hosted probably being well aware of what their customers were up to, but that this had no bearing on us.

I personally prefer for the law to tread carefully in such cases because those rights are important.

Doesn't matter though. Defending the guilty is one of the most important parts of the justice system. It doesn't matter that they're likely involved, it's all the more important that this information is visible.

It matters a great deal to the discussion, which is what we are here to do.

It matters not at all when the discussion is about transparency and due process. It doesn't matter how guilty you think OJ is, you can't throw a bloody glove over the fence in order to conduct a search.

This.

This publication also seems to have a habit of sensationalism. Just read another of their articles.

> Fauci conceded that the cloth masks that most people were required to wear indoors throughout the pandemic do not substantially prevent the transmission of COVID-19.

Infact quoted is him actually saying :

> "Right now, we are very, very clear that masks do work in prevention of acquisition and transmission," said Fauci. "But you've got to get a well-fitted mask that is of a high quality. And the two we know are high quality are N95 and KN95."

No mention of the surgical masks at all there, but 'reason' wrote an assumption as fact. So grain of salt for me personally.

> This publication also seems to have a habit of sensationalism.

Reason is to American libertarianism as Jacobin is to American socialism.

It's a shame too, because I think we need quality journalism from a wide diversity of viewpoints/biases. Unfortunately the ones we do get very rarely publish high quality journalism.

Astute summary. Both are thought-provoking and do a lot of sincere advocacy but their arguments sometimes rest on shaky axiomatic foundations and strategic disingenuity.

Of course, many avowedly utilitarian institutions do the same thing at scale and radical political journals are trapped within a paradigm of trying to leverage a dysfunctional status quo to turn one way or the other while trying to compete in the field of abstractions at the same time.

The quote you pull says that, in order for a mask to work, it must be well-fitted and of a high quality. And then it defines high quality as being N95 or KN95.

Cloth masks don't meet any standard of quality or well-fittedness, so I'm having difficulty seeing what problem you think exists in the restatement by Reason.

I also can't tell what you mean by "no mention of the surgical masks". What surgical masks? Surgical masks aren't mentioned in the quote from Fauci or the quote from Reason.

I meant to say cloth masks mistake on my part, but also it should be noted that certain cloth masks had the slot to put in the n95 filters.

> Surgical masks aren't mentioned in the quote from Fauci or the quote from Reason.

Nor where cloth masks mentioned by Fauci yet they were by 'Reason' so it's the same difference.

> Cloth masks don't meet any standard of quality or well-fittedness

Where are you getting that info from ? I had a cloth mask with n95 filter slips that seemed to fit exceptionally well. No study was done on mine though.

> Nor where cloth masks mentioned by Fauci yet they were by 'Reason' so it's the same difference.

Yes, Reason mentioned "the cloth masks that most people were required to wear indoors throughout the pandemic".

And Fauci did not mention them, but he did make a statement about them, which was that the category "masks that work in [the] prevention of acquisition and transmission [of covid-19]" doesn't include them. And that is the same statement that Reason reports.

>> Cloth masks don't meet any standard of quality or well-fittedness

> Where are you getting that info from ? I had a cloth mask with n95 filter slips that seemed to fit exceptionally well.

Well, I'm familiar with the standard that cloth masks do meet, which is "any piece of cloth, such as part of an old t-shirt, with ear straps attached". You're free to wear something that meets a higher standard than that, but it's never been a requirement. What was Reason talking about again?

(I should also note that your personal cloth mask wasn't meeting a standard of fit either. N95 masks are quite painful to wear, because they have to maintain a seal.)

Yeah okay, I get that and not going to have an argument over it, just the phrasing from Reason rubbed me wrong.

That doesn't justify the search and seizure of all his customers' property without due process.

There's clearly a balance to be had - but if millions of dollars in ill-gotten cash and property in the boxes were his (as he's admitted) then of course the Feds are going to seize those and any others with unknown provenance. It's not like this was a bank, it was in a strip mall. Judges have been siding on behalf of people who haven't been accused of crimes, and they've had their property returned (https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2021-07-26/judge-ru...) which of course is proper.

> It's not like this was a bank, it was in a strip mall.

Not sure what you're getting at here. Beverly Hills has a very large population of Iranian Jews, many of whom do not trust safe deposit boxes in banks because of their own lived experiences in Iran in 1979. This was a business filling a need in our community.

Same with people in former USSR countries. They still do quite a bit in cash and tend not to trust banks.

> That doesn't justify the search and seizure of all his customers' property without due process.

The fundamental due process issue doesn't seem to be in dispute, though remedies for that are being litigated.

What the article is focussed on is not the due process issues, but the right of people outside of those directly affected and whose rights related to involved property are being litigated to law enforcement background information relating to the planning for the operations, which is a completely separate issue.

The issue with all of this is that we're allowing actions against property while not respecting the rights of the owner. The FBI/cops can and should raid a place being used for crime, but it does not mean the cops should get to keep all the property that is seized. A much more mundane situation: Dad shouldn't have the family car auctioned off because his kid's friend decided to shoot up in the back seat. This civil asset forfeiture thing is insanely unconstitutional.

That example seems clear cut from both ethical and constitutional perspectives. If juveniles use your property to commit crimes, that property is rightly in jeopardy.

I'm not sure that's true, but if it is that is absolutely terrifying and I hope it is rectified at once. I think this would lead to the seizure of all public parks in my city.

I guess like all libertarians you will be surprised to learn that there is a separate body of jurisprudence around public property, separate from private property law.

I am rarely surprised to learn anything anymore in the various laws used to part the common joe of his property.

Google civil asset forfeiture. It is absolutely nuts.

When "use" is "was inside of", how the fuck can you call that ethical?

So person breaks into your house and squats it, or shoots up there, bith crimes. Your house should be forfeit?

What "ethics" you following?

I think there's a fundamental difference between "someone breaks into your house and commits a crime" and...purposefully allowing someone use of a gun or vehicle, or negligence leading to said use (ie, leaving your car running in front of a convenience store, and then someone stealing it and going on a high speed joyride, running a red light t-boning a minivan, killing a family of four), and someone, with no negligence on your part, using property of yours to commit a crime.

If you leave your gun on the floor of your car, someone smashes the window and steals it and shoots up a convenience store: you should be charged criminally and subject to civil liability.

If someone breaks into the gun safe in the trunk of your car and shoots up a convenience store? No crime, no liability - you took reasonable precautions.

A gun comes with special obligations to protect it. If someone borrows your car, or steals your left-running car, I don't think you should have have any criminal liability or risk of seizure. (Assuming you didn't conspire ahead of time, of course.)

While I agree with you on someone stealing your car, I don't see the gun and the car as so different as you do. You can easily kill people with a car or box truck, and possibly in greater number.

Blaming someone because their car or gun was stolen sounds a lot like victim blaming to me. And to the comment about breaking the window, I'd like to point out that most safes are practically as easy to break open as a window is. I recall buying one safe, and another customer explained to me in detail how they had pried one open in only a few seconds.

> Blaming someone because their car or gun was stolen sounds a lot like victim blaming to me.

This is punishing one of the victims.

Not a single example here is just. In every case someone has committed a crime. Stealing a running car is grand theft auto (assuming the car is worth the minimum). Even if I left it running, the thief alone committed a crime.

"Leopards would never eat MY face" ethics.

Why should I be responsible for some other parent's kid committing a crime with my property? So the fact a kid commits a crime erases my rights?

Unless I'm fundamentally misunderstanding the concept of due process, I would think that the warrant's explicit language around _not_ searching the contents of the deposit boxes would be a violation of the 4th Amendment's warrant requirements (and therefore due process):

"Nests of safety deposit boxes and keys, and documents and records referring or relating to them since 2019. This warrant does not authorize a criminal search or seizure of the contents of warrant does not authorize a criminal search or seizure of the contents of the safety deposit boxes. In seizing the nests of safety deposit boxes, agents shall follow their written inventory policies to protect their agencies and the contents of the boxes. Also in accordance with their written policies, agents shall inspect the contents of the boxes in an effort to identify their owners in order to notify them so that they can claim their property;"

They were allowed to "inspect" the contents, but literally only with the goal of returning the property (which they still haven't done).

That might all be true, but that's not the argument of the article? The argument is that the FBI is not being transparent about the process that led to the seizure.

It's hard to hold the government accountable when you don't even know what the government did.

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