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Comment by gfd | Hacker News Reader

Only tangentially related, but don't put cash in safety deposit boxes. Police can take them under civil forfeiture laws:

https://nypost.com/2021/06/12/fbi-aims-to-keep-valuables-86m...

https://www.businessinsider.com/fbi-raid-1400-boxes-us-priva...

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Civil asset forfeiture is one of those things that feels really unjust in the US, and I'm somewhat surprised there hasn't been a Supreme Court case ruling it unconstitutional per the 4th Amendment.

I'd love to hear a steelmanned argument in favor of it, maybe I'm missing something obvious?

The only steelmanned argument for civil asset forfeiture goes back to its origins, when it was used to seize smuggled goods on ships. Since the ship's owner was almost always a wealthy person living in a different country making them almost impossible to go after, and the smuggled goods were missing tax stamps etc. making it clear that they were being illegally smuggled, the government would simply seize the goods. That's literally the origin of civil asset forfeiture in the US, and all of the horrible and unjustifiable examples of it that we see nowadays grew out of that much more limited and justifiable example.

Seems to me in the specific case of wealthy foreigner owns smuggled good a better (more just) arrangement accuses them not the goods, but with the mechanism that if they for some reason don't want to attend court (maybe because they're super guilty?) their goods are seized but the crime still exists.

There are some nuances to work out to ensure cops can't accuse say Vladimir Putin of a crime involving the $8000 they found in your house, and then since Putin doesn't show up they keep your money, but the general idea seems more sound than civil forfeiture.

What if they don’t know who it belongs to?

If they reasonably cannot determine its owner, they get to seize it, but if you show up with proof it's yours they have to give it back (and go through the normal process).

Civil asset forfeiture is a surprisingly complicated network of related legal issues, unfortunately. It can be incredibly complicated to litigate. Asset forfeiture cases often involve the federal government and have to be litigated in federal court, which is difficult and expensive.

If you want to think of laws as an ecosystem, then think of civil asset forfeiture as a highly evolved species with all sorts of specialized defenses.

It seems to be slowly being ground away. The modern version of civil asset forfeiture was as a tool to take away the profits of drug kingpins in the 1980s and bootleggers during prohibition. Seems like the modern drug kingpins are companies like Johnson & Johnson, though.

> I'd love to hear a steelmanned argument in favor of it, maybe I'm missing something obvious?

If it were a big shipment of plutonium laced heroin, it seems fair game.

I think the biggest issue with civil asset forfeiture is the conflict of interest where police departments are keeping/using the seized assets. From the outside it looks a lot like the government acting like a gang.

The other big problem is it seems like it is up to the owner to prove the assets "innocence", rather than police proving the assets were the result of illegal activity.

If assets are seized, they need to go to a third party that can store them safely, return the assets to their owners. If found "guilty", the assets should go to some victims of crime fund, or destroyed.

Gold is legal. So is cash - in fact it’s legal tender for all debts public or private. By contrast, plutonium laced heroin is definitely not legal without the appropriate licenses from multiple regulatory agencies.

Yeah, I guess I wasn't super clear. I meant seizure of certain things is fair game i.e. Obviously problematic stuff. I didn't mean to suggest that means all things are fair game to be seized.

Looking at Wikipedia's definition of civil asset I see my "in head definition is slightly wrong:

> Civil forfeiture in the United States, also called civil asset forfeiture or civil judicial forfeiture, is a process in which law enforcement officers take assets from people who are suspected of involvement with crime or illegal activity without necessarily charging the owners with wrongdoing. While civil procedure, as opposed to criminal procedure, generally involves a dispute between two private citizens, civil forfeiture involves a dispute between law enforcement and property such as a pile of cash or a house or a boat, such that the thing is suspected of being involved in a crime...

So my use of clearly illegal assets being seized means it wouldn't actually be civil asset forfeiture. Mea culpa!

No civil asset forfeiture: cop pulls a drug dealer over, the drug dealer bribes the cop and is on his way.

With civil asset forfeiture: cop pulls a drug dealer over, the drug dealer offers to bribe the cop, the cop laughs and takes all his stuff anyway, books him, and the police department buys a martini machine.

Kind of a weak case, but that was the best steelman I could think of.

It sounds like a good idea until a cop acuse you of been a drug dealer without evidence, take all your money, and then you realize why you need a constitution and a independent court system.

Why would a cop give the money to the department instead of keeping it as a bribe for himself?

The greater risk is probably that your bank will just screw up and lose your stuff:

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/19/business/safe-deposit-box...

Probably not.

> Every year, a few hundred customers report to the authorities that valuable items — art, memorabilia, diamonds, jewelry, rare coins, stacks of cash — have disappeared from their safe deposit boxes.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civil_forfeiture_in_the_United...

> In 2010, there were 11,000 noncriminal forfeiture cases.

If I'm reading it correctly, that's just the Federal cases alone.

Asset forfeiture sucks, but I’d be more worried about run of the mill bank incompetence. Banks don’t really want to be in that business and screw up often.

Police can take anything anywhere under civil forfeiture; it's truly insane.

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