Judge finds no rights violations in FBI seizure Beverly Hills safe-deposit boxes
latimes.com
latimes.com
We really need to have a reset on law enforcement in this country. I don't think anyone's happy with the police anymore, federal or otherwise.
In face to face conversation with others, word choice is not critical because in conversation you can work out what someone means or intends over time. Written form is just not the same.
It's mostly meaningless to cite popular support for anything that doesn't clarify how it'll be completed by Congress.
People are willingly allowing broken policies as long as their perceived harm is greater on their perceived "enemies"
Still not convinced? Talk to some family members of cops. I am confident you'll come away with a new point of view.
That doesn't mean the principles and guidelines that drive our policing forces don't need a rewrite from time to time. I'm less critical of individual cops, and less inclined to blast the profession, but what I said is the best way I can express disatisfaction without getting personal or rude, to be quite honest.
I find your comment condescending considering it’s in reply to an admittedly emotional rant stemming from the fact my local police failed so thoroughly in their mission it made an FBI agent’s eyes go wide and say they’d open a civil rights investigation.
(Though maybe they were more focused on the fact I also very bluntly said “I’m not a Russian spy” and listed off the people making want to re-enact the scenes from the hit HBO television series “The Americans”.)
Being a police officer is less risky than say, a construction work flagger, but people feel coerced into giving them unearned respect since a construction work flagger can’t misunderstand on purpose and shoot you dead if you don’t kiss their butt like they’re an aggrieved military officer in 1930s Germany they will lie through their teeth and not follow through on their claim that they will do their damn job.
Please pick up a copy of “Rise and Fall in the Third Reich” and get back to me before replying again because I think you have no grasp of history.
Even talking about the police as a collective from the perspective of the US is odd. So many departments are different, they are not fully one entity.
The most important thing is that it is just that, a job.
2. FBI raided US Private Vaults, investigating the company for drug trafficking and money laundering in March 2021. FBI opened 700 safe deposit boxes on the assumption that their contents were associated with crimes.
3. 400 Owners of the boxes filed a class action suit, saying the FBI violated their 4th amendment rights.
4. September of 2022 U.S. District Judge R. Gary Klausner found no impropriety in the way the government obtained or executed the warrants
If you have a warrant for a building, or suite, and there's a bunch of little boxes inside ... what difference does that make ?
It seems to me that a savvy deposit box operator would create office space leases for every individual box such that you would have to enter a "premises" for each box, just as you would for individual offices in an office building ...
... or, at the very least, subdivide the box rooms such that every 50 boxes is in a different office with a different master tenant ...
If you’re looking at ways to prevent this from happening to you, the question is, would the FBI do something like this with the banks?
The answer is no. They are much larger and politically connected than a private safe deposit company. I recommend checking out a video by Steve Lehto if you want to learn more https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Lt5g3g2JHpQ
Bottom line is that you do not have any real privacy in society. Law enforcement is willfully ignorant of constitutional rights, and when they overstep, they often get away with it.
The only rights you have are the ones you are willing and able to fight for. "Always has been."
1 judge says, "you can grab the boxes, but not open them". The FBI grabs the boxes, then opens them anyway.
It seems like judge #2 ruled in favor of the FBI to save face.
Judge #2 ruled in favor of the FBI. The Plaintiff is appealing to the 9th circuit.
This is solid evidence to support the idea that the FBI was simply looting US Vault, since confusing the contents without documenting what came from each box would blow up any evidentiary value of the items seized, and prevent the evidence from being used in any criminal prosecution, or even civil asset forfeiture proceedings against the items themselves.
It is my opinion the FBI was expecting to keep everything they stole and auction it off for a profit.
> In their warrant request, the FBI and U.S. attorney’s office asked U.S. Magistrate Judge Steve Kim for permission to seize the store’s racks of safe-deposit boxes for forfeiture, but “not their contents.”
> The warrant request omitted a central part of the FBI’s plan: permanent confiscation of everything inside any box containing at least $5,000 in cash or goods, a senior FBI agent recently testified.
Is the crucial detail that the cash/goods lack any protection under the law? If there was a written and notarized murder confession in a box would that be permissible in court? I thought anything taken/found outside the scope of the warrant would be impermissible. Is the cash now impermissible for prosecuting actual crimes? (i.e. FBI can just keep it and make the owner sue for its return).
That isn't true in general, the supreme court has a test for whether things outside the warrant can be seized / not constitute an unconstitutional search.
1. Must be in plain sight.
2. Must be apparent that it was used in a crime.
3. Doesn't have to be accidentally or inadvertently found but if it's not the bar for it being a legal search is much higher.
Since it's a safety deposit box 1 & 3 are pretty much already checked and I think falls down on 2. I can't possibly see how the existence of cash is apparent that it's used in a crime.
Edit: I posted this as a (bad) joke, but then I see this sister comment on the article:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33848245
I liked it better as a joke.
It sounds like in the case of seizing these safe deposit boxes, no such procedures were implemented.
A Google search will rapidly avail here, including DOJ's own handbook for how to handle this situation. It comes up a lot!
Storing these items seems like the primary use of a safety deposit box.
Based on reading what appears to be the judge's actual opinion in the case (I've posted a link upthread), the excuse the FBI offered, and which the judge accepted, was that they had to open the boxes in order to "inventory the contents". But they also said they would only search the boxes to the extent required to identify their owners. From what I can gather, each box was contained in a "sleeve" which, in many cases, had a form in it, that could be read without opening the box, that identified the box's owner. Since each box was locked, the FBI could have simply made an inventory that, for each box, said "one safe deposit box, number #X, locked, contents unknown", with an additional note that either said "form found identifying box owner as A", or "no form found identifying box owner".
In other words, the FBI relied on an inconsistency in the warrant: it said they did not have permission to seize the contents of the boxes, but it also said they could follow "standard inventory policy", which in turn contained provisions that could be interpreted inconsistently to both require an inventory of the contents and to only authorize a search to the extent needed to identify the owner, if possible. This certainly seems to me to violate the Fourth Amendment.
In the case of boxes which were accompanied by a form identifying the owner, what obviously should have happened was that the FBI should have done nothing more with those boxes until the owner could be investigated to see if there was probable cause to think they had put evidence of a crime in the box. If there was, an additional warrant could be obtained to search that box. If not, the box could just be returned, unopened, to the owner. (In fact, the boxes of many plaintiffs were returned during the course of this lawsuit--but not unopened.)
In the case of boxes which were not accompanied by a form identifying the owner, the question would be whether that in itself was probable cause to think the box might contain evidence of a crime. In any case, that would be a question to be properly addressed by applying for an additional warrant.
So I think there were several rights violations here: first, the judge who approved the warrant should have spotted the inconsistency in what the FBI was asking for and resolved it; second, the FBI should have adopted an inventory policy that was consistent; and third, the judge in this ruling should not have let the FBI get away with what they actually did.
General warrants "confiscate all these things" are not constitutionally valid.
The part of the warrant that makes it inconsistent is where it says the FBI can follow "standard inventory procedures", which are inconsistent with the above specification of what is to be seized, at least as the FBI decided to implement them, since that included opening each box and making a list of its contents.
You must specify and affirm in connection to what, and "drug dealers might be using it", if approved, should be grounds for seriously questioning that judge's commitment to protecting the People from Law Enforcement overreach.
The FBI did that: they said they suspect UPV of engaging in, and facilitating, criminal activity, so they wanted to seize the boxes in UPV's possession. But that, in itself, did not justify opening every single box; it only justified seizing the boxes and holding them.
The legal argument I'm criticizing is not the FBI's, but the judge's. The judge said the FBI didn't violate anyone's rights because they followed "standard inventory procedures", and the warrant allowed them to do that. The judge did not even address the fact that that provision of the warrant was inconsistent with the basis on which the warrant was issued and with the warrant's specification of what was to be seized, namely, the boxes, not their contents.
This judgment should be reversed on appeal on those grounds.
Quite possibly not, but I would at least like to see it go up the chain.
Not long ago people were joking on Steve Lehto's YouTube videos that the police might as well do forfeiture on armored cars. In California, the police started doing exactly that. You can hear them lamenting in one case that they only seized $300,000 and not the $1,000,000 they were expecting. This practice is being fought but it is still common in the US for police to seize assets just because they feel the assets might have been used in a crime, or might be proceeds of a crime. No criminal charges are necessary, and you have to sue to get assets back.
[1] https://s3.documentcloud.org/documents/23115856/092922-uspv-...
[2] https://reason.com/2022/09/30/federal-judge-decides-safe-dep...
This case is just another example of how the Fourth Amendment is essentially dead.
This decision is just more overreach in the same vein as civil asset forfeiture, which gets around "unreasonable search and seizure" by basically saying the money and the property seized has no rights and uses some twisted logic that allows a civil action against property for a perceived criminal violation even though no criminal complaint is made. It's ludicrous.
An originalist interpretation fo the Constitution is propaganda, nothing more. The idea was also invented in the 1970s and 1980s. Don't fall for it.
Courts as a general rule side with prosecutors, law enforcement (qualified immunity anyone?) and the wealthy. The pseudo-intellectual hand-wringing is just a pretense for political views.
Basically, the FBI in this case actually did give nearly all the property back. Seems like a win right?
Not actually -- I don't think the FBI necessarily expected this case to blow up like this, so they're going back to their favorite playbook.
Make the facts of the case most favorable, so the judge will be inclined to rule on the law itself. In other words, the FBI wanted a favorable ruling, so it returned everything.
If there was no suit, was no publicity, would the FBI have returned nearly as much? I doubt it. Civil asset forfeiture needs an examination in this country.
How and why does the FBI work against the interests of the public (i.e. property rights)? Do they simply get to keep the proceeds of the seizure, which would be a perverse incentive?
At many local level states, literally the police dept gets to keep the money and fund e.g. bonuses using them, which is really a peverse on the ground incentive.
How is this possibly kosher?
"Prove that you're not a criminal (assumed guilt without a trial or due process), and we'll return property we stole from you."
Since "Orwellian" and "Kafkaesque" inadequately encapsulate the evil this represents, I think we need new adjectives to describe this insidious and corrosive abuse of rights in the name of the color of law.
Disgusting.
"It is not enough for an impermissible investigatory motive to be present to invalidate a search and seizure. It can only invalidate it if that is the only motive behind the search."
So apparently the 9th Circuit endorses the issuing of flimsy warrants for fishing expeditions, and once again, ignores the requirement whereby the warrant must describe that which is to be searched and seized.
Firthermore, this catalog of other, no evidence present, but still anonymous customers, is an implicit nod that anonymity is criminal in character according to law enforcement.
This seems like the most salient issue so that's rather unfortunate.
> “Unfortunately for plaintiffs, the mere presence of such a motive is not by itself enough,” he wrote, citing a U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals ruling in another search and seizure case. “An impermissible investigatory motive must be the only reason the agents conducted the inventory.”
This would seem to almost give carte blanche to craft warrants on the flimsiest means possible and then wildly overstep the original scope of investigation.
Old news (Sept).
They are magnets for thieves, police, usually in urban area where a PI can easily follow you and even when acting fully within the law it could unintentionally look very bad if you are in the middle of some proceedings.
A hole in the ground is probably preferable 99 times out of 100.
That is what is alleged, but has yet to be proven.
I doubt that the owners put up billboards or bought ads saying "Store your ill-gotten goods here, wink-wink". It is much more likely that the business was taken advantage of by criminals. Like how FedEx and UPS are used to ship drugs.
Judging by the lawsuit, there's at least 400 customers who used them for legitimate purposes. And some unknown number of customers who used them for nefarious purposes. At what percentage nefariousness does a business become a criminal enterprise, resulting in a large raid by the FBI? Sweeping up and inconveniencing the innocent customers in their dragnet?
Traditionally, the answer was "your bank", but does that apply anymore? Chase is discontinuing the service, I'm sure plenty of banks never offered it in the first place, plenty of people use "online-only" banks where there might be a branch for legal reasons, but it's nowhere they could easily stop in and retrieve documents, and entirely too many people are unbanked.
This seems like enough of a gap in the market that a third-party service that says "we've got a really secure building with armed guards and lots of cameras and stuff" could reasonably find an audience among the law-abiding.
I assume a service like the one raided doesn't advertise to the broad public "store dirty assets here" -- indeed, one would expect advertising the service to non-criminal customers would be an important part of their legal ass-coverage strategy.
Anonymous safe deposits threaten the paradigm that assets should by KYC'd and easily visible to creditors/the wife/child support/.gov/privacy-hating-tyrants without resorting to depending on the testimony of the defendant.
Saying "anonymous boxes are a problem" is viable if there's a prominent non-anonymous alternative. I don't think that exists-- see my concern about the bank option.
Hell, one would think this would be a great opportunity for law enforcement to get a direct line into "normal people's" business. Let them do a safe-deposit service: put my passport/birth certificate/old paper stock certificates in a vault at the police station. It's less likely to be burgled than my house, and if they want to gawk over a 30-year-old certificate for one share of MCD, they can feel free.
In other words, salt the surrounding area with lightly buried worthless coins, nuts, bolts or metal scraps and anyone trying to find your loot will give up.
Ground-penetrating radar is a different beast, but also has its limitations: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ground-penetrating_radar#Limit...
Diamonds were worthless until De Beers paid a marketing agency to make the public think they are valuable.
This sounds like a fun thought exercise. No idea who we are protecting against but some factors might be:
- Moisture. The containers need to be completely sealed from moisture and have resistance to acid from the soil.
- Metal detector. Perhaps this could be mitigated using a skid-steer with an auger drill attachment? Some of the larger skid-steers can use an 80 inch bit. Excavators can use even larger bits and drill at angles to get under solid objects. Rock auger bits can get through some rocks. Layers of gravel might obscure detection from ground penetrating radar.
- Location should be obfuscated by trees to avoid satellite and aircraft imaging from Keyhole/Google/Others.
- Accessibility. If there is a few feed of rocks above the container and a rope passes through the rocks, then retrieval is less likely to damage the container and one would not need dig as deep for extraction.
- Drill numerous holes and find some other use for them whilst singing One of these things is not like the other
For anti-metal detection, ideal spot would be atop/near a buried junkyard. Once they've gone to the trouble of excavating a rusted Dodge Neon, interlopers are not inclined to dig there again.
The investigators tear apart the backyard and find nothing. The alleged terrorist then lets his wife know the backyard is prep'd for this year's potato planting.
Lynx also works.