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Comment by from | Hacker News Reader

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I think that's being appealed and in that case all the IJ was asking for was for people who had their stuff seized to have their names removed from some government database. Basically anyone who asked for their money ended up getting it back.

> It went on to return everything in about 180 of those boxes after failing to produce evidence to support the allegations, court documents show. Those box holders retrieved more than $27 million. Attorneys for other customers say they recovered close to $25 million more through private negotiations with the U.S. attorney’s office.

https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2022-09-23/fbi-beve...

That's $52 million and that's just from the attorneys they talked to - I think another LA Times article mentioned that around 5% of boxholders didn't even claim anything. They seized a few million from Poliak the owner but they had him talking about being a professional criminal for hours and hours. Still messed up but maybe if another judge sees it goes another way.

The problem being discussed is not so much the government stealing people's money, it is the government searching your property without any semblance of a warrant or any shred of evidence that could be used to obtain a warrant.

Per this ruling, if the FBI obtained a warrant to confiscate Google's servers using proof that Google is engaging in criminal behavior, they could then claim to start an inventory of every Gmail account in order to give people back access to their accounts. If they do so, they would then be perfectly justified in starting investigations into each and every Gmail user for anything they find in their emails, without any warrant whatsoever, because their inventory of the emails and pictures was not solely motivated by fishing for evidence.

Similarly, they could seize a post office and do the same with un-opened mail, per the same logic.

These cryptomessenger-take downs happened in Europe and most EU jurisdictions work very differently from the US as far as admissibility and searches go. In fact in several of them (France, UK and Netherlands iirc) you even have to decrypt your own devices to provide evidence against yourself if there is a reasonable suspicion that evidence exists.

Actually there was a case some time ago very similar to your post office example: Someone was stealing letters/packages in a post sorting center near the Dutch-german border. Supervisors found a stash of partially opened/damaged/illegibly addressed letters and the suspected thief. Hand everything over to the police. Police opens all letters and reads them ostensibly to determine whether things are missing and where the letter is supposed to be delivered. One letter is from some german dude to some dutch dude asking for cannabis seeds. Oops. A few busted down doors later german dude is convicted, appeals on the grounds that it was obviously illegal for the police to just read his letter for no reason. Appeal denied - sure it was illegal for the police to do that, but he didn't get convicted based on the letter, but based on his plantation that was found during a raid.

So, as a general rule, it usually doesn't matter how or why police knew about something, if they have solid, physical evidence at the end of the day, it will not be thrown out just because some constitutional rights were ignored along the way.

So they can basically use the result of an illegal search to justify it? That seems so wrong to me. Makes you wonder why they even require warrants at that point.

Post office would be a much harder legal sell given it's a federal entity with plenty of precedence against that.

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