Appeals Court: FBI's Safe-Deposit Box Seizures Violated Fourth Amendment
reason.com
reason.com
My conclusion was to search for "holographic tamper" on AliExpress, and carefully examine the photos to find models where each sticker has a number and a differently-aligned background pattern. Prices are around $5 for 250.
Then you could use several stickers to seal whatever container, and take photos to record each sticker and its pattern. There are ways to exploit this system, but it probably helps against a non-sophisticated attacker.
Not to mention, you'd also need a really effective solvent for resin that doesn't also happen to be a solvent for whatever the mosaic is made of. Perhaps the mosaic is made of resin beads.
All that being said, it's virtually guaranteed that a valid attack on these methods exists. There's no such thing as perfect security. It's always a case of evaluating your threat model to make security attempts that thwart a constantly moving array of types of attack.
The LockPickingLawyer on youtube demonstrated that you can just unglue the commonly used tamper seals with a bit of alcohol and reapply them when it had time to evaporate. Someone watching his channel wanted to use a lock sealed with them as proof that LPL was picking locks off camera first and all he got was proof that the seals where useless.
X-Ray imaging has gotten surprisingly affordable: https://www.ebay.com.au/itm/386247465197 (honestly I was looking for canister X-Ray machines which are a bit safer for this, now I'm seeing these things and thinking "is my search for a way to find joists in walls actually over?)
The company was setup to maintain privacy. By it's nature, who owned what was ambiguous. There was none or no identifying information.
What's at issue is if the FBI could use the contents of these boxes to further prosecute previously unknown crimes. The lower court said yes, the upper court no.
The initial taking was legal, it's how the property was handled after the fact that ran afowl the law.
You could argue that having authorities that abuse their authority to self-serving ends renders that authority illegitimate, but by the admission of Anarcho-tyranny's own proponents (as a theory), they still recognize the existence of these "authorities", and just contest the governance decisions made by those authorities.
That's certainly a bad government, but to call it anarcho-anything is just downright confusing.
Emphasis mine. The Government failing to recognize it's own laws and founding principles absolutely qualifies as anarchy.
Anarchy as a state(1) of disorder predates Anarchy as a form of government for a state(2).
Anarchy 1530s, "absence of government," from French anarchie or directly from Medieval Latin anarchia, from Greek anarkhia "lack of a leader, the state of people without a government" (in Athens, used of the Year of Thirty Tyrants, 404 B.C., when there was no archon), abstract noun from anarkhos "rulerless," from an- "without" (see an- (1)) + arkhos "leader" (see archon).
From 1660s as "confusion or absence of authority in general;" by 1849 in reference to the social theory advocating "order without power," with associations and co-operatives taking the place of direct government, as formulated in the 1830s by French political philosopher Pierre-Joseph Proudhon (1809-1865).
It is this dysfunctionionality that makes free market oriented societies that place greater limits on the power of the state generally more prosperous than societies with significant government intervention, despite the latter theoretically being better able to address a litany of collective action problems.
The government doesn't have the bandwidth to move on collective action problems that people don't already have figured out by some other means, voting isn't a great tool for doing more than the really basic stuff like keeping a military and police force functional. And even for things like the military, private sector institutions are better at building all the components.
We have corporations (using a very wide definition that includes non-profit entities that are legally similar) that tackle every problem under the sun. You can't expect beat an entity that exists for the sole purpose of addressing a problem with a general purpose schizophrenic institution like a government.
So if someone had (say) $1000 in cash in there, they'd be told to pick out the bank notes or something.
At which point it's just gambling as to whether any particular bank note is going to get you arrested or not due to it having a bad history.
Maybe 10y ago I was robbed. The investigator who took my case, a month later, asked me if I had anything to drink that night. I said, yeah, one beer about 7hr earlier. He said that because I drank that night that would close the investigation and that was that.
Why are you lying or making up stuff? Even the raiding party's memo doesn't claim that:
The memo states that “[e]ach inventory [would] likely include the following”: the USPV box door with its lock, a form with emergency contact information, the physical deposit box, and the box’s contents.
Opinion by Judge Milan D. Smith, Jr.: https://cdn.ca9.uscourts.gov/datastore/opinions/2024/01/23/2...
In an indictment against U.S. Private Vaults, Inc., the U.S. attorney for Los Angeles accused the company of marketing itself deliberately to attract criminals, saying it brazenly promoted itself as a place customers could store valuables with confidence that tax authorities would be hard-pressed to learn their identities or what was stored in their locked boxes. To access the facility, customers needed no identification; it took just an eye and hand scan to unlock the door.
“We don’t even want to know your name,” it advertised, according to prosecutors.
https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2021-04-02/fbi-beve...
My understanding was the identifying info may placed by the customer inside the box, with the agreement being the box would not be opened by the hosts except under defined exceptions.
That’s a problem.
Not a good enough reason to violate people's rights.
Their gas pumps should be seized for investigation.
That is not the ruling at all
The FBI lied to the court system, and was never authorized to take the boxes at all, they were only authorized to secure them and identify the owners of the property to enable returning to those owners
That was all the original warrant authorized
Then after they executed that warrant, they then initiated (illegally) "inventory" procedures far beyond what was authorized by the court (warrant) and once inventoried further initiated (illegally) forfeiture proceedings of the property.
The original warrant only authorized the FBI to "take" aka seize property belonging to the company itself for the purposes of their criminal case everything beyond that was actually specifically barred in the actual warrant, which the FBI ignored and did what ever the hell they wanted anyway. It was further reveled that was their plan all along and they deceived the court from day 1.
I already know the answer, but still…
https://ij.org/press-release/innocent-security-deposit-box-r...
Well it make sense when you understand that the FBI is not about seeking "justice", it is about enforcement and punishment.
The process is their goal, to make peoples lives miserable and to do "street justice" not to win in the court system and get a conviction
Further in this case, was also "Policing for Profit" which is what the entire civil asset forfeiture scheme is about.
This naive view that the FBI, or law enforcement in general, today is about "protecting the public" and "getting justice for victims" is laughably absurd
They couldn't get the paperwork right. From the first time I signed up and was issued a box, the paperwork was screwed up in some royal fashion, I would thoroughly read it and point out that they messed it up (always unfavorable to me) and they'd fix it up apologetically. This is a bank. Bankers do paperwork for a living and their livelihood depends on dotting "i"s and crossing "t"s, so to speak!
The worst experience was the second visit when I discovered that my keys no longer worked. Well, I'd brought only one key of course, and when we discovered that it had stopped working, they demanded for me to go back and bring in the twin key to test that one too. Of course it was jammed. I was absolutely appalled. The "senior relationship manager" said the boxes are old and tend to seize up like that. I demanded a letter in writing with their proposal to drill the lock and rekey it, for free, under my supervision.
So I came in on the Drill Day and, you know how they have that little private Viewing Room where you put the box, open it, and inspect its contents? Well, the drilling contractor had put all his tools and toolbox inside that room, so it was full of valuable property already. I was sort of flabbergasted at the clear security breaches they were committing, constantly. This is a bank!!!
So eventually I caught wind that safe deposit boxes are completely deprecated. The last straw is when I asked the banker what would happen in a power outage - could I retrieve my belongings? He said nah, the last power outage they had, the cameras stopped working so they closed and wouldn't allow any customers in. Well, shit, one purpose of having offsite storage was to stash some cash and emergency supplies in case the shit hits the fan, and they're telling me it'll be off-limits in case of the slightest outage or civil unrest.
So I decided that an SDB is useless for my (or anyone's) purposes and I closed it out and said bye-bye. They never screw up the paperwork on my checking or savings accounts.
What makes you think their location would be natural disaster proof if it can't even handle a blackout?
For what you spend on these hypothetical scenarios on an ongoing basis, you may as well just figure out a much better method—like keeping cash on you, in the house, in your vehicle. Like cameras, the best one is the one you have on you.
"Bugout bags" probably way more sensible over this nonsense.
Like you have to leave your home in a rush to not be covered in lava, like on Iceland.
> There are an estimated 25 million safe deposit boxes in America, and they operate in a legal gray zone within the highly regulated banking industry. There are no federal laws governing the boxes; no rules require banks to compensate customers if their property is stolen or destroyed.
> 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. Sometimes the fault lies with the customer. People remove items and then forget having done so. Others allow children or spouses access to their boxes, and don’t realize that they have been removing things. But even when a bank is clearly at fault, customers rarely recover more than a small fraction of what they’ve lost — if they recover anything at all. The combination of lax regulations and customers not paying attention to the fine print of their box-leasing agreements allows many banks to deflect responsibility when valuables are damaged or go missing...
> Wells Fargo’s safe-deposit-box contract caps the bank’s liability at $500. Citigroup limits it to 500 times the box’s annual rent, while JPMorgan Chase has a $25,000 ceiling on its liability. Banks typically argue — and courts have in many cases agreed — that customers are bound by the bank’s most-current terms, even if they leased their box years or even decades earlier.
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/19/business/safe-deposit-box...
The point of the viewing room is that it starts and ends empty.
This contractor had stored all his equipment and tools in there. Then I had to go and mingle it with my box's contents.
What if he had discovered some drill bits were missing? I could be suspected, because I was alone in private with them, so I could have placed them in my SDB.
I asked the manager what I should do if I find someone else's belongings when I enter the viewing room. They said, that shouldn't happen: I should inform them. Yep.
One use of SDB that I like is to get estate documents to heirs. My SDB includes a GnuCash one-pager printout of my financial accounts, usually current to within a few months. It also contains a one-pager that documents the remaining info that I think might affect my estate, like what health and renter's insurance policies I had.
Even if a neighbor in my apartment building leaves their unlit gas stove burner on before leaving town for the weekend (yes, this happened), this time obliterating me and any documents at home, heirs will eventually get the SDB, hopefully with exactly the documents they need.
The principal items are my citizenship documentation and copies of keys.
I'm confused, what's the problem here? You were getting your lock drilled. What were you worried about happening?
> Well, shit, one purpose of having offsite storage was to stash some cash and emergency supplies
What made you think a security deposit box is the solution for that, in case of civil unrest? Banks aren't even open in evenings or weekends. The boxes are intended for long-term storage of things you don't need immediately or in an emergency.
Emergency cash and supplies, why wouldn't you keep those at home? Surely you can find a good hiding place if you're concerned about people finding them?
A very large fire proof safe in a hidden room in a house is going to be much more convenient to access documents and probably more safer given the story here.
Banks don't treat these boxes seriously anymore, best to take it in your own hands.
NYT article about it from 2019:
It's like someone using YouTube as a general purpose data storage service.
"Real bank" branches do still exist - but they aren't as commonplace as they used to be. My nearest one for my credit-union is a good 45 minute drive away, ugh.
Not a dig at the grandparent commenter who was obviously unfamiliar with it, but being upset at it for being a libertarian opinion mouthpiece is sort of like being upset with National Review for being conservative or the New Republic for being lefty.
Many countries continue to abuse their power and are trying everything to change regulation in order to keep and increase their control and power over on their slaves, oh I mean citizens. Just a bunch of power hungry and usually corrupt people
Muddying these lines does a disservice to your argument. We aren’t slaves nor serfs. We are mostly disinterested.
https://constitution.congress.gov/constitution/amendment-13/
What the exception does is ban the now-extint practice of "convict leasing"[1]
The naive front, is this secrecy is in the 'interest of the children' (meme.jpg), and thus they haven't a right to public adjudication. Corrupt judges salivate for the proceeds of that.
And some do utilize the laws and systems in our country to increase the amount of slaves though.
This is likely just the tip of the iceberg: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kids_for_cash_scandal
I'm not going to argue for the hyperbole of us all being slaves though.
Passports/citizenship: Although most people will see a passport a sa travel document, you could also see it as a certificate of ownership. In many countries it is illegal to have multiple passports which supports this argument.
Try resigning from the United States. It’s very difficult. Also, passports and border patrol have been used to prevent people from leaving a country in order to exploit their labor, and slavery:
> During World War I, European governments introduced border passport requirements for security reasons, and to control the emigration of people with useful skills. These controls remained in place after the war, becoming a standard, though controversial, procedure
Lastly, if you do not comply or pay taxes to your owner, you will be taken by force and sometimes with the result of injury of death.
It's always been how kings and governments raised the money to pay their armies.
In the uk it started around 1800, a few years before ending slavery. Could it just be a substitute?
Sharecropping taxes are income taxes. There weren’t formal income taxes because peasants didn’t have incomes. They paid a tax to their lord that was fixed as a function of the productivity of the land they farmed.
Income tax is even less coercive than previous forms taxation, where people were taken from whether or not they could afford it. With income tax, people who do not work do not pay it. In fact many people who do work do not pay income tax.
You need money. If you work, you give half to the gov.
If you earn “passive”, it still happens, but rates are a lot lower
It is actually the opposite. It all belongs to the rulers, and they generously gift you a portion of it.
It’s really not. The Third Party Doctrine has muddied the Fourth Amendment’s legal boundaries. The fact that a district judge originally ruled in the FBI’s favour should show that.
> Everyone associated should be fired
If they continue to think they did the right thing, sure. That’s incapacitation. But prioritising retribution isn’t helpful when restitution and deterrence are unfulfilled.
Perhaps I’m overindexing on the term “sickening,” but it seems unhelpful to bring an emotion like disgust into a technical legal discussion.
Where one has (and doesn’t have) a reasonable expectation of privacy isn’t trivial. I think it’s obvious that a cop who recognizes a fugitive in public is acting reasonably while the same cop doing a facial-recognition search at a public school parking lot may not. Where does searching public Twitter photos lie? What if they’re only accessible with a login?
If you can’t tell, I think the third-party doctrine as presently interpreted is wrong. But the history leading up to it is incredibly reasonable, recent and well documented.
When true is redefined to false, it tends to raise emotions to a high level. Injustice often results in people's lives being disrupted and ruined where the ruin never should have happened. We should be disgusted by injustice.
Sure, do that. This isn’t that. Being “disgusted” by the Third Party Doctrine, broadly, isn’t the same as being offended by injustice.
There are some pretty obvious and reasonable lines we could draw here. For example, is the thing available to the general population, or only to specific parties who haven't chosen to make it public?
This doesn't necessarily answer your question, because you might e.g. have a reasonable expectation that data which is ephemerally available to the general population is not being recorded en masse and indexed into a central database, but it provides a boundary that would have eliminated a large swath of the trouble.
I agree. The problem is we have, on one hand, the police absolutists, and on the other hand, people who want to express their outrage more than do anything real. Neither bothers educating themselves on the legal merits of the other side’s. Both turn the Third Party Doctrine into a totem.
The Third Party Doctrine was created by Congress. Barring SCOTUS overturning half a century of law (again), that means the Congress must remake it. The lack of a popular alternative directly leads to the Doctrine’s persistence. We could draw these lines. But we don’t because we’re too busy expressing conniptions.
No, the third party doctrine was a mistake.
> But prioritising retribution isn’t helpful when restitution
I'm not sure in this case, that is what is going on. The sequence of decisions at the FBI and DOJ were so terrifyingly bad that the carriers of the ideas leading to those decisions need to be removed from the institution. They are a cancer.
Firing would be a deterrent. Given qualified immunity, the consequences for this kind of abuse of power are small, and that's a factor in why so much of it happens.
I'm not necessarily a fan of creating such high stakes setups. But until these institutions are reformed around the concept of equity such that their victims are routinely and predictably reimbursed for the harms perpetrated by the institutions, we should fall back to insisting on criminal punishment for the individuals who enable them.
The government obtained a warrant to seize the business and, as a part of that, to do a routine inventory of what's inside the boxes. After securing the warrant, the FBI said "sike, we're gonna rifle through customers' stuff to see if we can uncover new crimes... and we're gonna keep the contents via civil forfeiture too."
Several folks sued, and then the government dragged their feet for a while, but eventually said "ok, we'll return your stuff, you have no legal standing anymore." The courts agreed.
The only outstanding issue was whether the government should be ordered to destroy any records / copies of what they found in the deposit boxes they were not supposed to investigate in the first place. That's where the courts differed. The appeals court decision is a pretty scathing criticism of the whole fiasco, but strictly speaking, it only delivers a verdict on that last question (yes, the government has to destroy it).
We really need to reign in theft under the guise of civil forfeiture. If clear abuses like this don't get that issue raised in courts I wonder what it's going to take.
No, it is one trial. Appeals courts do not (in general [0], and did not in this case) conduct trials.
[0] There are cases where what is usually an appellate court, like the SCOTUS, has original jurisdiction over certain cases and conducts trials, but in those cases it is not an appellate court and there is no prior trial, and there are cases where specialized lower courts (small claims, traffic courts where they are separate and not a function of a court of general jurisdiction, etc.), can be appealed to a trial court of general jurisdiction, which will conduct a trial, either in the normal sense or on the record of the prior trial.
(1) https://beverlypress.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/03/US.Priva...