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Comment by cogman10 | Hacker News Reader

It's more complicated than that. The reason for the raid in the first place was because the FBI suspected (correctly) that the owners of this lockbox company knowingly facilitated money laundering.

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.

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There's the whole civil asset forfeiture angle to this: they may have been ostensibly planning to have people defend their deposit box in court, only to get charged with a litany of crimes related to its contents. They didn't keep any of the articles separate, though, which makes me think this was just a legal robbery.

Definitely a case of malicious non-compliance. The police love to ignore their oath when they face no repercussions.

I hate everything about our anarcho-tyranical state.

A 'state' in the sense of a government is the antithesis of anarcho-anything.

Anarcho-tyranny means a government that doesn't enforce any of the laws that protect people, only enforces laws that protect itself. So it's like the absence of a government in the sense that a government is supposed to be tasked with protecting people's life and property.

Well that's objectively poor phrasing, then. 'Anarcho-' as a prefix refers to Anarchy, which refers to a society being in a state of not having authorities.

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.

> Anarchy > a state of disorder due to absence or nonrecognition of authority or other controlling systems

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).

If you want a real understanding of a word, look to its etymology.

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).

This has been the default for thousands of years and I wouldn't expect any less from our current government.

The anarchic aspect comes from the void in accountability that comes with large bureaucracies like states.

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.

I get what you're saying and agree. But even theoretically a corporation is much better at dealing with collective action problems. Setting up a new entity that looks a lot like a corporation is the standard approach to moving a needle.

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.

Yeah, that sounds dodgy as all heck.

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.

Related story: 4 or 5 years ago my brother got held up on the street in Baltimore in a daytime robbery. The cops drove by 30 seconds later, my brother pointed out the guy, and they caught him right away. My brother was told he could only get his money back if he could provide the serial numbers for the cash he had stolen. Of course he couldn't do that.

Were there witnesses or video or some other proof independent of your brother’s claims?

I smell BS in this story..

Baltimore police is known to be corrupt, what’s BS about the police officers citing unreasonable demands for proof in an attempt to pocket the money?

Hah. Yeah.

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.

You may want to watch The Wire, which was problematic enough. But then, nearly two decades later We Own This City (based on the non-fiction book of the same name) which breaks down a lot of the endemic corruption in Baltimore PD.

Civil forfeiture has turned into legalized robbery in the US. This is just an exceptionally egregious example, and you can see why people don't trust the FBI when things like this happen.

> The reason for the raid in the first place was because the FBI suspected (correctly) that the owners of this lockbox company knowingly facilitated money laundering.

Not a good enough reason to violate people's rights.

Every single gas station near the US major border knowingly 100% facilitate money laundering, and knowingly engage in a business where there is no doubt they are both taking and generating the proceeds by selling their gas.

Their gas pumps should be seized for investigation.

How does a gas station facilitate money laundering?

>>The initial taking was legal, it's how the property was handled after the fact that ran afowl the law.

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.

So when are all the agents involved getting charged?

I already know the answer, but still…

> By it's nature, who owned what was ambiguous. There was none or no identifying information.

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...

Saying "By it's nature, who owned what was ambiguous. There was none or no identifying information." seems reasonable given what was reported.

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...

It was ambiguous to the owner. Not necessarily the FBI.

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.

So basically anything that protects the customers privacy is automatically “deliberately to attract criminals”?

That’s a problem.

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