What "consent" looks like for the DEA and TSA
papersplease.org
papersplease.org
(I don’t have the sources but read years ago that states that let the cops keep the cash have ridiculous levels of abusive confiscations, whereas states that have the money go to the state coffers basically don’t)
(Most civil asset forfeiture is done by local cops stopping people on the highway and similar)
The Wikipedia page has more on the rationale, good or bad:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civil_forfeiture_in_the_United...
…and then the third is describing how American courts immediately recreated the laws with these inspirations to increase their budgets.
https://medium.com/luminasticity/adrenaline-culture-bed2d640...
(note: non-serious article has some crude language and scenarios)
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/02/22/world/americas/canada-pro...
Like what do you really know about Canada?
Because I'm getting the same "Montreal is the capital of Canada" vibes that I got from an American tourist when I was a little kid visiting the same tourist town that they were on summer vacation.
It astounds me how confidentially incorrect Americans (I'm assuming that you're American) are when it comes to their close neighbour.
So please, tell me more about Canada.
I would imagine that the funds that Canada froze in a unique situation are a rounding error compared to the funds some random US state seizes in a year.
Whatever their flaws so many other countries including Canada are so much better at this thing than the United States.
And this is relevant precisely because it's an example that shows the lack of financial liberty, that you could fall prey to in Canada. I thought it's a fitting answer to the parent comment.
How many people were affected by this issue? Again, it's a rounding eror compared to the number of people who are affected the corrupt practice of civil forfeiture.
These things are night and day different. A one off event compared to a systemic issue.
Did they not freeze bank accounts of people donating to the freedom convoy? Please note that this is a question of facts and not opinions. It is also completely removed from whether you (or I for that matter) support this cause or find the means that they chose legitimate.
Whataboutism is not a great argument. We should aspire to take the best features from each country, not to mirror any country exactly.
They were outside the color of law and often targeted specific trade coming out of adversarial nations.
It depends on who is getting robbed.
Kings and governments just make up special words for when they commit crimes.
This would have certain parallels to contemporary civil forfeiture.
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sheriff_of_the_City_of_London#...>
It might actually also make things worse, as local cops only get a small kickback, they need to confiscate more to get to the same levels for themselves.
It abstracts it away by one level. Without appropriate third party oversight you're going to be playing whack a mole until you have the President himself managing the operation.
Well, maybe if money from fines was allowed to go directly to paying for something that directly addresses the specific type of harm that the type of crime the fine was for tends to cause, that would be ok. Like, if someone is fined for damaging the road, that money can go towards fixing roads.
But nothing else.
Making someone else prove it came from a legit source before it disappears is much easier on them.
Especially since drug dealers (or most other folks) are not really all that interested in the scrutiny involved in a civil trial. Civil discovery is potentially incredibly invasive, with few of the protections of a criminal case.
And that might be enough. Give some credit to laziness and inertia.
Why not require due process and 4th amendment rights to be respected?
If the government convicts you of the crime and proves the money is the proceeds of the crime you are convicted for, them maybe it makes sense for the government to seize the funds. Absent that, it should be taken for what it is: armed robery.
This ship has sailed quite some time ago - resist TSA or border control to unlock your phone, and they either confiscate it or turn you back. These powers are unlikely to ever be curtailed again in the name of security. But I also think that TSA and border control should rather focus on people actually violating immigration law and compromising travel security.
If I was king.. all confiscated cash must go to organizations such as ACLU and EFF (not a comprehensive list). That way it can still be done when sensible, but the more it happens the more money goes to organizations who strive to reduce abuse.
I attended a wedding that got hit by a major flash flood that required a rescue operation by boat and helicopter. Thankfully no one was seriously injured. A half dozen people were swept away and rescued from trees. The rest of us got to higher floors of the building and they were concerned about us waiting out the flood because cars from the parking lot floated and rammed the first floor of the building. It was featured on an episode of I Do, Redo.
They brought in busses to transport the 61 people rescued to the local high school where they had activated the Red Cross and provided us dry cloths and food. I can't say enough nice things about the Red Cross volunteers and the staff at the high school, and same with the fire department and EMS.
However, when we were loaded into the busses, the police held the busses until they had a drug dog come into the busses to walk up and down the aisles, and only after that let the busses take us to the high school. While no one was seriously injured physically, people were traumatized from the flooding event and many attendees suffered from PTSD for years.
It was so cruel for the police department to do what they did with everyone in the mental state that we were in.
For reasons I do not understand, we were not free to leave the high school, and even the people that did not lose their cars to the flood were required to go to the high school on the busses. I can't recall how long they detained us at the high school, I'd guess 3 to 5 hours, and then they let us leave. The friend that came to pick me up (I did lose my vehicle to the flood) got to the high school not long after I did and had to wait in the parking lot for hours.
We wanted to feel safe once we got to dry land after the ordeal we went through. I did not feel safe until I got home.
Police budgets are a farce, and this is what the US gets. Public services are (in too many cases literally) criminally underfunded.
And .. obviously the last ~50-60 years of "tough on crime" dogwhistling (as the civil rights movement successfully moved the discrimination boundary) is the new heuristic for quasi-segregation. Of course it's was not invented overnight back then, as it has been ongoing since ~1866. The post-Reconstruction culture and policy changes all boil down to "X while Black" and occasionally "or poor".
Finish the job and end 'em. The US isn't a compatible platform for that kind of thing. It's a decentralized libertarian wild west with low social development, as intended from the start. Meanwhile, our taxes are going to waste in ignorance of that or in pretending we can (or even should) change it.
https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2020/01/wh...
Maybe there is a silly explanation about the bus being confiscated from a local drug lord and people needed to be protected, but otherwise I don't see a way how you officials could come out here not looking like idiots.
When festival buses are going to Fusion Festival (think Burning Man), it's common knowledge that half the buses will be stopped and "controlled", i.e. warantless search of all the passengers' belongings. That my German friends think this is normal or acceptable just blows my mind.
Civil forfeiture is absolutely insane. The “war on drugs” needs to end. Legalize all drugs. Dissolve the DEA. Tax all drugs. Earmark part of the sales towards drug addiction treatment and mental health.
What do you think the war on drugs means?
Ideally you'd want a world where it was effectively impossible to buy drugs without proper authorization. Singapore has managed it, though being much much smaller helps a lot there.
I actually grew up in another relatively small state that had a huge heroin problem in the 80s: Portugal. Portugal solved it by decriminalizing drugs and by making treatment modalities available for the people who needed help, namely methadone. This worked spectacularly well.
By the way, if you want to make it "impossible to buy drugs without proper authorization", I imagine you will want to include one of the most dangerous hard drugs there is: alcohol. We all know how well that worked the last time it was tried...
Thank you for using this term instead of calling Singapore a dictatorship (as many others are wont to do). It's a much more accurate description of Singapore's style of governance.
Something that certain people could learn from in their futile attempts to control others, wouldn't you agree?
It simply does not work to fight it aggressively. Junkies on the street can be managed but probably not eradicated in the next few decades, the issues the USA sees with drugs are extreme, and the root cause is usually much deeper than the drugs themselves. A lot of other developed countries have managed to help their drug addicted homeless population, the USA seems to be on a downward spiral on that front for decades...
Attacking the surface of the problem is a game of whack-a-mole, a Sisyphean task that won't ever come close to solving the actual problem.
You need programs to address the root causes (homelessness, poverty) as well as aggressive enforcement of drug laws. I’d argue the two are not necessarily at odds, and actually would complement one another.
How would that work in reality though? Aggressively enforcing drug laws push people to the margins (being arrested, having a felony charge, etc.), living on the margins of society is a major factor into pushing people into despair, despair fuels drug addiction.
Aggressive enforcement of drug laws is not compatible with an empathetic approach to drug abuse, it also creates many consequences which could've been unforeseen when introduced but we all live in the world of such consequences. Removing freedoms in name of pushing anti-drug laws, for what ends specifically? What are we trying to achieve by being tough on drugs in the end?
It does work. It works extremely well. Extremely well. The problem is that if you don't actually want to win the war, it works poorly. As is evident in the US and many other first world nations.
No, fixing the problems that just letting it run rampant is whack a mole. You're spraying for cockroaches when you find them rather than fumigating the house.
It's okay, most people from leading countries of the world think their situation is the best and they need compassion for all the amazingly negative aspects of drug use. Junkies, aggression, organised crime involvement, etc. The truth is that your governments don't want to fix the problem and it's obviously snowballed out of their control. It's easier to lay down and admit defeat than actually tackle the problem when it's this far gone. Good thing places like Singapore never let it get to that point.
They've won the war on drugs. It's not even a contest which is better, the drug free environment is way better. You just have to experience both to realise.
Even with all the repressive stance, death penalty, they still see an increase. That isn't what I would consider "working" for such harsh penalties.
> They've won the war on drugs. It's not even a contest which is better, the drug free environment is way better. You just have to experience both to realise.
There are absolutely no "drug free" environments in the world, absolutely none so your statement is impossible to assert in reality.
I prefer to live in a society where death penalties do not exist, even less for the cases of substance use/abuse.
[0] https://www.cnb.gov.sg/docs/default-source/drug-situation-re...
This is how enforcement works in a world where people are giving up their enforcement.
It's almost like the world is connected... and people doing things easier in other countries cascades on.
>There are absolutely no "drug free" environments in the world, absolutely none so your statement is impossible to assert in reality.
Wrong. There are several. It's okay if you want to be wrong.
>I prefer to live in a society where death penalties do not exist, even less for the cases of substance use/abuse.
Irrelevant. I don't care about your personal stance on death penalties. Has nothing to do with what I wrote.
They also have several thousand in drug rehab/prison right now.
They haven’t solved it by any means. They did successfully drive it out of the public eye though.
Does this ideal world include classification of alcohol, nicotine, caffeine, and high-sugar food products as drugs?
What does "proper authorization" look like?
It's amazing too. It's weird how many people are for drugs when such environments exist.
> Obviously it's impossible to eliminate every single instance
Exactly. So when does it end? What target needs to be reached for the war on drugs to stop?
> it's quite easy to eliminate virtually all negatives to society.
Then why has nobody done it?
The same way when does anything end? When you reach the level that is what you can feasibly resemble as "the end". So in this case, drug-free.
>What target needs to be reached for the war on drugs to stop?
You need to eliminate the negatives that society has to deal with related to illicit drug use? It's not that hard.
When is a newly built house finished?
>Then why has nobody done it?
Huh? Many countries have done it. Why many others haven't is because they don't want to.. Drug usage is a problem for the lower rungs of society, not the government or higher ups. The government must want to improve the life of their citizens at the cost of themselves. Like most objectively good government decisions.
You seem to be unaware that you're cyclically defining "the end" to be "when it's over".
War generally ends when the other side capitulates, or when both sides run out of resources and come to a peace agreement. In war on drugs, there's no "other side", there's just an invisible black market that you can get more and more visible by introducing more and more survaillence.
Exactly that. War on drugs can not effectively be won because the concept of "winning the war on drugs" is ill-defined.
“We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or blacks, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin and then criminalizing them both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night in the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did,” - Richard Nixon’s domestic policy advisor John Ehrlichman, 1994.
Drug free societies are way better in every measurable way. You only have to live in one for long enough that returning from that place seems absurd to be ridiculed with drugs.
Few countries won their war on drugs and it's amazing the benefits that a drug-free society brings. In fact, not even benefits, but the lack of obscene negatives.
And others.
That's it.
Citizens United was a fundamentally pro-first amendment, pro-human rights ruling.
I wonder if you can mount a defense of the idea that government has the right to ban people from making videos that criticize political candidates without government approval?
The ruling barred restrictions on corporations, unions, and nonprofit organizations from independent expenditures, allowing groups to independently support political candidates with financial resources.
In a dissenting opinion, Justice John Paul Stevens argued that the court's ruling represented "a rejection of the common sense of the American people, who have recognized a need to prevent corporations from undermining self government"
and I’m going to be selling ad space to SuperPACs every 2 years until they do. I really thought for sure that one would provoke a tweak to the constitution, but nope!
A whole is not the same as its constituent parts.
A person isn't an organ, or a cell, or molecules, or quarks, despite being composed of each of these.
A corporate entity (that is, any entity comprised of two or more people) might have a need for legal rights, but there's no reason acceptable to me that it has to be on a notion of equivalence to "personhood", equivalent to human rights. And calling it that merely compounds both error and confusion.
Courts are not infallible. And the Santa Clara v. SPRR US origin is its own ball of bullshit.
You can tell that’s an opinion held by most of the people in this country by the fact that we had a set of campaign finance laws that were gutted or basically made moot by various recent developments like Citizens United. We have those adorable quaint little limits (4 figures) that a person can give to a campaign per election cycle. The point of that is that as a person, there probably ought to be a limit for how much money you can give a campaign.
And entities other than people, just like they aren’t entitled to votes, aren’t entitled to be able to stuff money into campaigns. Even if they pretend they’re independent.
None of the campaign finance laws we have mean anything when you can use these loopholes big enough to drive an oil tanker through. Also, I think we’re the only ones among advanced democracies who have this stuff. I don’t think it’s making our democracy healthier.
The problem is that the corruption has built up so much, and so many generations have grown up being "educated" by propaganda on TV like "Law & Order" that they think this is not corruption at all.
But the 4th amendment is clear, they need a warrant. They never get one. And when they do, they are almost all fraudulent/invalid warrants.
But since government is the only one that gets to enforce the laws, it is not a surprise that government tends to let government get away with criminal activity.
I strongly disagree with this. Traffic stops are absolutely not a felony. Properly-motivated traffic stops (think: "Stopping a driver who is operating his vehicle erratically" or "Stopping a driver whose vehicle is obviously in dangerous disrepair") are essential to maintaining the safe operation of our public roads. What should absolutely be a felony are warrantless searches conducted as part of a traffic stop, properly-motivated or not.
If the cops can't get a warrant over the phone, then they should not be permitted to do the search. They're not pressed for time! It's not like you're going to be going anywhere, they've ordered you and your passengers out of the vehicle. And if you run on foot, they still have the vehicle that they can search if they get a warrant.
To be fair to that show, it doesn't ever misconstrue corruption as normal or OK. Quite the opposite.
So they try to separate the person from the asset, and launch a case against an asset as if it can call a lawyer and defend itself. They don't charge the person, they establish some weaker level of review against the asset.
That's called "robbery".
I've seen one of these searches happen to another passenger first hand it's absurd.
We're talking about prop money, not counterfeit money.
Bonus point if we give it a plaintive cute kitten voice so that the recording shows it pleading for its life.
(If you want to buy one of these, I'll gladly sell you it)
If you can work out a way to insure the loss on activation then it sounds like a solid business to me.
We're talking about the police, not the CIA, right? Can't imagine torture as a common response to obstinacy
Data point: I tried Googling for "police misconduct"...but by the time I'd typed "police miscon", Google was already suggesting half a dozen search strings - all of which amounted to "find a nearly lawyer to help you with your police misconduct case". Sounds like a booming business, eh?
In a country with more than 300 million people, there's bound to be bad ones, and some of those will become cops. I'd be happy if you could point out some comparative studies between countries, that take this into account, but I guess that's something I could just search for online
[1]: so do the other replies
Extreme reform is required at this point...
You'll get no due process in the sense that the "authority" who took your money and deprived you of it's use will suffer no consequences due to "qualified immunity."
The chances are very small due to the way the case is structured but it is entirely possible and it has been known to occur. The main issue is it's a _civil_ case against property and the rules of a civil trial massively over benefit the government and effectively ignore fourth amendment property rights.
thank you for linking your excellent comment
incidentally, the thread six years ago was about https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timbs_v._Indiana, and you may be pleased to know that tyson timbs got his land rover back
The three options are (a) the feds hold the cash until its origin is found to be legit, (b) they hold the person until the cash is verified legit, (c) the suitcase of cash and the person fly away never to be seen again.
I guess the 4th option would be making it much easier and faster for the DEA to obtain a warrant; but this just leads back to a, b, or c.
n.b. I am totally against local cops holding any amount of discovered money during random searches. That's a huge conflict if interest. I'm mainly commenting on the original post.
They generally aren't interested in catching criminals. They're interested in catching someone. The easier the better.
I know several officers, and can safely say they are as varied a group as any other profession. Their day-to-day typically consists of responding to 911 calls, backup to other officers, or traffic duty. I think they generally are interested in catching people breaking the law - particularly the really bad ones. And sure, they would prefer it to be easy, who wouldn't. They get paid like $60k/yr and their day-to-day involves stuff like responding to a domestic violence calls with belligerents wielding various weapons. My biggest challenge most days is finding a parking spot.
Are you asking a real question here?
> My biggest challenge most days is finding a parking spot.
I don't see how that justifies normalised and spread power abuse.
Where did I say anything about justifying power abuse?
It makes sense to anyone who has dealt with the police.
> Where did I say anything about justifying power abuse?
In your previous comment. Where you say job is hard, pay is low, so imply that we should be understanding.
It's astounding to me that every conversation about police pay never brings up their extremely generous pensions, lifetime of healthcare provided at taxpayer expense, ability to conceal-carry a gun nationwide, PBA cards to show other cops you shouldn't get a ticket. I'm sure there are other benefits I'm not including.
i mean we've tried this hundreds of times in different countries; it's not a new idea. we know what the results look like
closing your bank account and withdrawing the contents in cash is not only legal; it's the foundation on which the trust of the banking system rests. a colombian doing that would presumably not want to hang around in a potentially dangerous foreign country any longer than necessary
his poem was adopted posthumously 120 years later to boost morale
it has nothing to do with anything and relies on comparison to the most mismanaged countries in the world to justify a perpetuation of its flaws
we’ve gotten lucky with 1st amendment rulings over the last 100 years to perpetuate strong protections there and haven't had a military coup, but thats pretty much it. case in point, by 1910 the supreme court ruled that motion pictures had no 1st amendment protections, not overruling itself until the mid 1950s. anything can happen unless we button up the constitution with finely tailored amendments
If there were a law that directs confiscated money to one of: pay for medical bills of the poorest, rehabilitation of those with prison history, federal disaster relief fund, gender affirming care, phone bills in prisons, etc. None of these are my actual positions, these are just examples to remove the perverse incentive to steal.
https://archive.is/2024.07.24-000026/https://papersplease.or...
This nonsense can be stopped with a quick legislative change, which is not something that can be said of the deeper harms that Crypto has enabled.