DEA passenger searches halted after watchdog finds signs of rights violations | Hacker News Reader

DEA passenger searches halted after watchdog finds signs of rights violations

nbcnews.com

206 pointsperihelions214 comments

> f the agents found cash, they seized it through civil forfeiture — a legal process that places the onus on the passenger to prove it was not connected to drugs in order to get it back

one of the absolutely most horrible laws that exist in the U.S. today that goes totally against the presumption of innocence that is (supposedly) the bedrock of our legal framework

> The IG found that the search was based on a tip by an airline employee who passed on the names of passengers who had purchased flights 48 hours before departure.

> That employee was being paid by the DEA a percentage of the cash seized, the IG found, and had received tens of thousands of dollars over several years. That arrangement is problematic, investigators concluded.

I think this goes even beyond civil forfeiture (which shares revenue with police departments, etc)

I think sharing it with an airline employee is out and out corruption.

Civil forfeiture is also out and out corruption. But I agree that this goes beyond the usual bounds of that process.

Some people just assume that legal == good. Too many of them comment on conundrums of morality without making that clear.

But is it really legal??? Seems pretty unconstitutional to me

I honestly don't understand how this has been allowed to stand all these years.

There are two ways that the abuses which happen at the intersection of government force and private business typically wind up making headlines and then getting scrutinized.

First is someone dies. Either someone goes postal, an attractive woman kills herself, a sympathetic bystander who had nothing to do with it or perhaps an otherwise decent cop who's begrudgingly getting leveraged as muscle for the scam catches a bullet.

More common is the victims of the scam pile up until some enterprising lawyer sniffs out a class action.

I think threesebig issues are that it’s hard to draw the line and make a “one-size-fits-all” set of rules, that this is a state by state issue, and that it’s easy to hand wave away the corruption by saying “we’re the police!”

Presumption of innocence until proven guilty is straightforward and one size fits all. No state nuance necessary.

I don’t either. How has this not been challenged as unconstitutional?

The problem, in general, is that any money collected by the criminal justice system should go into a fund that gets redistributed to victims or the population in general--it should never go into a "fund" that the state has any discretionary control over.

Any other arrangement sets up far too many perverse incentives.

I don't expect this situation or the situation in the title will improve over the next four years. People voted for a "crime and punishment" president, and we're about to experience the consequences. I really hate the excessive frisking and policing at airports and public events, and I despise our increasingly militarized police. I tend to focus on local events and road trips, doing my best to avoid these intrusive experiences for myself and my family. I regularly donate to organizations like the ACLU, EFF, and other civil liberties groups that fight against over-policing, despite their imperfections.

Just like the last time he was president, I'll bet.

The reps have consolidated around him over the eight years since 2016. They’ve got concrete policy plans and all three branches of the government. They’re gonna do way more stuff.

This is unfortunately correct

Would the blockchain make it easy to prove the source of crypto assets?

Or are crypto holders at risk of being arbitrary robbed by the government if they don't have thorough enough records?

nobody uses crypro assets as money.

not true

we're talking about seizing cash they find while searching; I'm not sure if they can seize bank accounts (or crypto accounts) in the same way. How would they even find them?

Well they wont do this to a senator or their billionaire friends, so you're gonna have to live with it.

Obviously the solution is to vote for someone who gives them even more rights to violate yours /s

> In a management directive issued on Thursday, the Justice Department’s Office of the Inspector General said it had been hearing complaints about the searches for years — and had recently learned new information that suggested there were significant problems with them, including potential constitutional violations.

For years... The recent info is (of course) a passenger recording their encounter.

> The IG said investigators could not come to any conclusions about whether the searches involved racial profiling because the DEA does not collect data on all the people it stops — only on the cases in which money is seized.

Data on seizures seems like a solid start. Why don't they have data on searches?

> “The Department has long been concerned — and long received complaints — about potential racial profiling in connection with cold consent encounters in transportation setting,” the report said, adding that the DEA between 2000 and 2003 “collected consensual encounter data on every encounter in certain mass transportation facilities as part of a Department pilot project to examine the use of race in law enforcement operations.”

> But neither the DEA nor the Justice Department “drew any conclusions from the data collected about whether the consensual encounters were being conducted in an unbiased manner, and in 2003 the DEA terminated its data collection efforts,” the report said, and “its consensual encounter activities continued.”

Complaints for years, yet decided to stop recording data... That's sketchy as hell.

> The IG found that the search was based on a tip by an airline employee who passed on the names of passengers who had purchased flights 48 hours before departure.

"Fight crime with crime" seems to be a fairly widespread attitude amongst government agencies (reminded of the TSA article yesterday), but this seems particularly egregious.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42228795

> Complaints for years, yet decided to stop recording data... That's sketchy as hell.

The motivation could also be practical. Studies are canceled for a variety of reasons unrelated to the conclusion: flawed design, poor data collection process, data doesn't generalize, data isn't specific enough, study has run out of budget, something significant changed in the middle of the study, etc.

> something significant changed in the middle of the study

"Oh shit! They're right. Our agents are bullies and thugs stealing from the citizens. Better stop looking"

I don't know where the government gets off on using "consensual encounters" as a euphemism for 4th Amendment violations.

I watched the institute for justice video about this months ago. If that’s a “consensual encounter” I don’t think that word means what the dea thinks it means.

I forget exactly what the DEA agent was saying, I think I recall him saying that he wasn’t detaining the citizen, who was free to leave, but the bag was detained. Seemed like bullshit from a 95 IQ glorified cop.

> I don't know where the government gets off...

It's the next stop after "voluntary income tax system".

I'd really like to know what airline had an employee doing this, so I can make sure to never do business with them again.

My guess is all of them.

The DOJ report on the findings (https://oig.justice.gov/sites/default/files/reports/25-005_3...) mentions multiple airline employees were being used as confidential sources, so you might be right.

That would make the most sense :/

So the airline sells a last minute ticket and after the customer pays, the airline's agent initiates steps to coerce the ticket holder from enjoying the travel he just purchased. All in the name of profit. Sounds unfair, deceptive and damaging to me, exactly the sort of thing that ruins reputations and balance sheets.

It's like the big boy version of a venue that has an employee who tips of a tow company to have people's cars towed without sufficiently good reason and gets a kickback for it.

> That arrangement is problematic

Understatement of the year.

>The Department has long been concerned — and long received complaints — about potential racial profiling in connection with cold consent encounters in transportation setting,”

While it's useful that anything helps stop these grotesquely pervasive abortions of legality from happening, it's perverse that the main concern was a possibility of racial profiling.

So if minority groups that cause bad political optics aren't being visibly targeted, then it's once again okay to arbitrarily rob legally innocent people under threat of violence, as a fucking government police agency no less?

Also, "cold consent encounters" What a laughable euphemism for coercion and theft.

> Data on seizures seems like a solid start. Why don't they have data on searches?

I thought the Supreme Court found that search _is_ seizure (of your person). Not that I would expect the DEA do categorize them equivalently, of course.

(IANAL, but I do watch lot of YouTube videos.)

> The IG found that the search was based on a tip by an airline employee who passed on the names of passengers who had purchased flights 48 hours before departure. That employee was being paid by the DEA a percentage of the cash seized, the IG found, and had received tens of thousands of dollars over several years. That arrangement is problematic, investigators concluded.

How come this is not a fireable offense in any company? This person is leaking a customer's PII to a third party (DEA, in this case). It doesn't really matter if it's to a government official, unless there was a warrant and the airline's Legal council involved.

Am I missing anything? This feels outrageous that airlines are letting this happen. Is there a law that allows employees to break any company's policies under the guise of "suspicion of a crime being committed, even without a warrant"?

And it's even worse that the "profits" are being shared with said employee, and this is not seen as bribery and corruption.

Presumably the airline is unaware of the practice by employees. How would they know? Not like the the employee or DEA is going to make them aware and confidential informants aren’t named in court documents.

Actually a great side hustle for similarly situated employees who don’t mind fucking over other humans. I wonder how common it is? Big enough where people with these jobs discuss it in a forum on the net somewhere?

There are likely hundreds of employees with access to this information within the company, and thousands of third party employees.

I work as an analyst for a marketing company that fulfills gift/award points/miles for people who have opted into the loyalty programs for all the major airlines, hotel chains, fuel reward affiliates. We have data granular to the minute in a continuous feed.

I can only imagine that there are numerous opportunities for exfiltration along this chain. Personally, I make enough to never consider breaching protocol, but there are a dozen contacts in my sphere that are temps or contractors that deliver the data to us, I could imagine that the DEA offering double or more than their base salary with little danger of discovery would be tempting.

*I think that by becoming an informant you would be dissuaded from public discourse or lose your anonymity, so there’s probably aren’t any serious forums dedicated to the practice.

> The IG found that the search was based on a tip by an airline employee who passed on the names of passengers who had purchased flights 48 hours before departure.

I have bought last-minute airline tickets three times in my life -- all to buy a car that was a good deal. All three times I had cash to buy said car. Glad I never got snared.

48 hours is not uncommon for business trips.

this was simply a targeted operation at people who use cash instead of credit cards, right? (I mean business trips, corporate people usually use credit cards.)

A lotta corporate people are forced into using some (annoying and often useless) corporate travel agent.

I’d guess messing with those bookings would… quickly fix the problem.

I purchase most of my tickets last minute simply because I tend to procrastinate. And they’re usually one way tickets because I procrastinate deciding my return date, too. I’ve never been flagged for SSS though. Maybe that’s because the behavior isn’t anomalous for me.

I never flew before 9/11, the few times I've flown, I've always been "randomly selected".

make sure you are shaved (unless of course you have religious or other reasons not to be) - without fail I always get rando select when I am not shaved and literally never when I am shaved. travel on average 7x per year

I'm not certain on this, however it has been implied to me by custom officials that declaring excess funds (typically over 10k USD) when traveling internationally can protect against seizure.

That doesn't seem right.

I suspect they mean that it is protection against it "going missing", as in there's a record of the money being brought in.

I don't think it protects against anything just to declare to customs.

You don't say?

> USA Today reported in 2016 that, over a decade, the DEA seized more than $209 million in cash from at least 5,200 people at 15 busy airports

Assuming the top 15 airports account for 50MM annual travel, that means, on average, 1 in 100K traveler-trips have cash seized: 3 seizures per airport per month, with a per-seizure haul of $4K

Here’s the watchdog org that first made the video go viral:

https://ij.org/press-release/department-of-justice-suspends-...

We just did holiday donations at work. If I saw this last week, I probably would have earmarked some for them.

The violation of rights isn't great, the article also mentions seizing cash which may be just as bad or worse in some cases. One person cited in the article was traveling to purchase a truck and the deal fell through ($30k), an elderly man and his daughter had $82k siezed (why they were traveling with that much cash wasn't mentioned).

- "(why they were traveling with that much cash wasn't mentioned)"

You can read or watch their story here[0,1]. They're not shy about what happened to them—they sued the US government to get everything back (with the pro bono assistance of the nonprofit IJ).

[0] https://ij.org/press-release/pittsburgh-retiree-sues-federal... ("Pittsburgh Retiree Sues Federal Government to Get His Life Savings Back" (2020))

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hsre7I0UUJA (" DEA & TSA Take $82,000 Life Savings From Pittsburgh Retiree")

- "Terry, 79, is a retired railroad engineer born and raised in Pittsburgh. For many years, he followed his parents’ habit of hiding money in the basement of their home. When Terry moved out of his family home and into a smaller apartment, he became uncomfortable with keeping a large amount of cash. Last summer, when his daughter Rebecca was home for a family event, Terry asked her to take the money and open a new joint bank account that he could use to pay for dental work and to fix his truck, among other needs..."

In a functioning justice system the government might be able to place a temporary hold on the money, but would need to promptly return it when declining to press charges or on an acquittal. Literal theft.

A temporary hold like that only seems just to me in a case where someone had been charged with a crime and the money is alleged too be evidence or proceeds of that crime. Civil forfeiture is a way for the government to enforce criminal laws with a lower standard of proof and fewer protections for the accused. That's a bad thing.

It's called Civil Asset Forfeiture (gov euphemism for said literal theft).

I believe John Oliver did a piece on it when he first joined HBO.

A functioning justice system in a free country has no legitimate reason to seize property without any prior suspicion of wrongdoing and an order from a court.

> any prior suspicion of wrongdoing

That's still an incredibly low bar: the DEA agent may "smell marijuana on the person" or get a "hit" from a K9

why not say canine?

A "canine" is any kind of dog. A "K9" is a very specific type of dog used in US law enforcement, specially trained to act as if it smelled something when it sees a special signal from its handler.

The same reason I said "DEA agent" and not "an adult of working age" - the specificity of the role matters. I used a metonym for the animal as the police departments that work with dogs are called "K9 units"

This has always felt incredibly thin to me and shouldn’t in my opinion constitute probable cause. It’s essentially a dousing rod with four legs.

"Dousing rod" is a nearly perfect description except it doesn't quite convey the deliberate violation of civil liberties.

https://www.npr.org/2017/11/20/563889510/preventing-police-b...

That’s precisely what I mean. Each tool here reflects the will of the person wielding the tool while providing a pretense that some other force is at play.

You should be free to travel with 10MM cash if you want. If the government wants to claim it, they should file a lawsuit against you. Just taking it is Divine Right of Kings nonsense.

this right here. i hate this move to a cashless society and hate getting stink-eyed because i buy something with a $20 bill. these seizures all but codify this.

The annoying thing is that a $50 bill is worth 20 1989-dollars but you can't spend them as freely without the risk of refusal or criminal suspicion.

warts and all, this is what cryptocurrency provides for an digitized economy rapidly moving towards cashless digital-first payments.

While I don't think it should be within the government's right to seize cash without reason, i can't imagine why you'd carry cash for such transactions and not a cashier's check. It also gives you some negotiating power because you can say 'we agreed on x, I brought a check for x, the price is x or I'm walking'.

Because a cashier's check is for a fixed amount; you can't change its value on the spot without going through the whole process again.

Suppose you show up to buy a truck with #30K in cash (the truck is listed for $30K). You inspect the truck, and find that the A/C needs to be fixed, which would cost you, say $3K. So you decide to split the repair cost with the seller, and now the truck will cost you $28.5K. If you have cash, this is simple: you just hand over $28.5K. But if you have a cashier's check?

You walk. In that case, I would walk regardless because I would ask if there were any issues with the vehicle and if a problem with the A/C wasn't disclosed, what else wasn't disclosed?

When I show up to buy a vehicle, the only thing I'm doing is taking it to a mechanic for a look over, and completing the purchase if it's all clear. That's it. The time for disclosure and negotiation is over. Not negotiating things in person (as opposed to over email where I have it in writing) has saved me countless hours over the years and made buying things much more pleasant.

Yeah, the smart move is to walk, but we're not all perfectly rational spherical car buyers. You've made all that time investment, and having cash and being adaptable is just easier.

> i can't imagine why you'd carry cash for such transactions and not a cashier's check.

because people forge cashier's checks far more easily than they forge cash. I certainly wouldn't take one as payment for a truck without going to the issuing bank first and withdrawing the money (as cash). In which case, there is no need for the check.

For smaller purchases, sure. For large purchases, I refuse to do business with anyone who insists I show up with thousands in cash. Even taking civil forfeiture out of the equation entirely, there's just too much that can go wrong.

The last time I rented a home in the Bay area I paid first, last, damage deposit and pet deposit in cash (almost $15k). The reason was that I was changing banks after a dispute and didn't want my old bank snagging the money.

The owner straight up asked me if I was a drug dealer though, so I see your point. I had to show him my tech company offer letter for him to believe me.

No. I don't care why you "can't imagine it". Don't blame the victim.

Because you can't imagine, I can't carry whatever cash I'd like for a legal use case without the risk of seize-first, ask questions later? Nonsense implication if so.

Did you read the first half of my comment? Could you quote me where I supported government seizure of assets without due process? Please. I'll wait.

I love watching the feds scramble to stop committing crimes whenever someone with a camera happens to walk by. Really makes me believe they're behaving when we're not looking.

Given that the war on drugs was such a massive failure (and seems to fail harder each year), I consider their continued existence to facilitate parallel reconstruction and bypass what protections we have from our government.

From the perspective of preventing people from using drugs, it is a failure, but it is clear that was never the goal from the start. It is successful in systemically and extra-judiciously oppressing a lot of peoples, often to the benefit of the prison-industrial complex. The war on drugs has also benefitted the military-industrial complex and helped to quell leftist insurgencies in foreign countries, like Colombia.

Wars against vague notions, like drugs or terror, let the government pinpoint its enemies and deal with them how they see fit.

My brother was robbed of over $80k like this at an Amtrak station several years ago. They made up some story about following him from Chicago to Portland and it was from heroin sales.

1. He got on the train 3 states away from Chicago, I know this because I gave him a ride to the station.

2. He never had anything to do with heroin sales.

They were charging him with 3 felonies of 10+ years each and eventually got a plea deal for them to keep the money and he had like a couple years probation. All for carrying some money on a train.

I'm sure he wasn't a heroin dealer, but why was your brother carrying $80k?

It's a free country and people should be allowed to transport money with them. He was on his way back to Northern California to pay someone for some stuff that had been fronted + re-up

In cash? Did you tell him "this is a bad idea, you should wire the money instead"? What if he had been mugged? What if he lost the suitcase? I arranged the transportation of $25,000 in cash (I sold a car, it was a gag, I was very young, and it was an extraordinarily bad idea that cost me thousands of dollars), and just as a physical object that's pretty big. Also: where did he get the cash from? I had trouble getting it.

At larger banks, there’s usually a teller that has their own cubicle with a locked door. They buzz you in in and you ask for amounts > 1k.

Sure, nobody (here) would disagree that people should be able to carry as much cash as they want without fear of illegal search but the whole “he plead guilty and had multiple years of probation” rightly makes people wonder what did he plead guilty to? since it clearly wasn’t civil asset forfeiture if they charged him with criminal charges and then he plead guilty to criminal charges.

so it for was drugs, just not heroin.

>He was on his way back to Northern California to pay someone for some stuff that had been fronted + re-up.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but this very much sounds like "drugs". If that's the case, your point about him never being involved in "heroin" sales is now just semantics, because he's still engaged, to some degree, in the movement of drugs between states.

It's not semantics because that was their justification for the search. They claimed to have been following him since Chicago even though he had only got on the train in Fargo. They also claimed that the money was from the sale of heroin, another lie. I'm not saying what he was involved in was legal, I'm saying that he was targeted and arrested on false pretenses.

I'm thinking they saw a young guy on a cross country trip who had purchased a ticket on short notice and decided to go after him. Maybe he was "acting suspicious" if he was nervous, but I kind of doubt that; he used to take beta blockers for that type of thing and what he was doing wasn't really out of the ordinary for him. Maybe they saw he had a history of taking the train that route. I don't know. But I do know that they lied in their justification for making contact with him.

>It's a free country

Obviously, it isn't.

This sort of question should not need to be answered, or raised. Carrying a lot of money around should not be grounds for suspicion.

Should the police take the money without cause? No. Can we question what he was up to? Yes. It's risky, as cash can be stolen from you with no recourse. It's also a very inconvenient way to pay someone, since it's physically large and would take a long time to count out.

I think you are vastly over estimating the size of 80K USD in $100 bills. Each bundle of $10K is about 1/2” thick. You can easily carry 80K in 100’s without looking out of place.

It'll fit comfortably in a shoebox.

No, I think raising the question is just fine: if you tell a story about someone carrying more money than most Americans ever have in their bank accounts in their entire lives, in cash, on their person, you're describing something extraordinarily unusual.

Again: I'm not saying he's a heroin dealer, and I said that specific to avoid this pointless preening about how it's everyone's right to carry large amounts of cash on them. Sure, I'm fine with that; in fact: I think you will find it difficult to find anyone to take the other side of that argument on HN (and HN is a big, complicated place, giving you some idea of just how banal that argument is.) So let's assume that's not what I'm talking about.

If it helps, though this isn't really my intent, assume my subtextual allegation is that this story is copypasta.

>if you tell a story about someone carrying more money than most Americans ever have in their bank accounts in their entire lives, in cash, on their person, you're describing something extraordinarily unusual.

I used to play poker semi-professionally. Traveling with upwards of $50k wasn't an uncommon thing at all among the people I knew.

I knew a card counter who was detained at an airport carrying well in excess of $100k and, comically, the money and the inside of his bag were covered in white powder at the time. Because he was a nerdy jewish kid, they believed his story that it was powdered caffeine (it actually was) and sent him on his way.

There's a rather famous court case about civil asset forfeiture involving somebody who had just closed on their house for cash. Cops stopped the car, decided the money was dirty, stole it.

Carrying a ton of cash is unusual, but does really happen.

Yes: this definitely happens. I'm not making a broader argument about the legitimacy of civil asset forfeiture.

The key point in my comment is "closed on their house for cash." It isn't unheard of to carry around such a massive pile of cash even if you aren't a drug dealer.

The end of this particular story was "charged with several felonies, plead guilty and received probation" so it's safe to assume this cash wasn't a civil asset forfeiture, and certainly wasn't from the sale of a house.

They charged him with money laundering. He plead guilty to attempted money laundering. I don't know the exact laws he was charged with breaking.

Maybe it was happening in the past, but nowadays you can’t really sell a house for paper cash. Title & Escrow companies will require settled money on a verified checking account from a buyer and they will not deliver you duffel bag of cash - they will deposit into an account of your choice.

There are stories everywhere. They are very varied. So no, one more story is actually detrimental, making the reader feel good "Oh, some silly unusual situation I would never find myself in". This is already all too common a position "Well, I have nothing to hide".

Sure, people carry around cash all the time, there isn't a problem with that - but carrying around $80,000 in cash is highly unusual. It's not something normally done. I don't know anyone who would travel with that kind of cash because it could be stolen, by cops or by anyone.

When receiving a large amount of cash for a legitimate sale of something, or other kind of legit transaction taking place, the first thing most people would probably think to do is to go to their bank branch in the local area and deposit the money ASAP, and then get on the train. Large deposits are tracked, I think you have to fill out a form, so maybe he just didn't want to have the tax man look at what's going on (points to possibly shady dealings).

The fact is that walking around with $80,000 in cash is a huge risk (unless you're a billionaire - but then you're probably not taking a train), it's not something most people would typically do. It appears a bit shady without OP giving any other details. He claims it wasn't for heroin, but what if he's purposely omitting that it was actually for cocaine. I'd like to know more about OP's story, but I doubt we'll get any answers.

Hanging out on HN and arguing in favor of the gestapo is unusual.

Shall we send them over to your place next, so they can tell you what exactly you have to hide?

When I see these kinds of arguments I realize how important and how fragile the rule of law is. People jump to conclusions very readily and are easy to whip into a frenzy by malicious authorities.

You're trolling - I never "argued in favor of the gestapo". I specifically called out the reason why it's not great to carry around $80,000 in cash is that anyone can steal that cash from you if you're carrying it around, not just "the gestapo".

Anyone can steal it, sure. And anyone who did so would be a criminal, unless they were the police.

The fact that it's unusual is not relevant. Or it's relevant in that - pretty much by definition - these situations are unusual. It's not okay to violate people's rights merely because "unusual". It's not okay to demand a good story just because "unusual". Instead we get the all too common a reasoning "well, I don't play cards", or "well I have nothing to hide". None of this is relevant. The opposite is true: if you believe in freedom of speech for another example, then it's only for socially uncommon speech that it will matter. In particular, speech that few people would support. If cash is legal, it's only in unusual situation that it has to be particularly protected by the law.

I never once advocated that it's okay to violate people's rights. You must have misread my comment.

The fact is, if you want to keep your money safe, don't walk around with large sums of it. Period. It's really that simple.

Not sure about that. If he took the money out of a bank, there are forms to be filed. If he received it from someone in a trade or business, there are forms to be filed. If he found it and was on the way to the bank to deposit it, there are forms to be filed.

The money didn't magically appear in his pockets.

Which forms are legally required to have on file whilst traveling to the bank to deposit it?

This feels like a ragebait comment and the entire story is clearly not being told.

Nah that's about all of it

Why the hell would you ever plead to something you didn't do if you had the resources to fight it? I get how they might pressure some kid into a plea, but they'd be taking my ass to trial, and yes, I'd gladly pay the legal fees if it came to it, over basically selling out my good name.

I have no relation to anyone here, but:

Every time I've carried a large amount of money, it was essentially all of the money I had in the world.

If I had lost it [for any reason, including theft by civil forfeiture], I'd have been essentially broke and have nothing to fight with.

If I were additionally charged with crimes, I'd still be broke and still have nothing to fight with.

The money is just...gone.

---

Now, suppose a DA or prosecuter gives me a binary choice and I can select between the following options:

1. Be broke.

2. Be broke and in prison.

...then I think I'll cut my fucking losses and stick with option 1.

It's scary how people immediately side with authorities in these situations. You can lose everything in an instant by getting charged with something nefarious and it just takes a couple of bad cops.

I'm not 'siding with the authorities', I'm advocating fighting if you're innocent. Plea'ing out when you're innocent just encourages this sort of abuse. If everyone that remotely had the resources to fight charges actually fought them, this whole system would collapse on itself. Civil rights are only upheld when they're exercised.

You're implying that someone who didn't fight is presumably guilty, which is a perverse argument given the immense cost and general toll a legal defense can impose on a person.

> If everyone that remotely had the resources to fight charges actually fought them, this whole system would collapse on itself.

Yes, that is precisely why the system is stacked against the average person being able to fight the State on criminal charges, and it is very out of touch to imply that anyone that the State has convicted presumably deserved it for not putting up an effective defense.

The system is working as intended on you and I hope you never find yourself on the wrong end of a criminal prosecution.

> You're implying that someone who didn't fight is presumably guilty

I can see how one could get this implication because they said "why would you" but that's a common phrase that people use to (I guess literally) call some decision into question. It's not necessarily about saying that they are obviously lying and could be more about wondering why someone would make that choice. The reply made a good case, which they don't seem to be arguing with.

Why would you use that kind of phraseology, if not to imply something?

Because you're curious for the answer to your question. Why would you think there must be some other implication? (What did I imply by using that phrase in the previous question?)

> Why the hell would you ever plead to something you didn't do if you had the resources to fight it?

Does this sound like mere curiosity to you?

> mere curiosity

Well, no. The phrasing suggests some bit of outrage to me, which has its own problems but is still easier to interact with if one is looking to understand their perspective. I suppose it sounds more exclusively like an accusation to you. More likely than either of those is that it’s a combination of several factors which ultimately culminated in the person’s decision to leave their comment.

Regardless, the claim that they must have been making an accusation is speculation which is called out in the guidelines to avoid:

> Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith.

What exactly is your point? Am I not allowed to point out the fundamental failure of ethics in jumping to the conclusion that someone who didn't put up a fight when wronged by a vastly more powerful entity is somehow enabling the wrongdoing?

> What exactly is your point?

Be more open-minded when someone says something you disagree with.

> Am I not allowed to point out the fundamental failure of ethics ... ?

You are allowed to opine. Are other commenters not allowed to do the same?

This is nearly meaningless. I see you have no point.

You should not be so afraid of engaging with other perspectives. You can choose your own beliefs and it doesn’t hep to close your mind to others. Read the thread back and you may find consistent arguing if you understand that my actual conclusion was written above.

Of course, you would have to read comments in good faith and I suspect you would not. I would be foolish to believe you will even try because you it’s obvious by now that you have no such desire to understand other perspectives. I recommend fostering such a desire. You only have pleasant discourse with those you agree with and you cause that problem.

Because in real speech with real people in my real life, expressions like "Why would you do x" are nearly exclusively rhetorical and unambiguously accusatory.

Similarly, I have heard expressions like "Why would you do x" and "Why would you think y" as questions being asked with curiosity. I've also seen how my perception of their intentions has been distorted such that I would not believe they are simply trying to understand. That isn't to say the phrasing does not seem to trigger such a response (I personally think it sounds hostile in text), it is to say that I can take them at their word when they tell me they did not have that intention. I will, however, concede that the phrase seems to be more commonly said with hostile ignorance rather than humble curiosity.

But... that's kinda beside the point which I did not seem to have made clearly. The original assumption of that person's decision to write that phrase is that it is intended as an accusation to this thread's OP that their brother was actually selling heroin. They do not seem to have made that specific accusation. Recall what I originally replied to:

> You're implying that someone who didn't fight is presumably guilty

That is decidedly not what they were implying, if they were implying anything.

I don't know why you would make these kinds of arguments, and I do not care.

Stealing is always wrong.

Stealing is wrong even when it is stupid people who are doing stupid things that are stolen from.

Nobody deserves to be stolen from.

Especially by a cop.

The end.

Further replies will be ignored. I don't willfully talk to Nazis.

(Is that an implication? Hmm. Why would anyone think that?)

> Stealing is wrong even when it is stupid people who are doing stupid things that are stolen from.

It’s plain cowardice to accuse me of disagreeing with this and subsequently run away from the conversation. You are god-awful at empathy. Learn some emotional intelligence.

It's part standard story for civil asset forfeiture.

The "civil" part of Civil Asset Forfeiture precludes criminal felony charges..

Reminds me of the "Stripe cut off my account without warning and won't talk to me. I've done nothing wrong!" posts that used to show up. Upon further digging, it turns out the person started off with a legitimate business, then got into a gray area, then pushed further to the point that they were against the terms of service. The person always becomes evasive or non-responsive once the questioning starts to unearth some peculiarities.

As I recall, some of those stories turned out to be "customer doing shady things, Stripe is in the right". But the others were different, like "Stripe actually screwed up and fobbed off their customer until it became a PR problem"

Personally, I don't think a complainant's apathy towards commenter curiosity counts as an admission of guilt. However, I know Stripe use to have quite the fan club until more of their ex-engineers (such as my own friends) started sharing stories of their internal chaos, like https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29387264

Was there a particular reason he was carrying around nearly 6 figures in cash? How was he planning to ensure it didn't get stolen by robbers of the old fashioned sort?

He owed someone money. The point is he hadn't been to Chicago and he hadn't been involved with the heroin trade. The whole point of the stop was fabricated.

The asset seizure part needs no explanation as that was common practice for many law enforcement agencies, but if your brother was not dealing heroin why did he plea to dealing heroin?

There is no way they'd get a conviction solely on the basis of someone carrying a large amount of cash. They'd have needed something more than that to even reach the preliminary hearing stage.

He plead to attempted money laundering or something like that

What state was this in? We can look up the predicates for that charge in the state, and then be talking more coherently about what might have happened here. Thanks!

I'm guessing North Dakota? That's 3 states away from Chicago on the only Amtrak route from there to Portland.

Were the charges federal? Did North Dakota (or whatever) police intercept him, or a DEA TFG?

What exactly are you trying to accomplish here? We can all see that person's HN comment history, see that fully half of it is drugs; and if this HN subthread is quiet about it, that is because we are politely avoiding confrontation.

I have not looked at their comment history, and the guidelines ask us not to do that.

You can read my comment history. It's right out in the open. Why would guidelines say not to look at it when it's right on the profile? Lol

He got on the train in ND. A drug task force illegally searched his bags and arrested him in Portland. I believe it was all state charges from a state agency working with the DEA. I'd have to ask because I don't remember the details. This was like a decade ago

We're not supposed to dredge things up from people's comment histories to throw at them in discussions.

Ok well I give you and anyone else permission to do that in my case

FWIW, this seems like the arrest/seizure - doesn't mention heroin and honestly seems pretty sketchy. Aside from a prior arrest for selling weed, using a BS 'hit' from a dog is pretty thin pretext to search the cans.

https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/3100482-9-1-16-PPB-M...

Oregon's money laundering statute is here:

https://oregon.public.law/statutes/ors_164.170

If your cousin was actually innocent he should sue his lawyer for malpractice.

The facts as you state them don't support any criminal charges, and any competent lawyer would be immediately aware of that and recommend against pleading.

98% of criminal charges end in plea deals. The justice system only works because virtually all charges go through without a trial. Prosecutors are strongly incentivized to find an acceptable plea deal, and they have the threat of massively ruining someone's life who refuses a deal--if nothing else, the 6-7 figure cost of defending oneself in court is incentive enough to take a plea.

A long time ago, in a nearby galaxy, Broward Detective Vicki Cutcliffe grabbed my client's crotch in the Ft. Lauderdale airport, hoping to find crack, which she did. Judge Roettger was a frequent user of the airport and found this behavior unacceptable. He suppressed the evidence.

One of the 2%, I guess.

98% of criminal defendants are actually guilty, and are just seeking the best deal possible. Prosecutors are strongly disincentivized to prosecute cases without evidence because they get demoted or fired if their win ratio (including pleas) drops below 90%.

Public defenders don't advise their clients to take pleas in the absence of any evidence tying them to the crime, as claimed in the OP.

if nothing else, the 6-7 figure cost of defending oneself in court is incentive enough to take a plea.

This is false, unless you're convicted of murder and you choose the most expensive lawyers, and you proceed to trial, meaning that there was sufficient actual evidence of guilt that a prosecutor would risk their record and that a judge would commit the time and resources of his court to have a trial. Pre-trial costs for non-violent felonies are in the 4-low 5 figures. Violent felonies top out in the mid-5 figures. You don't see 6 figure costs outside of murder cases, and 7 figure costs all involve extremely wealthy defendants.

The financial cost of pleading guilty is 10x-100x the cost of defending oneself in court. If, as the OP claimed, his cousin was innocent, no defense attorney (public defender or otherwise) would have recommended he plead guilty, because based on what the OP said, there was insufficient evidence for the case to even make it to the preliminary hearing. In many states, the law enforcement agency at issue would have also paid his attorneys' fees.

Tons of innocent people take plea deals.

Courts can and do get convictions based on bullshit. "The cop says you did it" convinces loads of juries. There's also often further incentive to take a deal if you are stuck in jail or are otherwise spending shitloads of time and money on a defense.

What a perverse incentive! Flag every passenger possible; your expected payout is positive. You have nothing to lose!!

> USA Today reported in 2016 that, over a decade, the DEA seized more than $209 million in cash from at least 5,200 people at 15 busy airports

Absolutely unacceptable

Government to temporarily stop robbing people after watchdog determines that the way they rob people may be a violation of their civil rights as the law says that the police must rob people without regard to their membership in protected classes.

Why now? These concerns have been being raised for decades.

There's been a few very blatant video-captured interactions specifically about the DEA at airports, so has refocused the lens on them. And in both cases, the videos are fairly thorough, high definition, so there's none of the usual "you didn't see the rest of the interaction and context that makes it reasonable" - instead blatant abuses of power by the DEA agents.

I would like to think that the heat of public perception is increasing but I'm not sure that's true. Seems like civil asset forfieture was a much more hot button issue 2-4yr ago and has kind of waned since. Maybe, hopefully, you're right.

Actually a key question.

I assume there are politics involved that are not covered in the article.

I would also be astounded to find that anything so simple as unilateral DOJ action, no executive order, no consent decree, would be effective in changing this behavior.

I suspect the trigger was the realization recent especially egregious cases were being prepared for court cases, which were likely to be won.

Agencies like this would rather voluntarily pull back to prevent a court ruling setting precedent. The agency can always bring back similar measures in different forms or with different supposed safeguards but a court ruling is beyond their control.

>I suspect the trigger was the realization recent especially egregious cases were being prepared for court cases, which were likely to be won.

I should've thought of this. Can you reference a specific case? I'd like to follow it.

>Agencies like this would rather voluntarily pull back to prevent a court ruling setting precedent. The agency can always bring back similar measures in different forms or with different supposed safeguards but a court ruling is beyond their control.

I need to review the federal jurisprudence on this. IIRC there were some finer points that changed so "don't worry we changed the rule" is no longer as good a defense as it once was and that's part of what led to Bruen making it into court in the first place.

> Can you reference a specific case? I'd like to follow it.

In addition to the cases cited in the article, I've seen some other scary sounding incidents in MSM reporting recently but I didn't bookmark any. My thought was triggered by the article mentioning the Institute for Justice filing a class action which indicates there are a lot and that IfJ feels they have strong grounds.

> "The IG report highlighted an incident documented in a video released four months ago by the Institute for Justice, a nonprofit civil liberties law firm which is pursuing a class action lawsuit against the DEA."

I agree that "we changed our policy" doesn't legally change their existing liability but it'll at least stop more incidents being added and I think it probably does influence the media optics as well as a judge's eventual corrective order (if it gets that far). Plus IfJ will certainly get discovery on all the relevant data including searches, confiscations, claims and the actual amount of criminal activity discovered (which is probably almost none as Justice Dept's own IG cited the lack of effectiveness). Now at least those likely shocking statistics will have a hard stop date a few years in the past by the time it comes out.

Additionally, while this decision was probably being deliberated before the election, it may have been accelerated and/or influenced by the outcome of the election simply because the DEA is now less certain they'll have leadership in the Justice Dept, Homeland Security, etc willing to circle the wagons and stonewall to defend these practices.

The article clearly states the below along with numerous other issues.

"That [airline] employee was being paid by the DEA a percentage of the cash seized, the IG found, and had received tens of thousands of dollars over several years. That arrangement is problematic, investigators concluded."

This is the "proximate cause" but anyone who "knows the world" knows that arbitrary power leads to corrupt abuse of this sort quite directly. IE, sure they stopped cause they "found problems" but one would expect such problems existed from the start and are inherent to a system of seizing cash on suspicion of ... something.

Which is to say it's not that no one read these explanations but that such explanations aren't meaningful and the real answer is politics as many have mentioned in other comments. That is to say, the mystery is what exact politics lead to this pull back now.

Screw off with the implication that I didn't read it. The stated reason is likely BS. Various parties have been getting kickbacks of various types for decades but now it's a problem? I'll restate my question, why now?

Because no one has a time machine to go back and change the past.

Holy cow, "problematic" is an understatement. So the airline employee gives a list of people who don't have enough time to assert their rights, the DEA confiscated any cash they found, and then gave what sounds like a kickback.

1. The data breach of personal information from the airline to the DEA.

2. The DEA performing any search at all. I can't imagine a world in which "Booked a flight on short notice" should be considered probable cause.

3. The DEA confiscating money. The unconstitutionality of civil forfeiture has been well discussed.

4. The DEA paying for the ongoing data breach. With payments "over several years", that isn't just a finder's fee, that's an ongoing business relationship.

Egads.

Yes, the IG quote in the article acknowledges that. Things like this depend on leadership and evidence. For the next couple of months, there’s a deputy attorney general who’s willing to look at that evidence and extrapolate the larger trend rather than dismissing things as freak one-off occurrences or the proverbial few bad apples. I would bet this has a lot to do with Biden’s political career being over: Democrats tend to run from accusations of being “soft on crime”, which means waiting for evidence to become overwhelming and while the DOJ is somewhat independent its senior leadership is generally going to be careful around sensitive topics.

As always when this sort of topic comes up, "don't talk to the police": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d-7o9xYp7eE

I wish that American high schools would teach people what their actual 4th amendment rights are. There's certain situations you cannot avoid being searched, and there's ones where you're fully within your rights to refuse.

I agree, but how ridiculous is the overreach of police when we start suggesting that schools include it in curriculum

Indeed, though I would also hope that it could be included in a more general and varied curriculum about the constitution and bill of rights, all other amendments, civil rights act, etc.

It’s a joke because most American schools are run by the government.

Schools have a lot of local autonomy and are among the easiest institutions to influence, for non-rich citizens. Getting your local schools to include more coverage of rights when encountering the police in the curriculum is among the easiest outcomes to pursue as far as changing what “the government” is doing.

… if enough other people in your local community agree with you.

And the government is selected by you and your neighbors.

Only if you live in a swing county of a swing state.

Sorry but the citizens of Detroit don't select the school board in Alpena. Too many Americans focus on a Presidential election every four years that gets decided by a couple hundred thousand people in 4 or 5 states and ignore all of the elections that actually impact their day to day lives.

Get involved in your local elections, even if only becoming an informed citizen. Those are the elections where you can make a difference.

It’s sort of a foundational principle of the American system that power will always overreach, and adversarial checks and balances are always required to keep power in line. Saying it’s ridiculous to teach kids about their rights is, in that light, roughly comparable to saying it’s ridiculous that the government produces documents (i.e. the Bill of Rights) asserting what it can’t do. Far from being ridiculous it’s about as fundamentally American as it gets.

It's ridiculous that we have to teach children their rights to avoid them being abused by the government that supposedly enforces them.

This is a sign that our checks and balances don't actually work as well as we think they do.

It's good for children to receive this education, but uhh... why don't the police?

Quit the hyperbole. This seems like a basic Civics class topic.

Get your tongue off the boot for a second, read this, and come back to tell me it's hyperbole

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civil_forfeiture_in_the_United...

Knowing your rights shouldn't be a prerequisite to avoiding government theft.

Forget schools, we already have to talk to kids about how to act around the police like they are some dangerous animal. Except if they were some dangerous animal we would have done the sensible thing and shot them all already.

it all starts in preschool, when officers are modeled as universal friends that always help.

"PAW Patrol's Dark Secret, Explained": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rwhUpu9MfZ0

As a somewhat recent immigrant to Canada, would the consensus be that this applies here as well?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canadian_Charter_of_Rights_and...

There is also a whole body of precedents and case law in canada specific to charter rights, broadly similar to US rights, but with different terminology.

In my experience with both countries, American constitutional rights are stronger, but Canadian police are less corrupt (but universally unpleasant)

Big difference in Canada is that judges can be fully aware of an illegal unconstitutional search but convict you anyway from evidence collected from it if they feel like it.

And fewer jury trials (positive or negative depending on your point of view), and the prosecutor is free to appeal a not guilty ruling.

As walrus01 said, yes the 4th amendment has a almost word for word parallel in the CCRF, specifically section 8:

8. Everyone has the right to be secure against unreasonable search or seizure.

However, it's important to know that the Canadian courts have interpreted the law differently then American courts.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Section_8_of_the_Canadian_Ch...

Note further that Section 8 of CCRF is one of the sections that are subject to the "notwithstanding clause" (Section 33), meaning that either the federal parliament or the provincial legislature can enact laws in direct contravention to it, so long as they expressly declare it in the text of the law. Such "notwithstanding" declarations have a 5-year term, but legislature can renew them indefinitely.

So, in practice, the most important parts of CCRF can be overridden by simple majority vote of the legislators.

Schools will never teach kids their rights to any useful or applicable extent because schools routinely operate in the gray area at the limits and creating a bunch of students who'll call them out on it would make their jobs harder. Same reason they don't do much to teach critical thinking.

Schools aren't really subject to the Fourth Amendment and students explicitly have lesser constitutional rights, so they don't really need to worry about gray areas or limits.

The main problem with the suggestion is rather that

1. Schools typically do teach students about their Fourth (among other) Amendment rights, usually in a high-school civics class at the very latest, many students just aren't particularly interested or don't particularly care about paying attention in class.

2. Every time there's a skill or pool of knowledge many adults don't have we default to "They should really teach this in school instead of all the other stupid bullshit they waste their time on," but it turns out all the stupid bullshit they waste their time on is other skills or knowledge pools that people have, over the years, agreed that they should really teach in school. So either you're proposing that schools get more funding and students are kept there for more hours to teach all the additional skills you want students to come out with, or you need to choose a subject to cut, and rest assured that any particular subject you choose will have an existing group of advocates leap to its defense - if it didn't, it would have already been cut after Reaganomics, NCLB, the 2008 GFC, COVID19, or the numerous other occasions we've found opportunities to trim school budgets.

I don't know when you went to high school, but my entire district cut their civics course for being "irrelevant to the educational goals of the district".

I was part of a group of students that did post-school discussions off-campus of civics with those interested, often discussing how it has become harder and harder for students to retain their rights in the public education system.

Are there really state standards that don't include the bill of rights in any of civics/US Gov/US History?? I know US public educational varies a lot based on state and locality, but that IS a surprise.

The malcom in the middle episode about the ACLU or Rock and roll high school are classic examples of this.

I am of the opinion that "lockdown" is illegal detention, and conditioning them from a very young age to accept it.

I do celebrate STFU Friday, every day, but airports are kind of a different situation.

If they decide to detain you for a couple hours, you're gonna miss the plane and you aren't going to get a refund or a transfer or whatever. The is so much incentive to play along that doesn't exist at a basic traffic stop.

https://youtu.be/uqo5RYOp4nQ much shorter version of your video :)

This is yet another insane thing. If you're detained and not charged, you should automatically be given a transfer, no questions asked - and it should be explicitly mandated so.

One big problem here is that your ability to insist on your 4th amendment rights varies considerably. The further you are from all of affluent, straight, white, and male the more likely it is that you’ll experience pressure or retaliation if you persist in not cooperating, and in extreme cases that includes illegal detention, violence, or fabrication of evidence.

If your life is a repeating story of having to situationally decide where you’re likely to fall on that scale, you’re probably going to acquiesce because it’s the least stressful option – especially in this case where the easiest retaliation is almost unprovable by “accidentally” making you miss your flight.

There's also almost no recourse even if your rights are violated. If you are lucky any evidence gets excluded from a future trial. But what about some remedy? It is outrageously difficult to sue individual state police or state police departments. Federal agents are even more protected, with Bivens being slowly crushed into nothingness.

They are targeting people who are already late. You can demand your 4th amendment rights, and after some "consultation" we will give them to you - but you will miss your flight. Or just let them search your bad, hope they don't take anything and you have a chance to get there on time.

In short you don't really have the option to stand up for your rights.

I bet this will go viral on X…

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