Civil forfeiture is not confiscation of your property as punishment for committing a crime. It's a determination that the property was never yours to begin with, because it was obtained in an illegal transaction.[1] That's why the standard for civil forfeiture isn't whether the person is guilty "beyond a reasonable doubt" but rather whether the property is the fruits of a crime by the "preponderance of the evidence." Any civil dispute over the rightful ownership of property is evaluated according to a preponderance of the evidence standard, and the dispute about the status of the property can be resolved without resolving the issue of criminal guilt.
The very important distinction to make here is that the issue of whether Ulbricht is guilty is distinct from whether the money is the proceeds of illegal activity. Maybe Ulbricht gets acquitted because he creates enough reasonable doubt that he isn't DPR, as he claims. Or because he succeeds in getting key evidence excluded because of a procedural failure by the feds. His acquittal doesn't mean that the money wasn't the product of illegal activity. Indeed, he has tremendous incentive to try and prove that he never owned these Bitcoins, because that goes to proving he isn't DPR!
[1] At least when we're talking about cash. There's a whole host of more questionable issues when it comes to things like forfeiture of vehicles and guns used in crimes. See: http://scholarworks.gsu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1459...; see also: http://ij.org/pennsylvania-judge-calls-civil-asset-forfeitur... (for a particularly egregious example).
That way of thinking opens up our current problems of police seizing everything within grasp during an arrest or traffic stop claiming the property is the result of illegal activity. "Hello, I pulled you over because it's late at night and I'm wondering if you're okay. Oh, you happen to have $10,000 in cash on hand? Drug money, I'll take that."
If this is the way the law is being interpreted then we gave up property rights a long time ago.
If you are a cab driver and you have a client that you know is riding your cab to perform illegal trade. Does the police have right to seize your fare?
Isn't that something court should determine?
That said, my understanding is yes, if you know that the purpose of the travel is illegal, then you are aiding and abetting. If they can show it to a "preponderance of evidence" standard, they have the power (not "right") to seize your fare. If they can show it beyond a reasonable doubt, they have the power to punish you as well.
As rayiner mentioned previously, the preponderance of evidence standard is actually not terribly out of place here, being that disputes about ownership of property are generally settled that way.
And yes, it is something for a court to determine.
http://www.wbur.org/2012/11/14/tewksbury-motel-owner-fights-...
A hotel owned by someone who has no criminal record or charges is being seized because some of its guests have used it to commit their crimes.
Edit: Seems like the Judge ended up dismissing this specific attempt but the key to take away from this is that the government will try and also sometimes win such cases.
In some circumstances, it's legitimate - "Yeah, I'll be getaway driver for your heist for $X..."
For assets to be forfeited the government literally sues the property[1] and is required to show the item is subject to forfeiture. If the asset is eligible for forfeiture the owner can claim that they are innocent[2] and prevent the property from being forfeited.
In this case DPR is not claiming that the wallet is his. Because if he did he'd likely harm the criminal case against himself.
You can read the order here: http://www.justice.gov/usao/nys/pressreleases/January14/Silk...
Note how the government filed suit against "all assets of Silk Road" - not DPR.
This isn't some secret thing that only the government knows about. You can go to http://www.forfeiture.gov right now and read required notices of forfeiture for all sorts of assets.
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[1] This is how we get court cases with fun names like "United States v. $124,700 in U.S. Currency" and "United States v. Forty Barrels and Twenty Kegs of Coca-Cola"
Proof beyond reasonable doubt doesn't mean you're definitely guilty. But if it seems reasonably likely (to the judge, or better the jury) that something was legitimately purchased for legitimate reasons, it should be yours.
Campervan fitted out as a mobile meth lab? That should get seized. The house your kid sold drugs from, but is your primary place of residence, and you paid for it with legally obtained money? That should be yours.
The problem is, US police forces seem to want to seize anything that's remotely connected with illegal activities, to raise revenue.
And the government has said, "Hey, if you own this wallet, which we have tied multiple controlled buys to, you're more than welcome to claim it, or we'll sell it. We might want to have a little chat to you about it, though."
Ross said "Nope. Not mine." He relinquished all claim to it, so his innocence or conviction is irrelevant.
It is the way the law is interpreted, and we've given up a lot of rights in the name of the drug war.
However, in the case of SR they actually may have a pretty good case that those are money intended to buy drugs, etc. - it's not like SR ever hidden what they're selling and the buyers hid what they are buying, and looks like the law enforcement has these records. So since under the current law drug trade is a crime, and they would have absolutely no trouble proving the money is actually the drug money, in this case it is hard to classify this as abuse, at least without venturing into the whole topic of drug legalization and so on, which is beyond the point.
Yes, it would mean stepping up and funding things currently funded with proceeds from seizures, but it would remove significant incentive to overreach.
With a fiat currency, it's not actually destroying anything. I'd rather no one feel it as part of their bottom line, or there will be pressure. Certainly, moving it far from law enforcement would be an improvement, but I think destruction is better.
Putting that person further away from the police probably improves things, as I said, but better that we just build such hospitals and fund such social programs as we actually need, and not rely on people doing bad things (either the people whose stuff is being confiscated, or the police confiscating property of innocents) to make it happen.
Note again that at this scale cash isn't really a resource - it's a claim on resources. Destroying it doesn't destroy those resources, it releases the claim which winds up sort of distributed over other dollars.
http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2013/08/12/130812fa_fact_...
Seems to me that only BTC that are directly linked to SR that are sold.
We can argue the merits of returning the coins to the last previously associated wallets; but I don't think the U.S. Gov has any intention of returning drug money to drug buyers the same way they wouldn't give gun money back to arms buyers.
An online shop selling clothing also happens to sell firearms illegally. Its assets are seized. What about money from pending orders for the clothing? It seems to me it's obvious in this case. Couldn't SR users start a class action lawsuit against gov for seizing their assets stored on SR servers? This is assuming not everything sold there was illegal (this might be wrong).
Presumably they've made an assessment and come to the conclusion that either the percentage of assets held that belong to customers of SR that said customer may have a claim to is small enough that it's easier/cheaper to deal with that if/when anyone makes a demand than trying to sort it out before auctioning off the BTC.
Especially given that presumably very few customers of SR have only bought/sold legal goods, and so presumably most of them won't want to identify themselves.
The moment I transfer a bitcoin to Silk Road, it's no longer my bitcoin. It's theirs. I've exchanged it for a promise from Silk Road to pass on the bitcoin to someone else or return it to me when I ask.
The government never seized my bitcoin. They seized Silk Road's bitcoin. This means Silk Road has more liabilities than assets. And since Silk Road hasn't given me a promissory note in exchange for my bitcoin, I'm an unsecured general creditor - and unsecured general creditors cannot establish standing to recover seized assets.
I'm not sure that I like the sort of thinking that would put those two words together, ever.
It would appear as though you think it possible that a flea market should be responsible for the conduct of its buyers and sellers, or that a public bulletin board be responsible for all material posted there.
I dislike the idea that a government that nominally prohibits itself from abridging freedom of speech, or of the press, or peaceful assembly could ever declare an information service operating over the Internet to be "illegal", seize all of its assets, shut it down, and then sell off whatever it seized, all without ever establishing any crime or criminal intent to the public.
By the same reasoning that led to the seizure and shutdown of Silk Road, since some drug dealers arrange sales with mobile phones, the antennas and backhaul used by the likes of Verizon, Sprint, AT&T et al should be seized, the phone networks shut down, and the equipment auctioned off, all for facilitating prohibited activities.
Whether people knew they were committing crimes or not, the site itself was little more than a warehouse building filled with unmonitored flea market stalls, and a common cashier. While the intent of establishing the market was undoubtedly to facilitate commerce in crime and contraband, we still have some expectation that crimes be prosecuted to conviction prior to the application of punishments.
What, then, has Silk Road been convicted of? Maintaining a public nuisance?
In any sane society, the police would use Silk Road, posing as ordinary customers to collect evidence of crimes, and then prosecute the people that committed them individually. That probably would have eventually resulted in Silk Road becoming more like the semi-legit flea market of Bitcoin, like eBay is for PayPal. What they actually did showed that their actions were targeted at Bitcoin rather than at the drugs. At the time, they did not want Bitcoin to have a common marketplace for goods of any kind, whether contraband or not, and moved to destroy it utterly using the drugs as pretext.
If you only bought legal goods from Silk Road, you were not doing anything more than threatening dollar hegemony. And that is why you lost your Bitcoin. Innocent of any crime (except possibly something related to taxes), you suffered a loss, thanks to people trying to enforce one law by breaking another.
You don't find pounds and pounds of cocaine in flea markets. The site was illegal, to the extent that any site can be, because its owners were aware of the illegal activity and, rather than reporting it, acted to facilitate it. Flea market owners in the same position would be just as liable.
> What, then, has Silk Road been convicted of? Maintaining a public nuisance?
Nothing yet, but you can ask again next year.
Silk Road implemented some countermeasures aimed at preventing dragnet-style arrests and mass prosecutions based on casual scraping of the site and analysis of the blockchain, but it was still completely vulnerable to a buyer-informant attack. The real world metaphorical equivalent is that the flea market did not require shoppers to register their real names and addresses, and declare the serial numbers of any cash they might be using to make purchases. I do not know of any flea market that does this, or any that could even survive if it tried.
Was there anything inherent to Silk Road that prevented cops from using exactly the same buyer-informant model to prosecute contraband trafficking that they use for physical street-level buys? No.
And we are not the Stasi. We are not required to inform upon one another. Any duty to report is usually associated with exercising a privilege granted by the state. Actual misprision requires not only that the crime be a felony, the witness be aware that it is occurring, and that they take active steps to conceal it. Misprision itself is only a misdemeanor, and protection against self-incrimination still applies. If reporting the crime would implicate you in a crime, it is not a crime to not report the original crime.
You are suggesting that it is acceptable to seize a person's entire business and sell off its assets before they are duly convicted of their misdemeanor.
Thanks to the decreasing popularity of misprision among Common Law jurisdictions, it is usually only applied to actual agents of the state with some measure of public trust or responsibility. The flea market would likely only be liable for crimes committed by tenant-sellers if the conditions of their business license specified a duty to police and report and they did not.
Silk Road, as a business with no physical premises, could never be subject to such conditions, as there is no one with authority to license it to operate. The fact remains that even if there were tons of cocaine, Silk Road was not selling it, and had no particular interest in the details of the transaction beyond the amount of the commission.
It is very easy to say that Silk Road was a den of criminals, but we expect them to be sleazy and untrustworthy. The cops that we throw at them in the pursuit of law and order must themselves be lawful and orderly. When they steal from suspects, and establish by their attitude that everyone is a suspect, they present an existential threat to the security of private property, independent of any other crimes that may be occurring.
This auction is a slap in the face to anyone at all concerned about police powers.
(Of course in practice what you'd do is a credit card chargeback - but bitcoin is specifically designed to make that impossible. If you choose to send an irreversible "currency" to an anonymous recipient, frankly you deserve what you get)
In this case, no one submitted petitions.
Most of the business there was drugs, obviously, but some amount of that money would have bought legitimate items. So what gives them the right to sell off that money?
1) the government filed "US v. A Wad of Cash Found in the Pocket of Danny Drugdealer"
2) the wad of cash was found to be subject to forfeiture
3) Danny Drugdealer didn't contest that he was innocent of drug dealin' or he attempted to and lost
4) The government posted that the wad of cash was subject to forfeiture at www.forfeiture.gov.
You'd then be entitled to make the case that ten dollars in Danny Drugdealer's wad of cash actually belonged to you and were not subject to forfeiture. You might've even won!
No one filed a claim to block forfeiture of all or part of the Silk Road bitcoins. Not even DPR. I think everyone knows why that is.
They did it because they had the capability. Civil forfeiture is an absolute perversion of the justice system, and is a direct contributor to police corruption. The damage it causes to the integrity of our rule of law is far greater than any deterrent effect it may have upon crimes.
Come on guys, is it so hard to understand that if you exchange an asset for a security, you don't own the asset anymore?
In this case this fact is directly contrary to a worldview held by many at HN, so I suspect everyone pointing out how property law actually works is in for a long slog.
http://www.justice.gov/usao/nys/pressreleases/January14/Silk...
Bitcoin is pretty fungible, almost like cash. If it turns out that he's innocent, he can sue the government for the money. It's not like they're selling some unique piece of art, or his family seat.
Or if you're up for a long read: http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2013/08/12/130812fa_fact_...
It's worse, though. While it's possible to get the property back, you have to prove by a preponderance of the evidence that the property had no connection to a crime. That's a difficult thing to do.
Criminal trial requires "beyond reasonable doubt" while civil forfiture requires "balance of probabilities"?
No government should be making money this way.
What you are suggesting would be a centralized backdoor in a decentralized protocol.
// TODO: remove after FBI auctionThis introduces serious problems with the question of "who is everyone" (when you say, agreed upon by everyone). In other words, is the community going to set up a centralized board to hear complaints and reverse transactions? Does this turn into "I bought a trinket on ebay and the guy didn't send me the thing, reverse the transaction"?
Part of the strength of bitcoin is a permanent historical record. There's been some suggestion that the true long-term benefit of bitcoin is not in the "money" part, but the blockchain itself. As soon as the blockchain becomes mutable, then this value becomes suspect, and the line for "how bad does it have to be before we edit the blockchain" might get weaker and weaker.