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Comment by andrewchambers | Hacker News Reader

It is amazing that Americans allow this sort of thing then say they are a world leader in personal liberty.

The scale of the civil forfeitures industry has increased drastically in the last 15 to 20 years. Most Americans are not yet aware of how large it has become, because it affects a relatively small percentage of people, and only in the last few years have the major news outlets begun to write about it (eg NY Times or Washington Post).

When you have a country of 330 million people as large geographically as the US, it's very difficult as a citizen in one state, to be aware of what a national agency (the DEA) is doing across the entire nation, unless the national news outlets are writing about it.

While a typical American is going about their day to day life, living a local life (some town, in some county, in some state), the world's largest, most powerful federal / national government is aggressively attempting to undermine them in hundreds of ways large and small.

The US has a federal government that is financially the size of the entire economy of Germany, doing nothing but passing more laws, economic regulations, taxes, et al. to strangle liberty as much as they can and increase their power. There is very little else they do, or need to do. What does a beast that large do? Protect itself, entrench its own interests, grab more money, write more laws - there is nothing else for it to do most of the time.

Try doing something about that, or even thinking about how you can stop it, if you're an average citizen. It boggles the mind. Oh yeah, while you're at it, deal with the fact that the US military (which the NSA belongs to) is now increasingly taking aim at the US domestic population, you know, the world's most powerful military with a $600 billion budget.

Now compare this situation to the complexity faced by, say, Finland (5.4 million people) in trying to reign in or adjust its government system. The US has something like 200,000 pages of federal regulations; try fixing that, while the vast dedicated law passing machine is busy passing thousands of new regulations.

It isn't going to stop expanding and over-reaching until it crashes, choking itself to death.

Civil forfeiture abuse and DEA criminality has been in the news for over a decade. Though it may be getting more attention now.

It has, I completely agree. I remember first reading about it in the early 2000's. However a $300 million problem doesn't garner the attention that a $10 billion problem does.

It's similar to why the patent trolls are increasingly getting so much attention from D.C. 20 years ago when they were vastly smaller in their impact and scale, they simply didn't garner the attention of most pundits, journalists, politicians, etc. They didn't impact most businesses at all. Now they've become a vast parasite, and when the dollar drain on the US economy gets into the tens of billions, people start noticing.

Civil asset forfeitures are like those towns in BFE that operate on ticket revenue - the situation rarely gets dealt with because the number of people getting tickets is an insignificant proportion of the voting population.

We're fortunate it has become, essentially, a national government scandal at this point, with perpetually wider awareness. The national media has taken to aggressively writing about it lately.

In this case I'm confident we're going to see the forfeiture racket neutered in the next few years. It seems to have finally gotten large enough to draw serious Congressional and White House scrutiny to stop it.

I hope you're right. I doubt it, but we'll see.

That problem is not limited to BFE: egregious ticket and court revenue from those who can least afford it is the chronic offense of Ferguson MO and neighboring suburbs. The recent questionable police shooting was more of a trigger for the expression of preexisting dissatisfaction over the ticketing. It's not clear that the "proportion of the voting population" that faced this problem was "insignificant", but it's clear that race had something to do with it. (Aside: a close relative of mine got a traffic ticket in Ferguson once. Since he is a wealthy professional white dude, a single phone call to a secretary at the court was enough to get charges dropped.) Actually that's true of pretty much all unconscionable law enforcement practice in this country: it may not be race-based, but it is quite race-related.

This. And while the USA purports to be the leaders in freedom, we see similar erosion of freedom and liberty in other Socialist/Democratic societies like Australia, UK and France.

The UK seems especially bad to me at the moment. The level of open surveillance that they practice on their citizens is astonishing.

People are only just starting to cotton on to this, but the Five Eyes are getting around the restrictions of not openly monitoring all their citizens by giving access to their surveillance systems to another member of the five and then just getting it handed straight back.

"Oh no, your honour, we don't monitor all our citizens."

It is almost like America is made up of people with different opinions and circumstances.

I believe that the comment was referring specifically to "Americans [that] allow this sort of thing then say they are a world leader in personal liberty", and I'm not sure how saying that there are other people in America is a relevant response.

The practice of civil forfeiture is being "allowed" by not doing anything about it or by giving it legitimacy by accepting it as something that should be reformed politically rather than treating it as a criminal violation of constitutional rights. Just because you get worked up about it for 15 minutes when reading an article about the injustice it causes doesn't mean that you aren't allowing it. Most people will unfortunately not even have a strong opinion about it until it happens to them or someone close to them.