> 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
> 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.
> 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.
"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.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
> 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.
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
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.
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).
- "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 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.
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.
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.
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'.
> 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.
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.
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.
> 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.
What a perverse incentive! Flag every passenger possible; your expected payout is positive. You have nothing to lose!!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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."
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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
> 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.
> 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.
"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
I don't know where the government gets off on using "consensual encounters" as a euphemism for 4th Amendment violations.
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.
> That arrangement is problematic
Understatement of the year.
> 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.
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.
Spider-Man pointing at himself meme.
> 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.
> 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.
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
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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'.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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
I bet this will go viral on X…
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.
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.
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.
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.
I'm sure he wasn't a heroin dealer, but why was your brother carrying $80k?
This sort of question should not need to be answered, or raised. Carrying a lot of money around should not be grounds for suspicion.
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.
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.
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.
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.
He was a cocaine dealer, not heroin dealer.
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
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.
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.
so it for was drugs, just not heroin.
This feels like a ragebait comment and the entire story is clearly not being told.
It's part standard story for civil asset forfeiture.
The "civil" part of Civil Asset Forfeiture precludes criminal felony charges..
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.
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?
Why now? These concerns have been being raised for decades.
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."
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
I am of the opinion that "lockdown" is illegal detention, and conditioning them from a very young age to accept it.
The malcom in the middle episode about the ACLU or Rock and roll high school are classic examples of this.
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.
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.
it all starts in preschool, when officers are modeled as universal friends that always help.
As a somewhat recent immigrant to Canada, would the consensus be that this applies here as well?
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.
In my experience with both countries, American constitutional rights are stronger, but Canadian police are less corrupt (but universally unpleasant)
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.
I agree, but how ridiculous is the overreach of police when we start suggesting that schools include it in curriculum
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 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.
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.
Quit the hyperbole. This seems like a basic Civics class topic.
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.