> The warrant request omitted a central part of the FBI’s plan: permanent confiscation of everything inside any box containing at least $5,000 in cash or goods, a senior FBI agent recently testified.
We really need to have a reset on law enforcement in this country. I don't think anyone's happy with the police anymore, federal or otherwise.
That's manifestly untrue. There's probably a way to write that sentence to make it much less trivial to refute, but it will make a claim much more specific than "nobody is happy with the police". As written right now, the opposite is closer (somewhat) to the truth.
Unless you're a lawyer or a lexicographer, in a good faith conversation with someone smart, you rarely have to talk about the meanings of the words you're using. So if you have to, it's a sign that you're talking to someone stupid or intellectually dishonest.
- Paul Graham
Totally disagree with that statement here on HN. The word “conversation” is doing a lot of work. Hehe
In face to face conversation with others, word choice is not critical because in conversation you can work out what someone means or intends over time. Written form is just not the same.
This comment is pretty much the definition of a straw-man argument. You're presenting an extreme opinion as the opinion of hundreds of millions of human beings. Just adding to the hate in the world.
Police routinely abuse the public [1]. Yet about half of America believes major changes to policing aren't needed, and about half of America believes we shouldn't reduce the budget of police departments and shift to social programs [2].
It's hard not to conclude from some people's own words that their worldview isn't, basically, "screw over the out-group, protect the in-group" more than "one set of rules applies to everyone."
The term “worship” is used here, not to mean “bowing and praying”, but to imply “they can do no wrong.” Every time there’s an article about police brutality that makes headlines, you can always find comments about how the suspect probably “had it coming”
But the truth is if you went and asked these worshippers about this specific case, or other cases I’m sure you consider egregious, a majority would say yea this is bad.
If you really think that a significant chunk of Americans actually believe something akin to “literally every police action historically and every practice is ok” then you’re totally delusional.
No one thinks that. These super general polls are terrible because they really just serve to confuse. But what’s worse is when people who should know better latch into them because it makes the other side look bad.
The fact commenters here actually think that people who generally happy with law enforcement are also in agreement with every action taken is a really bad look on them, it shows they are happy to reduce their opponents to strawmen publicly, and also that they think that sort of argument is convincing.
For example, I think we need more and better policing in general. I’m happy they exist, but obviously they can be dramatically better. There’s any number of polls that would capture me as status quo. Yet the truth is so far from that - obviously police have a ton of stupid policies, laws are flawed, abuses are rampant. It’s just my solution isn’t removing police or whatever, it’s a case by case fix for each issue.
You can be pro anything but also anti abuses within it. I could come up with a massive amount of strawmen against liberals this way and you’d rightly point out similar refutations.
As far as what I assumed about the "worshippers" comment, I didn't think it was meant to be taken literally. If nothing else that comment can be taken as an indication of how some people perceive those who politically defended the police during recent protests. It's hard for them to understand why nothing has changed.
> It’s just my solution isn’t removing police or whatever, it’s a case by case fix for each issue.
There are several systemic problems with policing in the U.S. The whole idea of "internal affairs" is the biggest, and maybe the most straight-forward to fix. Why are the police allowed to investigate themselves? That is totally inconsistent with the idea of checks-and-balances in our political systems, and should be changed. There seems to be a culture in police departments protecting bad cops, and nothing is being done to change that.
There's so many things we could be doing better, but too often all we get from our representatives are platitudes and partisanship.
Of course policing can get out of hand, and that should be addressed. The communists in their evil utopian vision want to dismantle the police as well as the family.
> Yet about half of America believes major changes to policing aren't needed, and about half of America believes we shouldn't reduce the budget of police departments and shift to social programs
A different way to look at it is that nearly half supports defunding the police - one large city in the US had nearly 50% support for a referendum to abolish the police department entirely.
That's not a majority, no, but it's also much larger than would have been the case five or even ten years ago. To imply that the public discourse hasn't had measurable impact on public opinion is missing the mark.
You're right, but not for the reason I think you intend to imply. Many Americans think Democratic cities are high-crime and Republican suburbs and rural areas are safe. If you look at the data this is completely wrong.
So places actually hurt by crime tend to support the police. Because the medium place actually hurt by crime is somewhere like suburban Louisiana.
> Many Americans think Democratic cities are high-crime and Republican suburbs and rural areas are safe. If you look at the data this is completely wrong.
It is not "completely wrong". It is only somewhat wrong if taken literally as stated, because due to extremely strong political correctness norms, the crucial variable is typically left unmentioned in public. However, most Americans who have the above quoted belief, also understand the impact of that crucial variable. That crucial variable is, of course, how many black Americans live in the area. Once you control for that, you will indeed observe that Democratic cities have higher crime than Republican suburbs. This is why your example was Louisiana, which has very high black population, and so the suburbs have much higher percentage of black residents than other places around the country.
The reason why people think Democratic-ran cities have high crime compared to Republican suburbs, despite the country-level correlation analysis makes nonclear or even wrong, is that they do not do country wide analysis, but instead they look at a particular city close to them, and the actual suburbs and rural areas around it, and if you do that, the pattern actually is obvious, including in Louisiana. The fact that it breaks down on the national level is just Simpson's paradox.
I change my example to New Mexico. 80% White. Very high crime in both metro and nonmetro areas, with nonmetro higher.
I'm not sure exactly what data analysis you're describing. You might find this breakdown of death by assault by state and metro/nonmetro. This dataset doesn't have perpetrator race, so I restricted victim race to white. In the US perpetrator and victim race correlate strongly.
Within any given state, Republican suburbs and rural areas are almost always safer than democrat run cities. For example, in Louisiana, the homicide rate in New Orleans is 41 per 100,000. In neighboring St. Charles Parish it’s 1/10 that. The same thing is true for say Massachusetts. The homicide rate in NYC is 5.7 per 100,000. The homicide rate in Putnam County is 0.4 per 100,000.
The statistic you’re referring to misleadingly disregards regional patterns in violent crime. Southerners are more violent than folks in the northeast, and midwesterners are somewhere in between. But within each region the bill of violent crime is still concentrated in the, usually blue, cities in those states.
All you're observing here is that metro areas get more conservative as you move from dense downtowns to almost-rural exurbia, and crime tends to track density.
To be fair, the right wing of the US didn’t trust the police or government in the 90s after Waco and Ruby Ridge. Now, they seem to trust the local authorities more since the “fuck the police” movement has become about racial justice.
It looks to me like the left dislikes the justice system and local police because of inequality. The right doesn’t like the federal breadth of powers.
This is a common conception, but I think it's totally wrong. I think it's misguided to try and model human behavior by assuming people have ethical axioms and then proceed logically from there.
Plenty of people express skepticism of the scope of government power in the abstract. Anecdotally they almost all behave inconsistently when things get a little more concrete.
I tend to assume that when people say "reduce government power" they mean "the government should keep helping me, and stop helping others". So far that's nearly always been right.
For example many Republicans have (correctly) condemned the treatment of the Jan 6 traitors by the system. They say it's wrong for someone to have to live in a cell flooded with raw sewage, yet they don't care their local jail treats ordinary people similarly.
A related example is abortion. Traditionally Republicans said they wanted to delegate abortion regulation to states. After they won that some started to say the Federal Government should ban abortion. Very very few Republicans condemned that.
I've focused on right-wing examples because their motivated reasoning has had more significant impact recently in this area. But the left exhibits similar flaws. Plenty of "in this house we believe" families that call the cops on people peacefully minding their own business because they felt uncomfortable.
I don’t know that this really shows anything other than how dumbed down discourse has become in the social media era.
Defund the police was a dumb rallying cry and a disaster in the cities that tried it
I always enjoy seeing this line of reasoning because it seems completely unique to people in tech. A group is not a set of individuals, or at least that's what's meant when non-tech people talk about them. When the parent says "half the country" they don't mean "the set of all people who worship the police is around 150 million" they mean "the political body that is backed by around half the country has chosen to adopt as a core tenant a largely uncritical support of police."
Probably, but I try to keep in mind that the intersection of tech and internet skews neurodivergent and that it's possible that it's really is just a misunderstanding. I work with people every day who really are that literal.
No, no we have not. any bipartisan moderate reforms are quickly loaded down with hyper partisan amendments from both the left and right killing any bill
There’s no law enabling civil forfeiture. The police do it and the courts uphold it. Qualified immunity is also a totally court created doctrine. The legislature could pass laws against it, but the legality of these tools was established by the courts alone.
Civil forfeiture and qualified immunity don't exist in legislation? They were invented in courts? Holy hell. I'm not American but I'm pretty sure that's not right!
To be fair to the courts not every right or legal doctrine needs to be enumerated in law. The law provides a framework and the courts extrapolate for specific cases or corners that are maybe nuances of the legal framework enacted by law.
But both political sides have said the courts often exceed their mandate and create law by fiat. The challenge is the legislature is essentially frozen in dysfunction that the courts are filling the void and exceeding their mandate without balance by the legislature. Congress could pass laws banning these practices or providing a framework for qualified immunity (which some limited form surely must exist for people doing jobs like the police given they must have the right to use force and other typically prohibited means, but are also just as fallible as anyone else). But they don’t because they’re too busy angling to shut the other side out.
And the USSC whuch created so-called government immunity. Will likely need an amendment which says something like 'persons do not have individual immunity to lawsuit, persons created government, government does not have immunity to lawsuit'.
This will lead to lawsuits which will lead to governments implementing reasonable risk mitigation practices and insurance. Businesses already do these things.
Until then, government bad actors sneer and laugh at the people who they have now split into tribes.
> Half the country worships the police as long as they aren't hurting them personally.
You sound hyperbolic, but you are actually entirely correct:
“Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit: There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect.”
We haven't really tried that. We've made token attempts at it, mostly for the sake of optics, but actually trying it would require a revolution and civil war, because the complex of white supremacy, fascism and oligarchy which breeds the corruption of America's justice system needs to be utterly torn down and rebuilt from the ground up, around principles many Americans would find deeply uncomfortable, and American culture needs to be deprogrammed out of its fetishistic love of authoritarian violence and hatred of empathy and society, and that system and culture will violently resist all attempts at change at all levels, and by all means.
Thanks, every comment thread would/should have that posted about once for every five comments made. More people should read it including the person I was addressing who routinely pollutes this place. Perhaps you should share it with them.
There are lots of us who are happy with police.
It's a hard job, and now it's politicized. Everybody's an armchair quarterback. It doesn't pay well. And bad guys sometimes try to ambush and kill you.
Still not convinced? Talk to some family members of cops. I am confident you'll come away with a new point of view.
I was in the military and served in country. I get it's a dangerous job with arduous hours and on average pay that doesn't match the areas they serve.
That doesn't mean the principles and guidelines that drive our policing forces don't need a rewrite from time to time. I'm less critical of individual cops, and less inclined to blast the profession, but what I said is the best way I can express disatisfaction without getting personal or rude, to be quite honest.
I very briefly dated someone whose brother was a police officer when I lived in DC, and prior to grad school I was encouraged to consider law enforcement by the very field office I’m complaining about a little over ten years prior to this thread.
I find your comment condescending considering it’s in reply to an admittedly emotional rant stemming from the fact my local police failed so thoroughly in their mission it made an FBI agent’s eyes go wide and say they’d open a civil rights investigation.
(Though maybe they were more focused on the fact I also very bluntly said “I’m not a Russian spy” and listed off the people making want to re-enact the scenes from the hit HBO television series “The Americans”.)
Being a police officer is less risky than say, a construction work flagger, but people feel coerced into giving them unearned respect since a construction work flagger can’t misunderstand on purpose and shoot you dead if you don’t kiss their butt like they’re an aggrieved military officer in 1930s Germany they will lie through their teeth and not follow through on their claim that they will do their damn job.
Please pick up a copy of “Rise and Fall in the Third Reich” and get back to me before replying again because I think you have no grasp of history.
I have 3 officers in my family, 1 of them being a parent. I’d have to disagree, but not strongly. So would they, they are a lot of fair criticism of how police are trained these days and a fair level dislike. My family members needed a degree, require extensive training comparably, and had more programs with the community.
Even talking about the police as a collective from the perspective of the US is odd. So many departments are different, they are not fully one entity.
The most important thing is that it is just that, a job.
1. Judge Steve Kim gave the FBI a warrant to search US Private Vaults in Beverly Hills, but did not grant agents permission to search the contents of safe deposit boxes.
2. FBI raided US Private Vaults, investigating the company for drug trafficking and money laundering in March 2021. FBI opened 700 safe deposit boxes on the assumption that their contents were associated with crimes.
3. 400 Owners of the boxes filed a class action suit, saying the FBI violated their 4th amendment rights.
4. September of 2022 U.S. District Judge R. Gary Klausner found no impropriety in the way the government obtained or executed the warrants
I'd like to learn more about this because it's genuinely interesting ...
If you have a warrant for a building, or suite, and there's a bunch of little boxes inside ... what difference does that make ?
It seems to me that a savvy deposit box operator would create office space leases for every individual box such that you would have to enter a "premises" for each box, just as you would for individual offices in an office building ...
... or, at the very least, subdivide the box rooms such that every 50 boxes is in a different office with a different master tenant ...
The Savviness of this safe deposit boxes owner was using their business to obscure crimes. Their legitimate customers got caught in the middle.
If you’re looking at ways to prevent this from happening to you, the question is, would the FBI do something like this with the banks?
The answer is no. They are much larger and politically connected than a private safe deposit company. I recommend checking out a video by Steve Lehto if you want to learn more https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Lt5g3g2JHpQ
Bottom line is that you do not have any real privacy in society. Law enforcement is willfully ignorant of constitutional rights, and when they overstep, they often get away with it.
Steve Lehto's coverage explicitly called out that there's no meaningful difference between what happened here and a hypothetical bank. Perhaps they wouldn't target Wells Fargo, but vast amounts of wealth are held in many tiny banks.
Yes, the FBI grabbed, then opened the boxes after judge #1 said that they should not open the boxes. In fact not only did the FBI open the boxes and inspect their contents, they co-mingled the contents of all the boxes such that the boxes original contents could not be determined. Then they reached out to US Vault customers, and asked them to step forward and identify their items. Knowing that the FBI presumed guilt and not innocence, 400 of these customers filed a suit instead.
Judge #2 ruled in favor of the FBI. The Plaintiff is appealing to the 9th circuit.
> they co-mingled the contents of all the boxes such that the boxes original contents could not be determined.
This is solid evidence to support the idea that the FBI was simply looting US Vault, since confusing the contents without documenting what came from each box would blow up any evidentiary value of the items seized, and prevent the evidence from being used in any criminal prosecution, or even civil asset forfeiture proceedings against the items themselves.
It is my opinion the FBI was expecting to keep everything they stole and auction it off for a profit.
This seems very strange so maybe the article is leaving something out but if a warrant for X but not Y can still lead to confiscating Y, then what actually limits the power of warrants?
> In their warrant request, the FBI and U.S. attorney’s office asked U.S. Magistrate Judge Steve Kim for permission to seize the store’s racks of safe-deposit boxes for forfeiture, but “not their contents.”
> The warrant request omitted a central part of the FBI’s plan: permanent confiscation of everything inside any box containing at least $5,000 in cash or goods, a senior FBI agent recently testified.
Is the crucial detail that the cash/goods lack any protection under the law? If there was a written and notarized murder confession in a box would that be permissible in court? I thought anything taken/found outside the scope of the warrant would be impermissible. Is the cash now impermissible for prosecuting actual crimes? (i.e. FBI can just keep it and make the owner sue for its return).
> I thought anything taken/found outside the scope of the warrant would be impermissible.
That isn't true in general, the supreme court has a test for whether things outside the warrant can be seized / not constitute an unconstitutional search.
1. Must be in plain sight.
2. Must be apparent that it was used in a crime.
3. Doesn't have to be accidentally or inadvertently found but if it's not the bar for it being a legal search is much higher.
Since it's a safety deposit box 1 & 3 are pretty much already checked and I think falls down on 2. I can't possibly see how the existence of cash is apparent that it's used in a crime.
On the upside, maybe the next time cops go into the vault of a bank during a robbery, they can just take all the money they find and fund their pensions.
Edit: I posted this as a (bad) joke, but then I see this sister comment on the article:
But whether or not there was legal justification for opening the boxes is precisely the point at issue in this case. So the "plain view" doctrine can't possibly be used as a justifying argument in this case.
Never mind murder confessions -- what happens if there's legally privileged information in a safe deposit box? Seizing documents without providing any opportunity to litigate privilege is a legal Pandora's box.
This happens all the time in searches, and, unsurprisingly, there's a bunch of very well-defined processes in the DOJ for handling privileged information found in searches. You should follow Ken White's podcast and Twitter feed if this is an interesting topic for you.
There's well defined procedures for searches which may run into privileged materials, yes. In the case of searching law offices, the first step is "don't do this if there's any way you can possibly avoid it". If a search is absolutely necessary, you either have documents reviewed by a "dirty team" who are walled off from the "clean team" who only see documents which are determined to be unprivileged... or you seal everything without looking at them until a judge hears applications to have documents returned.
It sounds like in the case of seizing these safe deposit boxes, no such procedures were implemented.
No, there are well-defined procedures for searches that turn out to uncover privileged materials, too. If you think about it, this issue must come up all the time, in all kinds of searches.
A Google search will rapidly avail here, including DOJ's own handbook for how to handle this situation. It comes up a lot!
The problem here is "turn out to". Documents in a safe deposit box might well be privileged but not in an obvious way because nobody expects their safe deposit boxes to be searched by the FBI. The FBI may have seized privileged documents without realizing it.
I don't think these safety deposit boxes were mugging passersby. Maybe you could make a case if there was a famously stolen artifact in them, but a wad of bills or an expensive watch are not necessarily criminal.
This doctrine can't possibly apply in this case, because something that is inside a locked safe deposit box can't possibly be in "plain view".
Based on reading what appears to be the judge's actual opinion in the case (I've posted a link upthread), the excuse the FBI offered, and which the judge accepted, was that they had to open the boxes in order to "inventory the contents". But they also said they would only search the boxes to the extent required to identify their owners. From what I can gather, each box was contained in a "sleeve" which, in many cases, had a form in it, that could be read without opening the box, that identified the box's owner. Since each box was locked, the FBI could have simply made an inventory that, for each box, said "one safe deposit box, number #X, locked, contents unknown", with an additional note that either said "form found identifying box owner as A", or "no form found identifying box owner".
In other words, the FBI relied on an inconsistency in the warrant: it said they did not have permission to seize the contents of the boxes, but it also said they could follow "standard inventory policy", which in turn contained provisions that could be interpreted inconsistently to both require an inventory of the contents and to only authorize a search to the extent needed to identify the owner, if possible. This certainly seems to me to violate the Fourth Amendment.
In the case of boxes which were accompanied by a form identifying the owner, what obviously should have happened was that the FBI should have done nothing more with those boxes until the owner could be investigated to see if there was probable cause to think they had put evidence of a crime in the box. If there was, an additional warrant could be obtained to search that box. If not, the box could just be returned, unopened, to the owner. (In fact, the boxes of many plaintiffs were returned during the course of this lawsuit--but not unopened.)
In the case of boxes which were not accompanied by a form identifying the owner, the question would be whether that in itself was probable cause to think the box might contain evidence of a crime. In any case, that would be a question to be properly addressed by applying for an additional warrant.
So I think there were several rights violations here: first, the judge who approved the warrant should have spotted the inconsistency in what the FBI was asking for and resolved it; second, the FBI should have adopted an inventory policy that was consistent; and third, the judge in this ruling should not have let the FBI get away with what they actually did.
They should not have been granted a warrant allowing them to seize anything except "this thing owned by this person, who is the subject of an active investigation into Z".
General warrants "confiscate all these things" are not constitutionally valid.
The Fourth Amendment says a warrant has to specify the particular things to be searched and seized. The warrant in this case, since it said "seize all safe deposit boxes stored in UPV's vaults", was fine as far as that goes.
The part of the warrant that makes it inconsistent is where it says the FBI can follow "standard inventory procedures", which are inconsistent with the above specification of what is to be seized, at least as the FBI decided to implement them, since that included opening each box and making a list of its contents.
It is not enough to get a warrant for "I want that, there".
You must specify and affirm in connection to what, and "drug dealers might be using it", if approved, should be grounds for seriously questioning that judge's commitment to protecting the People from Law Enforcement overreach.
> You must specify and affirm in connection to what
The FBI did that: they said they suspect UPV of engaging in, and facilitating, criminal activity, so they wanted to seize the boxes in UPV's possession. But that, in itself, did not justify opening every single box; it only justified seizing the boxes and holding them.
You seem to be applying logic whereas if logic mattered this never would have occurred in the first place. Of course they can and will make these types of arguments.
> Of course they can and will make these types of arguments.
The legal argument I'm criticizing is not the FBI's, but the judge's. The judge said the FBI didn't violate anyone's rights because they followed "standard inventory procedures", and the warrant allowed them to do that. The judge did not even address the fact that that provision of the warrant was inconsistent with the basis on which the warrant was issued and with the warrant's specification of what was to be seized, namely, the boxes, not their contents.
This judgment should be reversed on appeal on those grounds.
If you get a warrant to just take possession of a safe deposit box, and the warrant doesn't permit you to open and search it, on what grounds do you justify searching it for a gun?
Seems like the FBI is trying to confiscate the boxes themselves, and in the process of getting the boxes only, they happen to take out the contents. I could see that line of reasoning, effectively letting them search the boxes, but why keep all contents that weren’t suspected of a crime, and why not return contents once found not to be part of a crime?
It's been awhile since I read it. I was thinking the judge authorized the FBI to itemize the contents of the boxes "for their return" or something of the sort. No idea what happens if police legally obtain access to evidence of a crime as a byproduct of a warrant, although I imagine for a non-publicized case it would not be good for the defendent. [note: not a lawyer]
Search warrants allow you to search an area that might reasonably contain the items listed in the warrant. Once they are in the safe deposit box, it sounds as if they are using civil asset forfeiture to steal the money.
Not long ago people were joking on Steve Lehto's YouTube videos that the police might as well do forfeiture on armored cars. In California, the police started doing exactly that. You can hear them lamenting in one case that they only seized $300,000 and not the $1,000,000 they were expecting. This practice is being fought but it is still common in the US for police to seize assets just because they feel the assets might have been used in a crime, or might be proceeds of a crime. No criminal charges are necessary, and you have to sue to get assets back.
Courts are political. That's the lesson i want people to take from this. The idea that there is an objective or absolutist interpretation of the Constitution is not true and has never been true. That too is a political ideology.
This case is just another example of how the Fourth Amendment is essentially dead.
This decision is just more overreach in the same vein as civil asset forfeiture, which gets around "unreasonable search and seizure" by basically saying the money and the property seized has no rights and uses some twisted logic that allows a civil action against property for a perceived criminal violation even though no criminal complaint is made. It's ludicrous.
An originalist interpretation fo the Constitution is propaganda, nothing more. The idea was also invented in the 1970s and 1980s. Don't fall for it.
Courts as a general rule side with prosecutors, law enforcement (qualified immunity anyone?) and the wealthy. The pseudo-intellectual hand-wringing is just a pretense for political views.
As part of the ruling, the judge notes "Through the pendency of this litigation, nearly all Plaintiffs and class members have had their seized property returned".
Basically, the FBI in this case actually did give nearly all the property back. Seems like a win right?
Not actually -- I don't think the FBI necessarily expected this case to blow up like this, so they're going back to their favorite playbook.
Make the facts of the case most favorable, so the judge will be inclined to rule on the law itself. In other words, the FBI wanted a favorable ruling, so it returned everything.
If there was no suit, was no publicity, would the FBI have returned nearly as much? I doubt it. Civil asset forfeiture needs an examination in this country.
> In other words, the FBI wanted a favorable ruling, so it returned everything.
How and why does the FBI work against the interests of the public (i.e. property rights)? Do they simply get to keep the proceeds of the seizure, which would be a perverse incentive?
The DoJ gets to keep the money from what I understand. On the Federal level this is the better version, because at least it needs to be reappropriated to the department through institutions.
At many local level states, literally the police dept gets to keep the money and fund e.g. bonuses using them, which is really a peverse on the ground incentive.
Lets just call it what it is. If you are involved in law enforcement in the USA, many if not most laws simply don't apply to you in many if not most circumstances. The courts have signed off on this, it's really not a secret or something anyone should be surprised by at this point.
Klausner’s ruling did not mention the privacy invasion documented by the plaintiffs: Federal agents took photos and made video recordings of password lists, bank statements, pay stubs, immigration records and many other private papers of box holders who are not criminals.
By this argument, civil-asset forfeiture "should be legal" too.
"Prove that you're not a criminal (assumed guilt without a trial or due process), and we'll return property we stole from you."
Since "Orwellian" and "Kafkaesque" inadequately encapsulate the evil this represents, I think we need new adjectives to describe this insidious and corrosive abuse of rights in the name of the color of law.
"It is not enough for an impermissible investigatory motive to be present to invalidate a search and seizure. It can only invalidate it if that is the only motive behind the search."
So apparently the 9th Circuit endorses the issuing of flimsy warrants for fishing expeditions, and once again, ignores the requirement whereby the warrant must describe that which is to be searched and seized.
Firthermore, this catalog of other, no evidence present, but still anonymous customers, is an implicit nod that anonymity is criminal in character according to law enforcement.
> The ruling did not address some of the most controversial aspects of the raid, such as the FBI’s attempt to confiscate assets from box holders on the presumption they were criminals, even in cases where agents had no evidence to validate their suspicions.
This seems like the most salient issue so that's rather unfortunate.
> “Unfortunately for plaintiffs, the mere presence of such a motive is not by itself enough,” he wrote, citing a U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals ruling in another search and seizure case. “An impermissible investigatory motive must be the only reason the agents conducted the inventory.”
This would seem to almost give carte blanche to craft warrants on the flimsiest means possible and then wildly overstep the original scope of investigation.
Keeping things in an anonymous safe-deposit box is in general a terrible idea.
They are magnets for thieves, police, usually in urban area where a PI can easily follow you and even when acting fully within the law it could unintentionally look very bad if you are in the middle of some proceedings.
A hole in the ground is probably preferable 99 times out of 100.
the fact you separate thieves and police as separate entities is funny. I tend to put them under the same bracket. only that thieves have a full time to steal, whereas for police thieving is an auxiliary activity
I feel for the honest people using the service from the article but when you store your valuables in private safe deposit boxes owned by a criminal who advertised his safe deposit boxes as a way to store the proceeds of crimes, you’re gonna have a bad time.
> private safe deposit boxes owned by a criminal who advertised his safe deposit boxes as a way to store the proceeds of crimes
That is what is alleged, but has yet to be proven.
I doubt that the owners put up billboards or bought ads saying "Store your ill-gotten goods here, wink-wink". It is much more likely that the business was taken advantage of by criminals. Like how FedEx and UPS are used to ship drugs.
Judging by the lawsuit, there's at least 400 customers who used them for legitimate purposes. And some unknown number of customers who used them for nefarious purposes. At what percentage nefariousness does a business become a criminal enterprise, resulting in a large raid by the FBI? Sweeping up and inconveniencing the innocent customers in their dragnet?
Stupid question: If I wanted a safe-deposit box, where do I go?
Traditionally, the answer was "your bank", but does that apply anymore? Chase is discontinuing the service, I'm sure plenty of banks never offered it in the first place, plenty of people use "online-only" banks where there might be a branch for legal reasons, but it's nowhere they could easily stop in and retrieve documents, and entirely too many people are unbanked.
This seems like enough of a gap in the market that a third-party service that says "we've got a really secure building with armed guards and lots of cameras and stuff" could reasonably find an audience among the law-abiding.
I assume a service like the one raided doesn't advertise to the broad public "store dirty assets here" -- indeed, one would expect advertising the service to non-criminal customers would be an important part of their legal ass-coverage strategy.
The raid IMO is in part to send the signal such businesses are unacceptable and that your assets are not safe there. I would wager this was done for deterrent effect as much as anything.
Anonymous safe deposits threaten the paradigm that assets should by KYC'd and easily visible to creditors/the wife/child support/.gov/privacy-hating-tyrants without resorting to depending on the testimony of the defendant.
Saying "anonymous boxes are a problem" is viable if there's a prominent non-anonymous alternative. I don't think that exists-- see my concern about the bank option.
Hell, one would think this would be a great opportunity for law enforcement to get a direct line into "normal people's" business. Let them do a safe-deposit service: put my passport/birth certificate/old paper stock certificates in a vault at the police station. It's less likely to be burgled than my house, and if they want to gawk over a 30-year-old certificate for one share of MCD, they can feel free.
Any best practices for holes in the ground? I can imagine that metal detectors and various animals change the threat model, but I suspect there are also unknown unknowns at play here.
I always assumed the best strategy would be PVC plumbing pipe. You can get 4inch (10cm) diameter sizes cut to any length. Stuff your cash/jewels/drugs + desiccant and use PVC sealant caps with waterproof sealant. Bury as deep as you want. I would expect that to last decades. Plus it should not set off any metal detectors.
I think metal detectors can only tell the strength of the magnetic pull, which means they can't differentiate between a shallow piece of small metal or a large piece of deep metal.
In other words, salt the surrounding area with lightly buried worthless coins, nuts, bolts or metal scraps and anyone trying to find your loot will give up.
Nice thing about a PVC pipe is that you can have a screw-cap on the top near the surface, put your stuff at the bottom, and then have a sand or soil "slug" on top that you can easily take out to access what's at the bottom.
You mean like a vertical chimney? Interesting idea to trade convenience of accessibility for secrecy. You could even embed a secondary pipe to make retrieval of the items more straightforward. My concern would be if the tube would stay fully vertical.
The loss of value when you as a private citizen sell diamonds is going to hurt a lot compared to gold where you only lose a few percentages to premium spread. With shady diamonds you probably lose 80-90% of the value when you attempt to sell them. If I was hiding wealth it would definitely be gold. Maybe just do multiple sites geographically dispersed so if you lose one it’s not such a big deal
This sounds like a fun thought exercise. No idea who we are protecting against but some factors might be:
- Moisture. The containers need to be completely sealed from moisture and have resistance to acid from the soil.
- Metal detector. Perhaps this could be mitigated using a skid-steer with an auger drill attachment? Some of the larger skid-steers can use an 80 inch bit. Excavators can use even larger bits and drill at angles to get under solid objects. Rock auger bits can get through some rocks. Layers of gravel might obscure detection from ground penetrating radar.
- Location should be obfuscated by trees to avoid satellite and aircraft imaging from Keyhole/Google/Others.
- Accessibility. If there is a few feed of rocks above the container and a rope passes through the rocks, then retrieval is less likely to damage the container and one would not need dig as deep for extraction.
- Drill numerous holes and find some other use for them whilst singing One of these things is not like the other
Re: moisture, you also need to account for condensation forming inside the box as your seal fails.
For anti-metal detection, ideal spot would be atop/near a buried junkyard. Once they've gone to the trouble of excavating a rusted Dodge Neon, interlopers are not inclined to dig there again.
You might look at improving or expanding your drainage. You'll learn something useful and look less suspicious. In my mind the threat model is whatever cost/benefit analysis the people searching have in their heads masked by the unknowns you mention. People can just dig up your yard, if you see what I mean.
There's some joke about an alleged terrorist being in prison, so he sends a "coded" message to his wife about there being something buried in the backyard. The message is intended to be intercepted, and it is.
The investigators tear apart the backyard and find nothing. The alleged terrorist then lets his wife know the backyard is prep'd for this year's potato planting.
We really need to have a reset on law enforcement in this country. I don't think anyone's happy with the police anymore, federal or otherwise.