
Family Sues DEA and TSA After Elderly Man’s Life Savings Were Seized at Airport - jseliger
https://reason.com/2020/01/16/family-sues-dea-and-tsa-after-elderly-mans-life-savings-were-seized-at-airport
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JohnFen
Damn, I hope that family wins _hard_. This sort of theft is widespread amongst
other law enforcement agencies as well. I hope that they win hard enough to
make everyone stop (or at least curtail) stealing.

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BurnGpuBurn
Civil forfeiture cases have been in the news for more than five years now, how
long are people going to let those guys get away with this? It's absurd. I'm
willing to bet this will still be happening five years from now though.

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JumpCrisscross
> _how long are people going to let those guys get away with this?_

I’ve tried organising support for shifting New York law from its current
“clear and convincing” standard to one requiring criminal conviction before
seizure, as in Connecticut [1].

It’s hard to get people to show up, call their representatives and generally
provide an electoral incentive for going through the difficulty of changing
the law. Because most people don’t see themselves as potential criminals, and
thus at risk of such seizures, it tends to get second fiddle to more pressing
issues, _e.g._ wrapping up the war on drugs or healthcare.

[1]
[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civil_forfeiture_in_the_Unit...](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civil_forfeiture_in_the_United_States)

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tjpnz
Who are they intending to catch? Drug traffickers and tax evaders aren't going
to set foot in an airport with that amount of cash.

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thephyber
Anybody with large amounts of cash. If you don’t use digital banking, they
can’t trace your spending easily and that becomes something close to enough
evidence to Civil Asset Forfeiture your cash.

And I don’t like your argument because there are always a few extreme dummies
who justify the policies at airports, so I don’t think the “all smart
criminals will avoid detection” is strong enough to mean we should just drop
all screening.

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beatgammit
How about we stop assuming that lots of cash implies a crime? I bought my last
car with cash, which I think is greater than the current "this is sketchy"
limit since it was over $10k in $100 bills. I have also given and received
gifts of similar magnitude. If it weren't for sales tax making change a royal
pain, I would use cash far more often, in which case carrying a few hundred
would be an everyday thing, and carrying a few thousand wouldn't be "weird".

I am really uncomfortable with asset forfeiture without at least a criminal
charge, or preferably a conviction. Carrying a ton of cash may raise
questions, but it should never be sufficient evidence for seizure.

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mmhsieh
this is the TSA retirement plan:

show up to the airport with your life savings

the TSA agent retires with your money

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mmhsieh
owning money is a crime in america now?

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siruncledrew
In any case, it sounds extra-ordinarily stupid to travel anywhere with $82k in
a tupperware container. Regardless of how the TSA/DEA case goes, I'm just in
awe that people in this day and age legitimately choose to bring around all
their money they worked _decades_ to acquire in one easy to access place...
like a container. (Assuming the prerequisites of opening a bank account were
not the issue).

Seriously, what are they actually thinking? Are they fearful of banks? Is it
out of frugality? Even in a 1% interest account, $82k would make a good amount
of interest to use for spending.

Hell, imagine if the wrong person happened to get a peek at stacks of cash in
someone's backpack? People could get killed in an instant over that.

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seibelj
How does that make it OK for the feds to steal the money? It’s kind of dumb to
walk around with a $1000 phone and a $4000 laptop as well.

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Melting_Harps
> How does that make it OK for the feds to steal the money? It’s kind of dumb
> to walk around with a $1000 phone and a $4000 laptop as well.

It doesn't, and this LEO apologist narrative around here is what keeps things
like this in place. This belief that such actions are the result of the
victim's stupidity, and not the legal practices and judicial system that
enable and ultimately legalize what amounts to theft is the source of the
problem.

I feel bad for the elderly man, he came from a period where inherit Trust in
law enforcement was basically the norm, perhaps ignorant and naive, but it
can't help but underscore the times we live in.

For those who have never had anything taken away from them from Police its
hard to explain the vulnerability and exposed sense of betrayal it leaves you
with, especially when you're proven innocent. It makes you take so many
precautions before leaving your home, not against the most cunning and slick
of thieves, but those legally sanctioned to do so.

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thephyber
it’s always harder to change the status quo when the average citizen doesn’t
know about the practice and isn’t directly hurt by it (concentrated costs,
diverse benefits).

Also, I think the police in the USA right now are FAR more professional than
they were when this guy was born. They literally didn’t use fingerprints or
most kinds of forensic evidence. It was largely about picking up the person
that most tweaked your spidey-sense and trying to work backwards from there.
Today we have FAR more traceability of chain of evidence and documentation of
actions by individual officers than ever before. I’m not apologizing for
officers or bad policy, I just want to give credit where I think not enough is
given.

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nullc
A lot of forensic science is borderline or outright pseudoscience. Genetic
testing with a FP rate worse than photo comparisons... Whats the ROC of the
fingerprint comparison? Oops 'experts' working on comparing fingerprints
haven't ever heard of a ROC.

The reason much of it works at all is because it gets applied primarily where
there is a lot of other extremely traditional evidence (witnesses, motive,
etc.).

Overconfidence in science-theater investigations have been resulting in more
calls for dragnet operations, which would have extremely bad results.

