> Lyon arrived @RDUAirport & gave his bag to @TSA to be scanned. He says he absolutely knew TSA would see the cash, but said he also knew there is no law limiting the amount of cash one can fly with in the U.S.
Here's the real problem. Civil asset forfeiture is an extralegal action. It's outside the legal system, which is why it's nearly impossible to get your money back. It's why the legality of what Lyon was doing doesn't matter. It's not a system of law, but power. He who has the power makes the law on the spot.
That the US collectively has resigned itself to this level of clear overreach, utterly indefensible on any legal grounds, not to mention the bill of rights, says a lot about what 9/11 has done.
The terrorists won the battle the people of this country thought they were fighting.
This is categorically wrong. CAF is outside of the criminal legal system, but is very much part of the civil legal system, and the governments loses CAF cases more often than they win them in CAF cases preceding or not involving related criminal cases. (But conversely, the governments almost always win CAF cases that occur after succesful criminal cases involving drugs, racketeering, fraud, or financial crimes.)
CAF cases make the news when the victim doesn't get their money back in a timely fashion, for the same reason that fires and earthquakes do: because that's not the normal state of things.
CAF is problematic, especially the way it is run in the South and Midwest, but don't make it out to be something that it isn't.
EDIT:
The OP asserted that CAF was extralegal, and it absolutely is not. CAF is specifically authorized by the Comprehensive Crime Control Act of 1984, a federal law.
The OP asserted that the "terrorists won" even though CAF predates 9/11 and was created to combat organize crime. (CAF laws in the U.S. date back to the 1700s, but were infrequently used until roughly 1920 when they were used to target organized crime during Prohibition. The modern federal CAF law was passed in the 1984, to fight the "war on drugs", specifically referring to the drug cartels, and were modeled on the Prohibition Era CAF laws.)
In the incident described in the local news story, an officer of the law demanded the money extra-legally, and only resorted to civil asset forfeiture after the victim refused to play along.
I think it's important to note that it began with an extra-legal demand, no matter the legal substance of the procedure that followed.
Civil asset forfeiture proceeds in the USA are already a larger amount than substantially all losses to property crimes combined, and we have no way of knowing how much more was lost to extra-legal demands that didn't pass through C.A.F. proceedings.
-------------
We've made law enforcement into a thousand squabbling gangs of thieves, and it's going to take a lot of time and effort to un-make that monster.
> In the incident described in the local news story, an officer of the law demanded the money extra-legally, and only resorted to civil asset forfeiture after the victim refused to play along.
No, it doesn't say that.
It says that the funds were seized with the explicitly stated intent to pursue forfeiture, and also a drug and money laundering investigation was threatened, with surrendering the funds (presumably, meaning not fighting CAF) given as an alternative to the investigation being pursued.
This isn't “CAF is an extra-legal process” this is the very-legal criminal process being used as a stick to threaten with to undermine the integrity of the equally-legal civil asset forfeiture process, because federal rules allow local law enforcement agencies to keep a share of federal-law seizures the local agency participated in (while most state forfeiture laws dedicate funds to the State general fund and not to the seizing agency), exacerbated by the use of cross-sworn local officers in airports, the chokepoint nature of airports on travel, etc.
That's not what happened. The quote from FoxNews reporter was: "Then offers the man a way out: surrender his cash & no investigation"
This does not mean the officer was planning on pocketing the money personally. This likely still would have been considered a seizure under asset forfeiture.
I agree that it should be entirely legal to carry around hundreds of thousands in cash, but the reality is that it looks very suspicious for someone who's been previously convicted of a felony drug conviction carrying around hundreds of thousands in small bills.
Asset forfeiture is a mixed bag. You have to appear in court prove the money was not gained through illegal means. The fact that most asset forfeitures go uncontested is telling that a lot of them, IMO, are probably indeed drug money (this is obviously controversial).
It's important to remember that every state is different - as is the Fed gov't.
In any case, it is absolutely not "extra-legal". That's nonsense. Asset forfeiture is literally codified in almost every state.
"Surrender your cash & no investigation" is pretty plainly an extra-legal demand -- a civil asset forfeiture process was the threat in that discussion! The officer's preferred option was that the money was seized without any investigation, without any process at all, via the victim "voluntarily" surrendering it.
I don't care who was planning to pocket the money, specifically. The end beneficiary is not the primary problem in this clusterfuck. The fact that officers and departments, generally, can benefit from arbitrary harassment of citizens is the main problem. The final disposition of the stolen money is secondary.
> "Surrender your cash & no investigation" is pretty plainly an extra-legal demand
No. Your big assumption here is that that seize wouldn't have also been done under Asset Forfeiture rules. It was used as a threat to try to get a suspect to confess to a crime.
Remember that officers can lie during interrogations.
> I don't care who was planning to pocket the money, specifically.
Well that's what makes it legal or not. If the officer pocketed it, then it's illegal. If the gov't did it using the law of asset forfeiture, then it's literally LEGAL.
The threatened "investigation" in was the civil asset forfeiture procedure. They were asking him to voluntarily surrender the money, or else they would initiate civil asset forfeiture. In other words, law enforcement officers offered the victim a choice between plans A and B.
Plan A was the extra-legal course: give us your money, and we'll forget we ever had this discussion. This was the officer's preferred outcome. Free money, minimum paperwork.
Plan B was what actually happened: the civil asset forfeiture process. The victim refused to sign the papers, so everything goes to court, and then the government has to come up with something, at least a notional reason, to take the money.
However you read the laws around civil asset forfeiture, I am pretty sure that "plan A" was not an intended part of the picture.
No, it was used as a form of intimidation. I.e. give me the money or else I'm going to use the power of the state to systematically go through your life and fuck with you and people you know via an investigation
>then it's literally LEGAL
Who cares if it's legal or not? it's an extremely immoral and unjust way to handle law enforcement. The fact that it's legal is a blemish on the legal system that undermines the respect people should have for it.
Correct - which is a common tactic in law enforcement. That is why people are advised to shut up until they speak to their lawyer.
> Who cares if it's legal or not?
The people above describing it incorrectly as illegal.
> a blemish on the legal system
No. It would be a blemish on the legislators who wrote the law, and those who voted for them. The legal system enforces laws - it is not meant to judge ethics.
One other aspect is that it's often not even fiscally reasonable to attempt to get the cash back. The costs of an attorney to take the case often outweigh the value of the cash seized. This means many times the only options are to give up on the cash, or try to do it yourself. Doing it yourself means even more time investment, and a lower expected return.
There is no way this isn't a significant factor in how many people leave the seizure uncontested. I wouldn't be so quick to assume anything uncontested is drug money.
You have to show up to court to defend yourself. This is an unfortunate reality of the world. ...but poor folks working hourly jobs that cannot schedule a day off - are not usually the people having tens of thousands of dollars in cash seized.
It might not be just one day. When it's the TSA, you're getting robbed at an airport, so roughly 50% of the time, nowhere near where you live. So it's a few days' trip, plus airfair, probably a hotel, plus finding a lawyer to represent you, plus legal fees. And that's if you're confident that you can prove your innocence -- which is an immensely backwards notion of justice. Also, interacting with the legal system in this manner is irresistible bait for cops -- folks are rightly intimidated, because cops can generally make your life hell through perfectly legal procedures.
And, actually, poor people frequently don't trust banks and will keep their life savings in cash. That can easily be tens of thousands of dollars, it only takes putting away $500 a year for 20 years. Do you think they're gonna have adequate records to prove that all of that was legal income?
> And that's if you're confident that you can prove your innocence -- which is an immensely backwards notion of justice
You don't generally have to “prove your innocence”, the burden of proof in federal forfeiture is on the government to prove that the property is subject to forfeiture. 18 USC § 983(c)
The only case where you would have to prove your innocence is for the “innocent owner” affirmative defense that applies only after the government has met that burden; that is, where the government proves then seized property was, e.g., used in crime, but you assert that as the owner, you were either unaware of the use of the property in the crime or did everything reasonable to stop it being used in crime once you became aware. 18 USC § 983(d). It obviously isn’t an issue when the theory of forfeiture charged and proven by the government is your crime.
> The fact that most asset forfeitures go uncontested is telling that a lot of them, IMO, are probably indeed drug money (this is obviously controversial).
Is this just pure speculation? You seem to be making this claim with no evidence whatsoever. There are many reasons cases might go uncontested. For example, the individual might not have the means to pursue the case. There are innumerable other possibilities as well.
We've officially authorized law enforcement to be a thousand squabbling gangs of thieves. This is not to say they weren't already. So un-making the fact will be much harder.
Without authorization, the cop would have stolen the money anyway. The law just makes victims more resigned to it -- if the money goes regardless, the cop might just as well get it. Maybe they'll even take less, that way?
>CAF cases make the news when the victim doesn't get their money back in a timely fashion, for the same reason that fires and earthquakes do: because that's not the normal state of things.
Yeah, and we have an awful lot of news like that.
>The OP asserted that CAF was extralegal, and it absolutely is not.
In practice, there have been enough cases to justify saying that.
We live in a country where the authorities can confiscate cash when they see it without reason and consequence.
That, to my eyes, is extralegal.
Whether the law gives them this de-facto power is beside the point; the justice system clearly does.
I think you're conflating ethics/morals with legality. Something that is legal, by definition, is not extralegal. Civil asset forfeiture is legal, and is therefore not extralegal.
> We live in a country where the authorities can confiscate cash when they see it without reason and consequence. That, to my eyes, is extralegal.
No, it's not, because it is, unfortunately, legal. "Your eyes" aren't really relevant here; the law is what matters.
> Whether the law gives them this de-facto power is beside the point
No it's not; "legal" and "extralegal" mean specific things. You can't just redefine them to mean whatever you want.
You're right that it's not extralegal action. But you're wrong that rarity makes it newsworthy. It's newsworthy because it's so obviously unjust and corrupt.
I don't think the fact that the government loses most of the CAF cases means this isn't a problem. Winning the case will cost the person money and time, and they will be without their money for that time.
Many people won't contest the action if the amount is relatively small - say $5000 - because the legal fees will eat most of it and they don't want to spend the time.
Others are simply not savvy enough with the system to follow through with legal action. Or, they are too intimidated. I've heard stories of people being stopped while driving through a small town, having the car searched, and having $1000 confiscated for no good reason.
I agree that's a problem, but that's not what the OP was claiming.
The OP asserted that CAF was extralegal, and it absolutely is not.
The OP asserted that the "terrorists won" even though CAF predates 9/11 and was created to combat organize crime. (CAF laws in the U.S. date back to the 1700s, but were infrequently used until, roughly 1920 when they were used to target organized crime during Prohibition. The modern federal CAF law was passed in the 1984, to fight the "war on drugs", specifically referring to the drug cartels, and were modeled on the Prohibition Era CAF laws.)
> CAF cases make the news when the victim doesn't get their money back in a timely fashion, for the same reason that fires and earthquakes do: because that's not the normal state of things.
That's its normal for the victims to get their money back without much of a hassle?
No, because people showing the cops they have a legitimate reason to have the money and getting it back isn't news, it's just how the process normally works. (And note, this is my professional experience from when I was a public defender, which included helping clients recover assets seized pursuant to CAF claims.)
It's like how there aren't any news articles about how most Tesla owners don't have problems with their car driving into obstacles every day. Normal isn't news.
I agree that it sucks that someone has to prove they have a legitimate reason to have their own money (in cash), but that's the way the laws are currently written, and they were written that way because their intended use was against organized crime. Most of the abuse of CAF laws can be addressed by eliminating the incentives for LEAs to seize the money (namely, that it currently goes toward their budgets), since prior to that incentive CAF laws were rarely used except in organized crime cases.
Even if you could expect to get your money back most of the time, it's still a morally repugnant thing for armed agents of the government to do. As a society we should not tolerate it at all.
The civil system does not assume innocence, so as a defendant you have a to prove a negative.
CAF cases make the news because the defendant actually gets their money back, and it didn't already get spent building a new hot tub for the police station lounge
If a girl lists you as the parent on the birth certificate, some places will require you to make child support payments even if you prove that your not the father, never had anything todo with the child, etc.
Welfare office Argument being is that someone should pay for the kid.
> If a girl lists you as the parent on the birth certificate, some places will require you to make child support payments even if you prove that your not the father, never had anything todo with the child, etc.
“Some places”? Really, which exactly? The only case I am aware of in any US jurisdiction where child support is required even in the face of proof of biological non-paternity is for children born in wedlock (sometimes with other requirements, such as marital cohabitation) in states where the marital presumption of paternity is conclusive (or conclusive when other requirements are met) rather than merely presumptive. And in that case it is literally what you legally signed up for.
Let me see if I have this right. A man and woman marry. The woman cheats on the man and gets pregnant, but lies about it and passes the kid off as the husband's child. After the birth, husband is suspicious, gets a paternity test, finds out he's not the father, and divorces the mother. And yet the now-ex-husband is still required to pay for child support?
If that's a thing that happens, that's genuinely awful. That is not something I (or anyone?) would want to legally sign up for; presumably people in those jurisdictions get married without knowing about this.
Yes, divorce based on infidelity of the female due to non-paternity is terrible. If she was just sleeping around, maybe he'd have a point, but if procreation is her goal, then she is merely exercising her evolutionary imperative to ensure genetic diversity and quality of her offspring; having higher-quality offspring could theoretically give her more and healthier grandchildren later. I don't see how non-paternity is damaging to the male in any way, unless he is already mentally ill, iow NPD, which in itself justifies her infidelity and her own grounds for divorce. It just goes to show the institution of marriage is sexist. I'll never understand why a woman would ever want to be married. "fsck studs; get money" is the advice I give to the fairer gender. btw this is the Internet, and I am a straight man that is confident enough not to hold others to my own choice of fidelity for my own relationship. It's her life, she can do as she pleases, and even if I were married to her, it still would be absolutely none of my business.
Oversensitivity, low or no empathy, entitlement, control issues, holding grudges, passive-aggressive behavior, these are clear symptoms of mental illness, and unlike nearly all, of one that can be cured.
Here's some wisdom about marriage from Kahlil Gibran:
Give your hearts, but not into each
other’s keeping.
For only the hand of Life can contain
your hearts.
And stand together yet not too near
together:
For the pillars of the temple stand apart,
And the oak tree and the cypress grow
not in each other’s shadow.
I've only somewhat recently heard of IJ, but it's one of the first orgs that I've ever actually felt compelled to support. Their marketing is really good at both being informative and persuasive. I really hope that their goals are as good as I read them to be.
IJ is one of the charities that you can select for Amazon Smile, so a small percentage of your Amazon purchases will be donated to IJ. I think they're deserving.
Really? Why should we not organize to fight for causes that we believe in? Would you be happy delegating your moral compass to the U.S. Department of Do-Goodery?
It certainly shows failings in our elected representatives, but everything IJ does is through the legal system. It succeeding shows the government hasn't completely failed.
Well first of all I don't think the government should ever infringe upon my rights, but that's an "in an ideal world" type of thing.
Second of all the government itself should be striving, and one of its strongest foci should be to catch such infringements and correct them.
I suppose the donations are tax deductible which is a decent compromise, but my point is a) that such organization exist b) they have more work than they have the resources to do and c) citizens have to fund them out of their own pockets seems like a pretty big failure of government to me.
There's a joke in Cuba: Two women argue about who has the better boyfriend. The one says proudly: "Mine works as a luggage-handler at the airport!" To which the other replies ashamed: "Mine's just a doctor..."
With that in mind I wonder whether it is TSA policy to always have these officers cross-sworn in with the FBI, or if it's a legal loophole which officers can exploit?
From the tweet-thread it looks like local police departments have similar "double-agents"...
So if it is a loophole the guy in the video just figured how to maximize his reward for his moraly derelict actions. Like the luggage handler at Havanna-Airport.
When shit like this is so mainstream it's cross-continental and yet nothing is ever done, just goes to further show governments only support and defend themselves.
Can't get paid more than 1500 in cash in France. 2000 Pounds is "a lot of money" to exchange in the UK. The limits are suspiciously higher if you're well dressed and stepping out of an expensive car or moving millions. Tells you how pathetically poor the poor really are.
There's a proposal for a new fed program that will track anything over $600 in the US now[0]. It is pretty much aimed at gig workers. Previously the IRS just didn't care about anyone below the poverty line. I'm not sure I'm even fine with the spirit of what is happening here, since these people would be getting that money back in refunds anyways. Also, I think a problem is that it is placing the burden on people who already don't have money, by complicating their taxes. It's weird to see banks and credit unions sending petitions around[1]. But this is also why I'm nervous about a fed crypto coin.
I think there is a sort of "war on the poor" going on (or escalating really). Not specifically organized, but pushing into areas that have an outsized impact on the poor and finding no resistance because they don't push back. Think of most consumer facing environmental laws (emissions, charge for bags, bike lanes etc), car seat laws, health stuff - like basically any covid rule, it's all super regressive. I think there is positive feedback because it keeps the poor "in their place" while simultaneously signaling how progressive the proponents are. Expect it to get a lot worse.
> Not specifically organized, but pushing into areas that have an outsized impact on the poor and finding no resistance because they don't push back.
I would definitely call this emergence[0]. For example the IRS has been known to push more against poor people than rich people because it is simply easier. That isn't IRS officials taking the stance "fuck poor people" but rather that it is extremely frustrating to go after rich people who have massive amounts of wealth and are using that power to make it very difficult for auditors to track everything. We see this kind of emergence happen all over, where people aren't doing things that are actually planned but patterns emerge. I think economists would mostly agree and just point to incentive structures, but I don't think this is a common way of thinking.
Anyways, I fully agree that we shouldn't be pushing regressive systems. Even if it is easier. Maybe we should start thinking about "Not because they are easy, but because they are hard."
[0] Actually I think a lot of what people believe is "deep state" and organized actors can more easily be explained by emergence.
I definitely agree with you that most of what looks like deliberate planning in complex systems is emergent behavior. Deliberate planning (in complex systems I mean) can usually be recognized because of how poorly it works.
It’s not at all clear that it’s more frustrating per dollar recoverable, for the IRS. It may be that agents aren’t evaluated on a total dollars recovered basis but a number of case closed basis. Which would directly explain why going after easily provable cases makes sense.
They would get their income tax back, but not payroll taxes.
The distinction is important because Social Security only applies on income up to ~$140k (this year). Due to that, the amount of Social Security tax revenue from a poor person is fairly close to the amount paid by someone rich. A family of 4 at the federal poverty line ($26,500/year) pays $1,643 dollars to Social Security. Someone who makes $4M/year pays $8,853.60.
So 5 families at the poverty line == 1 bajillionaire from a Social Security perspective.
I'm not in favor of the proposal, but it's not as absurd as it looks, policy wise. Morally, I would agree with you. This is an inevitable outcome of combining low wages and 1099s. It's really hard to force yourself to put your payroll taxes away in savings when you're only netting $7/hr and your bills are past due. It does also put them in a position where they should really have a tax professional, instead of just doing TurboTax or whatever.
I mean I know it is harder to go after rich people with lawyers and tax accountants, but fuck man I don't think it is right to go after people below the poverty line.
I remember seeing increased IRS enforcement as one of the payment methods for the recent U.S. infrastructure bill, and thinking about how that really meant taxing the poor:
"One of the starkest differences is who will pay for it all. While Biden pledged to increase corporate income taxes to fund infrastructure, Republicans drew a line in the sand. The new deal pulls together a patchwork of increased IRS enforcement, selling off petroleum reserves, [...]" [0]
Meanwhile, in the eastern parts of the EU, it’s totally common to transact tens of thousands of Euros in cash, with lawyers preparing the contracts and observing the counting of the cash, especially for real estate.
Less common but not exactly rare in Spain, I would assume also Greece and Portugal. Can’t comment of France but in Germany it would be really weird, though probably legal.
I'm building a house, and throughout the process have kept petty cash of €10k for when we receive a bill. Most people will accept a bank transfer, but you need to pay extra - suspiciously the extra amount is always equal to the amount of income tax they'd need to pay ;-)
The government have tried to crack down on this by increasing ATM fees and imposing daily limits, but I don't think it will really change anything.
there is a tv show in germany where people are selling rare art-works to dealers which routinely hand over 10000-20000 euro in cash. still unusual, but it's definitely happening.
"And the brilliant part is, we have inflation as a matter of policy, and never update the threshold, so eventually the limit is meaningless and we can seize all cash!"
Really? Retail businesses move much larger amounts of cash every day, private citizens (rich and poor alike) rarely see more than a couple of hundred at a time. At least this is my experience.
If the government can file 'in rem' against the pile of cash, can you also file a habeas corpus motion on behalf of the pile of cash?
The entire idea of 'in rem' actions is absurd on the face of it, and is the kind of nonsense that causes people to lose faith in the justice system. There are often comments here that (correctly) castigate software engineer types as having too much of a game-playing 'gotcha' sense of how the law works - or ought to work - but "Department of Justice vs. $137,425 in US Currency" is exactly the same kind of too-tricky-by-half game-playing, only by the lawmakers.
If you don't have a bank account and aren't in a rush to move your money you can just overpay on your taxes and make about 4% from the IRS until you claim it back at least 45 days later.
This isn't gonna stop until the people who get screwed start buying bulldozers and getting their own justice. It's just too lucrative for the courts to strike it down until striking it down causes less problems for them than not. Follow the incentives.
No, it clearly isn't. The law says that a government employee can take your money as long as they write some words on a bit of paper, and if any of that money ever came in to contact with any drug (which are legal in many states), or for many other reasons, then they can keep it forever.
Claiming it is legal is just a way to get more clients.
It's legal for a person to fly with cash, but not for the cash itself. That's the core of civil forfeiture. The person is not being charged with any crimes, the money is 'detained' for investigation.
All governments want cashless economies. They make it easier to track money, collect taxes, keep an eyes on the populace, etc. India did it by invalidating all large-denomination bills. China did it by limiting ATM withdrawals. United States is doing it in the most American way possible. Literal highway robbery!
My experience is the opposite. I can open up my wallet and take out a $1000 bill* in about three seconds; if change is due, that typically takes about another ten seconds. Paying with a credit card takes about a minute, four to ten times less convenient, except a significant percentage of the time the time "no hay sistema" and it just doesn't work, and sooner or later your credit card number gets sold to the Russian Mafia on a carding forum. I guess for super organized people checking your monthly statement to see if you've been signed up for a porn subscription you don't know about is not a big deal, but if you're super organized can't you just organize yourself to have the cash you need when you need it?
Also, do I really want Visa International to know what brand of constipation medicine I take and which anarchist magazines I subscribe to? (None, I swear!) Anything I buy on a credit card is something I can expect to have to explain to the police or the immigration authorities sooner or later, possibly after the next military coup, or maybe just because there was a protest nearby that turned violent and they'd like to know why I was in that neighborhood that day. Also, why do I need acetone? I'm not cooking meth, am I?
If you think this stuff will never affect you, well, nobody ever thinks it will affect them, until it does. Most people alive have lived through an invasion, a coup, or an episode of extreme governmental repression, and most people who haven't yet will.
Bitcoin is a nice alternative when it's applicable, but transaction costs are a bit high for buying a cigarette or a restaurant meal, and it's a headache when the confirmation time is 45 minutes instead of 10 minutes. Hopefully Lightning will fix this.
______
* Inflation is bad here, yo. $1000 is about US$6, but printing $2000 bills hasn't been approved yet.
Argentina definitely has its disadvantages, but there are advantages too. Healthcare access is universal. University education is free and open to everyone, and although most of the universities are not that great (and none are R1), there are two world-class universities. It's illegal to arrest people for using or having recreational drugs—not generally my thing, but it wasn't Breonna Taylor's thing either, and in the US the laws give the police free rein to loot houses and kill people with the excuse of looking for recreational drugs. The homeless people here are afraid of other homeless people, not the cops like in the US, and actually there is vastly less homelessness because of less rigorous enforcement of building permits. We have the best ice cream in the world, the best empanadas in the world, and the best thieves in the world. Public transit here is better than any of the numerous places I lived in the US, almost as good as in New York. There are single blocks of Buenos Aires with more bookstores than most entire cities in the US. Raising kids is a reasonable thing to do in Argentina; in the US the shittiest people harass you if you breastfeed in public.
The biggest advantage, though, is that when the covid pandemic hit, the people in the US went totally nuts, saying that the government is controlled by a secret Satanic cabal of pedophiles who sacrifice children to drink their blood, that masks cause covid, that the vaccines are fatal, and all kinds of nonsense like that. Europe doesn't seem to be coping that much better. Here in Argentina, meh, it's just another crisis. It's shitty but not as bad as the crisis in the 70s when military dictators overthrew the democratic government, outlawed playing cards, and started rounding up their political opposition and dropping them out of airplanes. I literally don't know anyone who got raped because of covid, much less murdered.
But yeah credit card transactions can take a minute or two, the economy sucks, and ordering things from overseas is difficult and risky.
It's been pretty helpful in gaining perspective on the bullshit I grew up with in the US.
I find this kind of recommendation to a random stranger on the internet highly ubjectionable and indecent.
Have you considered, that if they agree they don't like their country, maybe they have to look after ageing or ill parents, or have other responsibilities they can't just abandon? Not to mention money ofcourse.
That is an unrelated thought: the world can slowly come to hardly ever use cash--or even achieve universal cashless-ness--without the continued existence of cash being actively discouraged by the government.
I agree, although I do not think civil asset forfeiture is specifically used to discourage the use of cash and incentivize people to go electronic, or at least it was not designed with that motive.
Civil asset forfeiture is a power trip by the government that neither political party wants to touch, and it does a great job at reducing trust in the US's governing bodies. When I was a kid, I thought that kind of low level brazen corruption only happened in poorer or less developed countries. Now I get to see my countrymen doing it and admitting to it on video, year after year.
The police unions in this country are powerful. A lot of seized cash is treated as tax-free "bonuses" paid out to officers. Either directly, or indirectly by financing "team building exercises" at a Build Your Own AK Ranch or some shit.
The prosecutors offices get their cut too, so they have an incentive to keep their mouths shut. Everyone else can be bullied into submission.
If the US government actually wanted to (mostly) eliminate cash, they could just stop printing currency, and wait for what's in circulation to wear out. That would take about 23 years [0]. As it is, though, only about 8% of all USD exists in physical form [1], anyway, making the USD largely a digital currency already.
That would be reported by the news and people would care. Whereas here we get this reaction: "they seized his money and say he is suspected of being a drug dealer, well then i have nothing to worry about - i am not a drug dealer."
I think the most common reaction is going to be "this guy carried my mortgage worth in cash on his person to the airport, I don't think I'm going to have that problem".
Also, it's not just cash they go after. There are plenty of "State v. Diamond Necklace" or "State v. Various Electronics Valued at Approx. $1000" cases out there.
I did once. Why? Because I damn well wanted to, that's why! I am allegedly a free man living in the "free-est country on earth" so I gave my bank the required one week notice, came in with a bag, and walked out with the amount of cash necessary to buy my shiny new corvette. I then peacefully made my way to the dealership, where I signed the papers and handed them the money. No eyelashes were batted.
> there's zero doubt in my mind that anyone doing it is doing so for good reason
> in this case is almost certainly involved in drug or human trafficking.
Plot twist: i've never been involved in any drug/human trade, and made the money legally...
I gave you my "good reason". Feel free to call the DA in my area and tell them what to charge me with...
> In my [...] life
There's your issue. Not everyone is you. People have different situations and measuring them all against yourself is ... well ... wrong?
Eg: Have you "in your life" ever lived in a country where multiple bank runs happened during "your life", the banks ran out of money, and the government did nothing to make citizens whole? No? Cause that is one reason people would avoid banks - being bankrupted by such an event leaves a mark on you. Probably enough of a mark to keep you from banks forever, even if you move to USA...
> I did once. Why? Because I damn well wanted to, that's why! I am allegedly a free man living in the "free-est country on earth" so I gave my bank the required one week notice, came in with a bag, and walked out with the amount of cash necessary to buy my shiny new corvette. I then peacefully made my way to the dealership, where I signed the papers and handed them the money. No eyelashes were batted.
Doubt it, considering dealers hate handling cash and filing the anti-structuring paperwork. It certainly wouldn't be a situation where 'no eyelashes were batted', at the least they would have been upset that you were wasting their time.
> Eg: Have you "in your life" ever lived in a country where multiple bank runs happened during "your life", the banks ran out of money, and the government did nothing to make citizens whole? No? Cause that is one reason people would avoid banks - being bankrupted by such an event leaves a mark on you. Probably enough of a mark to keep you from banks forever, even if you move to USA...
So your reasoning for advocating to use cash is because some countries are unstable (even though as a result you are even more likely to robbed of your cash in them)?
Eh, people would care for about 5 minutes, just like everything else. Remember when basically every American adult with a credit history had their entire credit files stolen? How many people do you hear talking about that now?
That is materially different than having your cash stolen from you by a seemingly random person at the airport. One results in a very small probability of it affecting you in any way, the other is someone stealing from you.
I thought they were comparing people’s reactions to news about equifax’s data breach exposing people’s social and other identifying info to news about the government stealing from people via civil asset forfeiture.
At this point, is it worth it to turn it into a criminal case where you fight them for the cash? They're trying to keep the cash inside of civil rules. what happens if you physically refuse to let them have your items? Because they're yours and you believe they're attempting to steal from you?
The cash would remain within the civil rules, and on top of that you'd catch a charge and a criminal case. Even if you beat that rap, you're still back where you started with respect to the money.
Why would you carry that much cash? I know he has every right to do so, but there are a lot of bad players out there (TSA included) and I would not want to risk it.
You could deposit the money in a national bank (JPM, BoA, etc), call ahead and plan the withdraw from a local branch. I'm sure there are other players in this marker who would only charge a few grand to provide you the cash on site if you had the money in a trusted escrow. To me, that is cheap insurance, but also to me it's worth the $70 bucks to have my bank wire the money instantly to any bank account in the US.
Not saying this guy did wrong, just saying you can't trust anyone to be on their best behavior when they see $115K.
I agree he has a right to, but I still wonder why he chose that course of action. There are plenty of things to do that are 100% legit but not worth the risk.
Maybe he just didn't know about CAF, maybe he thought it wouldn't happen to him or could other reasons. Either way, I hope other folks in the future take heed and don't trust LE with their bags of cash in transit.
Especially when one party seemingly champions “civil rights” or “the little guy”, and the other party champions “small government”. And yet a government employee stealing someone’s cash with no justification does not fall under any of those categories.
One party champions unrestricted capitalism for billionaires, the other party is in the pocket of pharma, banks and other large corporations (and the management-class that work in those businesses). Everything else they say is trying to sell you on something to try to buy your vote. We have one party of the 1% and another party of the 0.0002%.
I think that is over-simplistic, at least since the emergence of a) a genuine progressive faction among the Democrats, small though it may be and b) an insane faction that's taken over the Republicans who seem to mostly represent outspoken racists.
No, b) is easy to understand because a party of the 0.0002% doesn't sell well at all and nobody would vote for that if they said it out loud. The billionaires also tend towards being insane racists, classists, think everyone below them are serfs and that they deserve their birthright, so those viewpoints are perfectly compatible.
If the progressive Democrats could take over the party and control it then I'd agree with you about a), but effectively what the Democrats can do is controlled by Krysten Sinema, not the progressive wing.
And both Trump and the progressive wing of the Democrats shows how untenable the current situation is, and how insufficient the Democratic party has been.
If you start to view the Democratic party (aside from the progressive insurgents) as being bought for by large corporations, and then understand that all the failings and excuses of the Democratic party are really just delivering to the customer what they want, it all makes a lot more sense.
And when it comes to the failings of the Democratic party -- like Krysten Sinema -- the trick is to stop going "oh if only she wasn't in the way we could have fixed everything, we have failed due to this externality" to realize that she's playing the role that the people who have bought the Democratic party want her to play and she's a feature, not a bug. And there's always been an excuse like that for the past 30 years.
Hopefully the progressives do eventually succeed or else we're likely to get some actually competent fascist on the right wing.
That's because there is a widespread perception that if someone is engaging in a large scale cash transaction then there must be something shady going on even if there is no direct evidence of it (because legitimate business is transacted using checks or wire transfers). This is especially true if the person carrying the cash has dark skin. (Having a criminal record didn't help either in this case.)
>a widespread perception that if someone is engaging in a large scale cash transaction then there must be something shady going on
People who've never carried a sum of cash on their person are often terrified of the prospect and assume everyone is as frighted of as they are.
I used to walk cash from a retail store safe to the bank as part of the morning routine. I've had so many lectures about why I should have never done it. I should have forgone my paid leisurely stroll and "just" arranged an armored truck. Or I should have quit over principal, like it was some sort of uniquely risky job compared to all the risky jobs out there and no owner should ever put on an employee. It wasn't even that much money. One day's worth of cash transactions from a small store in the age of credit cards.
One of my tasks at my very first job as a 15 year old bag boy was to walk with the manager across the street to the night deposit box to drop off cash.
The real risk in ghat endeavor was the manager convincing me to split the cash and run off with it…
The unchallenged near-deification of law enforcement and hardline "tough on crime" propaganda in the USA leads too many people to think a certain way:
1. If there was some civil asset forfeiture, the victim must've done something wrong because cops certainly can't be wrong.
2. If you've committed even a minor, non violent, crime, it doesn't matter how harsh the penalty is, you deserve it.
3. A majority of voters don't see themselves as criminals and aren't hassled by cops like some segments of the population are. They think this will never affect them, so they pay it little mind - until the day it does affect them.
I don’t think regular voters like the policy; they just don’t have any input. Plus there is only so much bandwidth for legislative process, and that’s pretty log-jammed by some hot topic issues lately.
While there may be some hot topics recently, I imagine there was downtime in the last few decades for Congress to stop law enforcement from systematically stealing from citizens who have been convicted of no crimes.
The polls I've seen put support for civil asset forfeiture to around 16%. So there's plenty of public support to end it.
The police are powerful though, and proceeds from this don't seem to terribly well accounted for in every PD. We know the feds and the local prosecutors get their cut, but after that... They are going to throw everything they can at keeping this gravy train alive.
Do you really think so? Both parties have assiduously avoided making any material legislative moves to address any issues raised by the BLM movement. Democrats have been more eager to make symbolic gestures (renaming things, removing statues, kneeling in the Rotunda wearing kente cloth) but I can't think of one substantive bill that was passed because the BLM movement championed it.
No one has explained to me how this is still legal. This "law" has persisted until Bush, Obama, Trump and now Biden. Why does no one on both sides of the aisle have the courage to stop this?
“ The government and its institutions will never hand back power they have been granted.”
Completely false, there are countless instances of government giving up a power it previously had. Previous presidential administration rolled back environmental regulations, Covid regulations across the country have greatly lightened up since last year, there’s no draft going on right now…
The elderly men and women who run the country want it that way. After a few decades of the same people in office year after year, what other explanation holds water?
There is another plausible explanation: the policy exists because of incentives arising from the government's structures, rather than the wishes of policymakers.
Conceivably, other people in the same system might also leave the policy in place, while the same people in a different system might change the policy.
So if it happens, you can go to court for your individual case and possibly win, which according to this comment happens all the time: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28635430
So more is needed, obviously. It seems to me that the status quo is that you're effectively guilty until proven innocent, and the people accusing you don't have much of an incentive to stop.
> Why does no one on both sides of the aisle have the courage to stop this?
Because the other side of the aisle will crap on you for doing it, and why burn political capital on a minor problem, when you have more pressing issues, like waging a war, digging through fallout of the largest economic disaster since the Great Depression, getting a crappy single-payer healthcare system through, filling three supreme court seats, dealing with a global pandemic, or keeping the wealthy and powerful happy.
The only people who actually ground their elections on this kind of platform are anti-authoritarian contrarians, which have a rolling average of two seats in Congress and one in the Senate. Constituents, frankly, don't care about this.
Constituents ABSOLUTELY care about these things and other very important issues.
The problem is, nobody cares about these things MORE than "stopping abortion", "muh guns", "fuck taxes", "status quo" that most incumbents scream about. We have a two party system that discourages caring about anything.
The US won't get significantly better unless our electoral system is fixed. That won't happen unless one of the two viable parties makes that a major policy goal... so, never.
I traveled with like $20k cash arriving from aboard via LAX.
Declared in paper that I have those money and verbally when asked upon entry, then had to go with an officer to fill out some additional form, that’s it.
The issue with the OP’s case is that this guy was flying domestically and traveling with any amount of cash is not a crime nor is required to be reported. Because this procedure of declaring cash is with Customs and Boarding Protection, it only ever applies when flying in from abroad.
Let's step back and pretend like the TSA/police never engage in civil asset forfeiture in the first place. That issue aside, this is still a colossally stupid way to make a transaction.
A thousand bad outcomes that are possibly more likely than this scenario could have happened. The bag could have been lost in the taxi, lost by the airline, stolen by a passerby, left at home, and the list goes on.
Has this guy ever heard of Western Union? Bitcoin? A cashier's check? Anything else besides a suitcase full of cash?
This method of making a large transaction is so stupid that it's hard for me to even blame the government for considering it automatically suspicious. Of course, having no due process surrounding civil asset forfeiture is not right, but that doesn't mean that this transaction isn't suspicious.
I'd go ahead and play devil's advocate here: the only reason to carry this much cash is to do one of the following:
1. Evade sales and income tax (You can say this isn't your problem, or that the government should take less of our money anyway, but countries that have high tax avoidance rates have poor infrastructure and public services – tax avoidance hurts honest people the most)
2. Make a transaction to exchange illegal goods or people
It's entirely possible that this guy's story is just a lie. I think it's naive to pretend that this guy isn't likely to be connected to organized crime. That's the whole "organized" part of it: they're going to be armed with a good story and disciplined behavior, not like the people you see on Cops admitting guilt the second a beat cop starts asking questions.
People trust cash. A lot of people dealing in used goods only accept cash. It's substantially more difficult to forge a load of $100s than it is to forge a money order. All you need to verify a stack of $100 bills is a $5 marker.
I collect coins. Many dealers are cash-only, especially for items where they're trading near bullion value. The 3% or so transaction fee is pretty much your entire margin if you're dealing with a commodity 1oz gold coin.
I've been hoping to go to one of the big national-attraction bourses after the Covid crisis ends (all the budget not spent on vacations in 2020 and 2021 would pay for a nice $3 gold piece) but I've been thinking about this exact scenario.
I've noticed my bank, despite being a large national bank, has a habit of not having branches in the places I want to visit. So there's a fair chance I can't just do an in-person withdrawl on arrival. The ATM is limited to like $500 per day and might incur distasteful fees. So the obvious idea is to pull $5000 before I leave and carry it on my person. Except now I've got to worry about the TSA grabbing it. Since we have no large notes anymore, trying to pack fifty Franklins in my wallet is going to be pretty obvious when you put it in the little X-ray bowl.
> Since we have no large notes anymore, trying to pack fifty Franklins in my wallet is going to be pretty obvious when you put it in the little X-ray bowl.
If CSCS type programs take hold outside of china, you will need cash to do many basic things without the support of the government who will be busy regulating if you can fly, take a train, open an account, throttle your internet etc. etc.
Every normal person knows about and would use those alternatives. Even if they were ignorant they would have been coached as soon as they tried to withdraw a huge amount from the bank.
The 'victim' likely had his money seized because there is an investigation linked to him but not enough evidence to convict in court (or he was associated in an investigation with someone who was already convicted). The reason for travelling is to buy 'game machines', which just seems absurd since such business deals can be conducted entirely from email or phone anyway.
Here's the real problem. Civil asset forfeiture is an extralegal action. It's outside the legal system, which is why it's nearly impossible to get your money back. It's why the legality of what Lyon was doing doesn't matter. It's not a system of law, but power. He who has the power makes the law on the spot.
That the US collectively has resigned itself to this level of clear overreach, utterly indefensible on any legal grounds, not to mention the bill of rights, says a lot about what 9/11 has done.
The terrorists won the battle the people of this country thought they were fighting.