You may have heard that this week Jeff Sessions’ Justice (sic) Department rolled back the Obama-era directive that had curbed one of the worst aspects of asset forfeiture.
The federal government will once again be “adopting” forfeitures made by thieving police departments in states that have attempted to curb forfeiture abuse. Cops who want more toys and higher salaries can again thumb their noses at state laws — and of course at the very concept of due process.
Says C.J. Claramella at Reason:
The Justice Department, rolling back an Obama-era directive, will seize more cash and property from suspected criminals, whether or not they have been charged with a crime, Attorney General Jeff Sessions said Wednesday.
At a televised meeting with law enforcement leaders from around the country, Sessions laid out a new policy directive regarding the Justice Department’s Equitable Sharing Program, which distributes hundreds of millions of dollars a year in asset forfeiture revenue to state and local police departments.
“President Trump has directed this Department of Justice to reduce crime in this country, and we will use every lawful tool that we have to do that,” Sessions said. “We will continue to encourage civil asset forfeiture whenever appropriate in order to hit organized crime in the wallet.”
It’s s pity that a Reason writer repeats the fiction that the victims of asset forfeiture are “suspected criminals.” No doubt a few are. The rest are just marks who keep “too much” cash where roaming statist gangs can grab it and who probably don’t have the wherewithal to challenge the theft.
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Earlier, the Department of (Achtung!) Homeland Security announced that henceforth every American boarding an international flight at a U.S. airport will be a terrorist suspect.
But wait. You thought we were already terrorist suspects? True. But now — since the TSA has never stopped a single terrorist strike and since it fails to find up to 95% of the dangerous objects it’s supposedly looking for — they’re going to get more serious about it.
Says TechDirt:
The DHS has decided air travel is the unsafest thing of all. In the wake of multiple fear mongering presidential directives — including a travel ban currently being contested in federal courts — the DHS has introduced several measures meant to make flying safer, but in reality would only make flying more of a pain in the ass.
The government has argued in court that flying is a privilege, not a right, and the DHS seems hellbent on making fliers pay for every bit of that privilege. We’ve seen laptop bans introduced as a stick to push foreign airports to engage in more security theater and a threat to rifle through all travelers’ books and papers to ensure nobody’s reading explosive devices.
Now, the DHS is going to be scanning everyone’s faces as they board/disembark international flights.
But it’s okay! Really! Because it’s easy as pie to get around this latest incursion of useless Big Brotherism. The DHS’s own privacy-impact statement gives you the exciting secret workaround (as quoted in a lovely piece of criticism) (H/T DB):
“…(T)he only way for an individual to ensure that he or she is not subject to collection of biometric information when traveling internationally is to refrain from traveling.”
There you have it. War is Peace. Sickness is health. We have always been at war with Eastasia. And all you have to do to keep your privacy while traveling … is not to travel!
And if you absolutely have to fly internationally, fear not. The DHS says the new systems should be 96% accurate, so what could go wrong? And they look you right in the eye and promise they won’t retain the scans of U.S. citizens. Really, they won’t. Honest. Cross their fingers behind their backs hearts and hope you die.
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Now after that, you need the laugh. It’s a small and bitter one. More of a cynical chuckle, the sort of thing you could picture Humphrey Bogart doing out of one side of his mouth. But it’s what I’ve got.
This is “Made In America Week.” And Our Glorious Leader’s weekend palace, the Mar-A-Lago resort, has just applied for permission to hire 70 foreign workers because there apparently aren’t 70 cooks, waiters, and busboys in the U.S. who are willing to do seasonal work for billionaires.
Oh yeah. It’s a very different world for thee and me, isn’t it?
But! But! But, if the scans can only be 96% accurate, doesn’t that mean your exit scan could be different from your return scan? Would they let you back in if you were only a 90% match for your exit scan? What about an 80% match?
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As for asset forfeiture, the idea that it hurts ‘organized crime’ is totally bogus, and if we could get stats on it we would likely learn that over 95% of the cases where it’s used are not against real criminals at all. It’s used against you and me, stopped for a tail-light burnt out while carrying cash to the casino a few states away, or to buy an antique truck from a guy who only wants cash, or against somebody who got swatted because of a domestic dispute. They get away with it because it’s so difficult to fight, especially if you’re traveling from another state.
One way to avoid having your ca$h ‘copped’ (perfect old-school expression in this case, I think) is to not have it in your possession. You could carry prepaid credit cards, but in order to keep the cops from using them you’d have to register them, and probably have to hot-card them immediately. That may be difficult to do if they’ve also seized your phone to amuse themselves and to ‘establish dominance’. However, they can try to ‘leverage’ (aka bludgeon or coerce) you into revealing the PIN, and may then use the card themselves after they erase it from the inventory of assets seized.
If I were traveling and needed a lot of ca$h on the other end, I’d try to find an end-run around the possibility of having ton$ of ca$h stolen by Barney just because he caught me doing 37 mph in a 35 zone. There are other ways, but the simplest one I can think of is to use your banking ‘network’. Just leave the money in the bank and go get the cash at the other end. Most credit unions, e.g. are in a national network, and you can make deposits or withdrawls at a ‘foreign’ ATM, meaning not your FCU’s ATM but any other FCU’s ATM. You can even walk in and make much larger cash withdrawls than the ATM supports, if need be.
As I understand it, civil asset forfeiture is not against the person, but against the thing. You get the Government versus Mercedes Benz sedan or the Gov’t versus $25000. Since things don’t have rights, the highwaymen don’t have to follow laws that apply to people. If the dog alerts on your cash, the LEO does not build a case against you, but he has probable cause to declare the cash forfeit. The cash is guilty (by sniff) of being involved in the illegal drug trade and is forfeit.
But the terrorist aren’t just flying,THEY ARE EVERYWHERE!!!!
We need to face scan everyone everywhere, all the time, everything needs to be controlled, do you want terrorists running free in the street?
Coming soon for your own good & the children; you must report in to your local cops with your itinerary for your every day, to deviate means you might be a terrorist so don’t, only the guilty have anything to fear,do this all of the time and then only then will we be safe!
prirat — You have perfectly summed up the egregious (and medieval) legal fiction by which cops justify thieving from individuals and savaging the poor, battered Constitution.
Does anyone but a cop and a bought-and-paid-for government-supremacist judge actually believe that? Does anyone at all believe it makes sense?
It’s not even legal “fiction,” it’s a lie.
The Fifth Amendment says, “No person shall … be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law…”
Joe had $25,000. Now he doesn’t, because cops deprived him of it without him getting any process of law. That’s flat unconstitutional.
Per an article in April, 1973, in the LA Times which gave the numbers on the War On Some Drugs, the war was already lost.
Repeat the experiment and expect different results? Heh.
The WOSD is more a war on the Bill of Rights and always has been. The very idea of arrest the thing–money, car, boat, plane–is absolute evil.
And the fools think an Article 5 con con will fix anything. There is nothing wrong with the original constitution, just the failure to follow it. And yes, I am including Mark Levin in my list of fools.
Also, by original I mean before the amendments added after 1865.
Prirat is correct; it’s an in rem action (against “the thing”), rather than an in personam action (against the person). And that’s how they can get away with calling it a “civil” asset forfeiture; this allows them to apply search standards equivalent to those necessary for a simple warrant, looser evidentiary standards, a lower burden of proof, and almost no constitutional due process rights (no right to an attorney, for instance) than would apply in a criminal prosecution. The good news is that more and more states (up to 23 by my count) have adopted some sort of CAF reforms, and some of those are pretty good (such as requiring criminal conviction before forfeiture). What Sessions is trying to do is perform an end run around those new restrictions by “adopting” the state case (which allows the Feds to apply “equitable sharing”, which sends 80% of the loot back to the local “law enforcement” (sic) agency). He can do that; federal preemption applies. However, the states can (and many already have) adopt laws which either prohibit their domestic LE agencies from participating in federal actions (or those under a certain size or with other limitations) or (the best way) by requiring that all seized property (including equitable sharing proceeds) be paid into the state’s General Fund. This removes the perverse incentive that leads to “policing for profit”. We should all be working with our state legislators to curb this abuse. The feds can’t make it work without state
collusionassistance.And remember, you do not have to consent to a search. If you refuse, the officer generally (unless there is some other exception) has to obtain a warrant or get a drug-sniffing dog out there. That takes time which he may not be willing to devote to you. Of course, if he is willing to do so, you can be in for a fairly long wait.
Asset theft – I don’t know if it has been challenged in the SC, but if not, now would be a good time.
Bob
Tamara has a view of Sir Sessions:
http://booksbikesboomsticks.blogspot.com/2017/07/vintage-swamp-water.html
“Like a dog returning to its sick, Jeff Sessions is returning to those favorite themes from the Nineties”