What are the chances the seized items are returned in its entirety to the owner?
What are the chances the seized items are returned in its entirety to the owner?
The Bill of rights was created with a good reason and it shows.
Many countries continue to abuse their power and are trying everything to change regulation in order to keep and increase their control and power over on their slaves, oh I mean citizens. Just a bunch of power hungry and usually corrupt people
increase their control and power over on their slaves, oh I mean citizens
Muddying these lines does a disservice to your argument. We aren’t slaves nor serfs. We are mostly disinterested.
I mean, we do have for profit prisons and use our immense prison population as slaves.
That doesn’t make all of us slaves
Taxation: income tax is a relatively new re-invention. Even more for other types of taxation like VAT or capital gains. I’m all for paying for services though. But this is basically stealing or claiming from a person’s fruits of labor.
Passports/citizenship: Although most people will see a passport a sa travel document, you could also see it as a certificate of ownership. In many countries it is illegal to have multiple passports which supports this argument.
Try resigning from the United States. It’s very difficult. Also, passports and border patrol have been used to prevent people from leaving a country in order to exploit their labor, and slavery:
During World War I, European governments introduced border passport requirements for security reasons, and to control the emigration of people with useful skills. These controls remained in place after the war, becoming a standard, though controversial, procedure
Lastly, if you do not comply or pay taxes to your owner, you will be taken by force and sometimes with the result of injury of death.
Income taxes, transaction taxes, and customs duties are thousands of years old.
It's always been how kings and governments raised the money to pay their armies.
Taxes on certain goods, yes. Incometax, nope. It’s little over 100 years old. VAT I think about 75. And the list goes on.
In the uk it started around 1800, a few years before ending slavery. Could it just be a substitute?
In American chattel slavery, women were kidnapped, stuffed into boats where malnourished strangers died around them, beaten, forced to change their names and religion, and raped. The children of those rapes were routinely sold at auction, and their parents would never see them again. If the children were caught secretly learning to read, they would be beaten. Income taxes are annoying, but they are not slavery.
Of course. That’s a whole different aspect and I wouldn’t want to compare to that part of it.
Meanwhile we still rip custody from many (disproportionately) black dads, auction their children to foster homes, compel them to come up with certain amount of money and if they don't do it for the whip crackers we toss them in jail where they may be raped and malnourished and legally chained in work gangs.
Incometax, nope
Sharecropping taxes are income taxes. There weren’t formal income taxes because peasants didn’t have incomes. They paid a tax to their lord that was fixed as a function of the productivity of the land they farmed.
Income tax isn't there to get government an income, it's a surveillance tool. You have to write down how much money you earned, and HOW did you earn it, and sometimes even what things did you spend it on. People today are brainwashed to believe that it's OK for the government to know that, but when income tax was first introduced I believe that was one of the most common arguments against it: invading one's privacy.
I have heard people claiming that taxation is theft. I have never heard anyone claim that taxation makes us slaves.
Income tax is even less coercive than previous forms taxation, where people were taken from whether or not they could afford it. With income tax, people who do not work do not pay it. In fact many people who do work do not pay income tax.
That’s exactly the difference between upper and lower class.
You need money. If you work, you give half to the gov.
If you earn “passive”, it still happens, but rates are a lot lower
So rich people are still “slaves” by that definition.
The arguement goes that theft is retroactive slavery, the thief stole time from me. Not sure if I can make the logical leap between those myself, though I do consider them roughly morally equivalent.
Slave has a very specific meaning. Paying taxes does not make you a slave.
But this is basically stealing or claiming from a person’s fruits of labor.
It is actually the opposite. It all belongs to the rulers, and they generously gift you a portion of it.
I think given the existence of debtor prisons that becomes arguable.
And some do utilize the laws and systems in our country to increase the amount of slaves though.
This is likely just the tip of the iceberg: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kids_for_cash_scandal
I'm not going to argue for the hyperbole of us all being slaves though.
Having the government literally enforce slavery isn't in living memory but Americans learn about it in school.
It actually is in living memory: the 13th amendment expressly grants the government the right to use slavery as punishment for a crime.
https://constitution.congress.gov/constitution/amendment-13/
While the point still stands, the 13th Amendment's exception for punishment doesn't ban prison labor as we know it today. When it was ratified, "involuntary servitude" was only applicable to private parties, not labor performed for the State. If the exception didn't exist, the 13th would have still allowed for prison labor.
What the exception does is ban the now-extint practice of "convict leasing"[1]
Reality strongly disagrees here
Anything involving juveniles and family law is a magnet for psychopaths because the cases are sealed and basically impossible for the public to monitor for abuse. If you look at any secret government system like this it inevitably becomes a den for the most vile of parasites who thrive in darkness.
The naive front, is this secrecy is in the 'interest of the children' (meme.jpg), and thus they haven't a right to public adjudication. Corrupt judges salivate for the proceeds of that.
It still happens…
Look into private prisons and work camps, where they mostly work - it’s on farms. Just like the good old days. And master still manages to pay 27¢ an hour ($2.16 a day!).
who's this we you're speaking about?
I figured they mostly just sat in a room and figured out how the British monarchy had screwed them over time and again and figured that was a pretty good list to start with
This is so obvious it’s sickening. Everyone associated should be fired. What an affront against the constitution.
so obvious it’s sickening
It’s really not. The Third Party Doctrine has muddied the Fourth Amendment’s legal boundaries. The fact that a district judge originally ruled in the FBI’s favour should show that.
Everyone associated should be fired
If they continue to think they did the right thing, sure. That’s incapacitation. But prioritising retribution isn’t helpful when restitution and deterrence are unfulfilled.
One way of understanding the previous comment in light of what you've said is: the third-party doctrine is so obviously wrong it's sickening.
the third-party doctrine is so obviously wrong it's sickening
Perhaps I’m overindexing on the term “sickening,” but it seems unhelpful to bring an emotion like disgust into a technical legal discussion.
Where one has (and doesn’t have) a reasonable expectation of privacy isn’t trivial. I think it’s obvious that a cop who recognizes a fugitive in public is acting reasonably while the same cop doing a facial-recognition search at a public school parking lot may not. Where does searching public Twitter photos lie? What if they’re only accessible with a login?
If you can’t tell, I think the third-party doctrine as presently interpreted is wrong. But the history leading up to it is incredibly reasonable, recent and well documented.
I think it’s obvious that a cop who recognizes a fugitive in public is acting reasonably while the same cop doing a facial-recognition search at a public school parking lot may not. Where does searching public Twitter photos lie? What if they’re only accessible with a login?
There are some pretty obvious and reasonable lines we could draw here. For example, is the thing available to the general population, or only to specific parties who haven't chosen to make it public?
This doesn't necessarily answer your question, because you might e.g. have a reasonable expectation that data which is ephemerally available to the general population is not being recorded en masse and indexed into a central database, but it provides a boundary that would have eliminated a large swath of the trouble.
some pretty obvious and reasonable lines we could draw here
I agree. The problem is we have, on one hand, the police absolutists, and on the other hand, people who want to express their outrage more than do anything real. Neither bothers educating themselves on the legal merits of the other side’s. Both turn the Third Party Doctrine into a totem.
The Third Party Doctrine was created by Congress. Barring SCOTUS overturning half a century of law (again), that means the Congress must remake it. The lack of a popular alternative directly leads to the Doctrine’s persistence. We could draw these lines. But we don’t because we’re too busy expressing conniptions.
The third-party doctrine was created by the courts, not Congress. US v. Miller and Smith v. Maryland are the typically-cited sources of it.
Is this the same Miller where the courts ruled in a case against an undefended dead guy that NFA, which now is amended to outlaw registry of new automatic weapons, was constitutional because it was just a revenue collection law and preserved right to military-type weapons?
No, different Miller. This one is from 1976.
The main purpose of constitutional protections is to bind Congress. Regardless of whether Congress is inclined to fix it, they couldn't really fix it anyway (short of a constitutional amendment), because otherwise the next time there is a crisis the Fighting Evil with Evil Act gets passed and undoes it.
Perhaps I’m overindexing on the term “sickening,” but it seems unhelpful to bring an emotion like disgust into a technical legal discussion.
When true is redefined to false, it tends to raise emotions to a high level. Injustice often results in people's lives being disrupted and ruined where the ruin never should have happened. We should be disgusted by injustice.
We should be disgusted by injustice
Sure, do that. This isn’t that. Being “disgusted” by the Third Party Doctrine, broadly, isn’t the same as being offended by injustice.
The third party doctrine is disgustingly unjust.
It isn't trivial, but the lines have been drawn in wildly bizarre places. NBD if the cops fly a helicopter over your house to try to spot weed plants in your backyard behind a fence and no trespassing signs, for example. NBD if your communications are only likely to have been swept up by the NSA and you aren't able to prove that it has happened. And on and on.
Why tho? Judges have used emotional words in decisions for centuries. It is disgusting and abusive of what should be both logical and common sense upon reading the most basic rights we have in the Bill of Rights. Emotion has a place in life as well as much as cold hard logic.
If they continue to think they did the right thing, sure. That’s incapacitation. But prioritising retribution isn’t helpful when restitution and deterrence are unfulfilled.
Firing would be a deterrent. Given qualified immunity, the consequences for this kind of abuse of power are small, and that's a factor in why so much of it happens.
The Third Party Doctrine has muddied the Fourth Amendment’s legal boundaries.
No, the third party doctrine was a mistake.
But prioritising retribution isn’t helpful when restitution
I'm not sure in this case, that is what is going on. The sequence of decisions at the FBI and DOJ were so terrifyingly bad that the carriers of the ideas leading to those decisions need to be removed from the institution. They are a cancer.
"Fired" ?! I think you mean thrown in prison for armed robbery and conspiracy to commit armed robbery. Being unconstitutional thus illegal, these actions could not have been carried out under governmental authority. Thus these actions should be prosecuted as anyone else's would be.
I'm not necessarily a fan of creating such high stakes setups. But until these institutions are reformed around the concept of equity such that their victims are routinely and predictably reimbursed for the harms perpetrated by the institutions, we should fall back to insisting on criminal punishment for the individuals who enable them.
Yeah, but wait till you hear about qualified immunity.
I've certainly heard of it and it's one part of the cancer creating this state of societal breakdown. The concept needs to be soundly rejected. Any immunity shield should be narrowly scoped based on following written procedures. Acting within those procedures should mean that liability falls only on the institution. Acting outside those procedures should mean the institution and the agent are jointly/severally liable. One of the foundations of our society is that nobody is above the law, and government agencies need to stop being given this cheat code where they harm innocent victims and then just walk away from the situation unless it is especially egregious.
You’re preaching to the choir but the issue is that a lot of people “reject” it, and it is still an active part of American jurisprudence.
Sure, the comment I was responding to ("fired") wasn't grounded in how things actually are either. The point is if we're talking about what ought to be, then let's aim for actual reform and actual justice rather than some token firings.
We need someone in the executive branch willing to enforce the constitution for anything to happen
Side note: are there still places that have safety deposit boxes? Nearly all the banks in my area no longer offer them.
Yes, tons of banks still have them
Not for long, likely.
Chase in San Francisco told me that one factor is a handful of deposit box users who come into their branch multiple times/day to access their box. That’s a huge burden on their staff’s time.
It's funny how cost cutting turns once normal services and responsibilities into a "burden".
Safety deposit boxes are not meant as active drop boxes.
It's like someone using YouTube as a general purpose data storage service.
It’s very easy to fix that. Charge per use for accessing it more than once per day.
Should not be that hard to put a cost on that. Charge X per access. Make X big enough to be worth the bother. If you worry that it will alienate the users who only need access rarely make the first Y accesses per month or year free.
why is that?
If you look into those, they aren't really safety deposit boxes. The bank isn't obliged to actually protect the contents or to reimburse you if something happens.
Was that ever the case? Even if you rent a storage unit for instance you need to insure it.
Wells Fargo still offers them. FWIW.
They had looong waiting lists in most places in the Bay Area, though.
your local credit union does and they are awesome and cheap.
My local credit union is getting rid of them. I was kicked out last year, and they told me the branches that still have them probably won't for long.
Your lawyer's bank vault is still okay. Beyond that, you're pretty much screwed.
My local BofA offers it, and then somehow needed to close the branch for a few years during the pandemic. Was really inconvenient to access the box in a locked, unstaffed branch.
By "bank" do you mean one of those "customer experience centers" which offers the usual teller services and on-site card replacements, and has maybe 1 or 2 people working as tellers but none of them are loan-officers, and instead of a vault they have a convenience-store-style safe?
"Real bank" branches do still exist - but they aren't as commonplace as they used to be. My nearest one for my credit-union is a good 45 minute drive away, ugh.
My local Wells Fargo does.
I tried to maintain a safe deposit box recently, and it was a comedy of errors. Well, it would've been comedy if it hadn't been my valuables at stake in there.
They couldn't get the paperwork right. From the first time I signed up and was issued a box, the paperwork was screwed up in some royal fashion, I would thoroughly read it and point out that they messed it up (always unfavorable to me) and they'd fix it up apologetically. This is a bank. Bankers do paperwork for a living and their livelihood depends on dotting "i"s and crossing "t"s, so to speak!
The worst experience was the second visit when I discovered that my keys no longer worked. Well, I'd brought only one key of course, and when we discovered that it had stopped working, they demanded for me to go back and bring in the twin key to test that one too. Of course it was jammed. I was absolutely appalled. The "senior relationship manager" said the boxes are old and tend to seize up like that. I demanded a letter in writing with their proposal to drill the lock and rekey it, for free, under my supervision.
So I came in on the Drill Day and, you know how they have that little private Viewing Room where you put the box, open it, and inspect its contents? Well, the drilling contractor had put all his tools and toolbox inside that room, so it was full of valuable property already. I was sort of flabbergasted at the clear security breaches they were committing, constantly. This is a bank!!!
So eventually I caught wind that safe deposit boxes are completely deprecated. The last straw is when I asked the banker what would happen in a power outage - could I retrieve my belongings? He said nah, the last power outage they had, the cameras stopped working so they closed and wouldn't allow any customers in. Well, shit, one purpose of having offsite storage was to stash some cash and emergency supplies in case the shit hits the fan, and they're telling me it'll be off-limits in case of the slightest outage or civil unrest.
So I decided that an SDB is useless for my (or anyone's) purposes and I closed it out and said bye-bye. They never screw up the paperwork on my checking or savings accounts.
If the shit hits the fan to the point that you need emergency supplies, I doubt cash money is going to do much for you.
I mean, "shit hits the fan" can be a personal tragedy or local one.
Like you have to leave your home in a rush to not be covered in lava, like on Iceland.
Either the bank is out of harms way and you can get your stuff a few hours/days later, or the bank staff need to GTFO just like you do and won't be around to let you in.
Ye, true. I defer.
"Bug out bags" make way more sense if you live in an area where there's volcanic activity. Nobody is going to fuck around going to some deposit box, and no employer in their right mind is going to keep staff working in a disaster zone. Besides, good luck coaxing people to stay in an area where they might get burnt or suffocated.
The government doesn't have to fall for him to need both. A natural disaster or a bad breakup are two scenarios I can think of where cash money is useful.
And there's going to be a breakup during a storm?
What makes you think their location would be natural disaster proof if it can't even handle a blackout?
For what you spend on these hypothetical scenarios on an ongoing basis, you may as well just figure out a much better method—like keeping cash on you, in the house, in your vehicle. Like cameras, the best one is the one you have on you.
"Bugout bags" probably way more sensible over this nonsense.
I liked the start of the Jason Bourne series, Unfortunately, for a lot of emergency scenarios in which you'd want cash and supplies, you wouldn't be able to access your SDB.
One use of SDB that I like is to get estate documents to heirs. My SDB includes a GnuCash one-pager printout of my financial accounts, usually current to within a few months. It also contains a one-pager that documents the remaining info that I think might affect my estate, like what health and renter's insurance policies I had.
Even if a neighbor in my apartment building leaves their unlit gas stove burner on before leaving town for the weekend (yes, this happened), this time obliterating me and any documents at home, heirs will eventually get the SDB, hopefully with exactly the documents they need.
Be sure to speak with a lawyer to confirm that this can be easily accessed when needed. My grandmother passed away a couple years ago and when her account went into estate nobody was able to get into her safe deposit box until well after everything has been situated and properly transferred to the person managing the estate.
Most people I know completely skip over SDB's now.
A very large fire proof safe in a hidden room in a house is going to be much more convenient to access documents and probably more safer given the story here.
Banks don't treat these boxes seriously anymore, best to take it in your own hands.
There are well-documented cases of theft from safe deposit boxes at large banks like Wells Fargo, likely from bank staff.
NYT article about it from 2019:
Banks aren’t particularly good at what they do with property. Thee was a story a few years ago about how Bank of America lost millions in cash to shrink in poorly run counting rooms and armored car operations. They hid it for years by moving cash around from branch to branch ahead of the auditors.
Safe Deposit Boxes Aren’t Safe (NYT, 2019)
There are an estimated 25 million safe deposit boxes in America, and they operate in a legal gray zone within the highly regulated banking industry. There are no federal laws governing the boxes; no rules require banks to compensate customers if their property is stolen or destroyed.
Every year, a few hundred customers report to the authorities that valuable items — art, memorabilia, diamonds, jewelry, rare coins, stacks of cash — have disappeared from their safe deposit boxes. Sometimes the fault lies with the customer. People remove items and then forget having done so. Others allow children or spouses access to their boxes, and don’t realize that they have been removing things. But even when a bank is clearly at fault, customers rarely recover more than a small fraction of what they’ve lost — if they recover anything at all. The combination of lax regulations and customers not paying attention to the fine print of their box-leasing agreements allows many banks to deflect responsibility when valuables are damaged or go missing...
Wells Fargo’s safe-deposit-box contract caps the bank’s liability at $500. Citigroup limits it to 500 times the box’s annual rent, while JPMorgan Chase has a $25,000 ceiling on its liability. Banks typically argue — and courts have in many cases agreed — that customers are bound by the bank’s most-current terms, even if they leased their box years or even decades earlier.
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/19/business/safe-deposit-box...
Well, the drilling contractor had put all his tools and toolbox inside that room, so it was full of valuable property already.
I'm confused, what's the problem here? You were getting your lock drilled. What were you worried about happening?
Well, shit, one purpose of having offsite storage was to stash some cash and emergency supplies
What made you think a security deposit box is the solution for that, in case of civil unrest? Banks aren't even open in evenings or weekends. The boxes are intended for long-term storage of things you don't need immediately or in an emergency.
Emergency cash and supplies, why wouldn't you keep those at home? Surely you can find a good hiding place if you're concerned about people finding them?
As a thought experiment, I was wondering how to store something in a box/envelope, and know if someone else has looked at it.
My conclusion was to search for "holographic tamper" on AliExpress, and carefully examine the photos to find models where each sticker has a number and a differently-aligned background pattern. Prices are around $5 for 250.
Then you could use several stickers to seal whatever container, and take photos to record each sticker and its pattern. There are ways to exploit this system, but it probably helps against a non-sophisticated attacker.
There are ways to exploit this system, but it probably helps against a non-sophisticated attacker.
The LockPickingLawyer on youtube demonstrated that you can just unglue the commonly used tamper seals with a bit of alcohol and reapply them when it had time to evaporate. Someone watching his channel wanted to use a lock sealed with them as proof that LPL was picking locks off camera first and all he got was proof that the seals where useless.
Video in question: https://youtu.be/xUJtqvYDnkg?si=RgpKWJC81V7NVtUd
State of the art is a bag of beans:
I wonder if there's no attack on these. I think I'm fantasizing, and I suspect this won't work, but: Inject the vacuum-sealed package with a thermal plastic/resin that keeps the beans in position. Then cut open the solid beans and extract what you need. Once you're done, re-assemble, re-vacuum and then heat while applying vacuum to remove the resin.
Resins aren't always perfectly still when curing. Especially if you need large volumes of the stuff. Not to mention, time becomes a factor pretty quickly. The faster the cure for the resin, the more exothermic it is (along with higher risk of thermal runaway), which increases the chance of shifting.
Not to mention, you'd also need a really effective solvent for resin that doesn't also happen to be a solvent for whatever the mosaic is made of. Perhaps the mosaic is made of resin beads.
All that being said, it's virtually guaranteed that a valid attack on these methods exists. There's no such thing as perfect security. It's always a case of evaluating your threat model to make security attempts that thwart a constantly moving array of types of attack.
How about glitter nail polish?
Yeah, that may be a better idea. I see that some brands of nail polish use coarser flecks that would be easier to compare visually.
That's so funny, I once long ago worked on a project that suspended retro reflective beads in a solution to get unique patterns, this is a very simple variation on that theme and probably a more effective one.
Go old school with a wax seal and a signet ring.
You need multiple color wax and a photo of the pattern for that to work.
The past few years at DEF CON, there's been a "village" where you can practice (or watch others) defeating such schemes: https://info.defcon.org/village/?id=67
Kind of depends on what you mean by sophisticated.
X-Ray imaging has gotten surprisingly affordable: https://www.ebay.com.au/itm/386247465197 (honestly I was looking for canister X-Ray machines which are a bit safer for this, now I'm seeing these things and thinking "is my search for a way to find joists in walls actually over?)
Almost three years to come to this conclusion?
Almost three years for an appeals court to come to this conclusion. That's (at least) two trials. (I mean, yes, it should be a no-brainer, but even people who are no-brainer wrong get their full chance in court.)
It's a bit more complicated than that (but no less reprehensible).
The government obtained a warrant to seize the business and, as a part of that, to do a routine inventory of what's inside the boxes. After securing the warrant, the FBI said "sike, we're gonna rifle through customers' stuff to see if we can uncover new crimes... and we're gonna keep the contents via civil forfeiture too."
Several folks sued, and then the government dragged their feet for a while, but eventually said "ok, we'll return your stuff, you have no legal standing anymore." The courts agreed.
The only outstanding issue was whether the government should be ordered to destroy any records / copies of what they found in the deposit boxes they were not supposed to investigate in the first place. That's where the courts differed. The appeals court decision is a pretty scathing criticism of the whole fiasco, but strictly speaking, it only delivers a verdict on that last question (yes, the government has to destroy it).
The only outstanding issue was whether the government should be ordered to destroy any records / copies of what they found
We really need to reign in theft under the guise of civil forfeiture. If clear abuses like this don't get that issue raised in courts I wonder what it's going to take.
Almost three years for an appeals court to come to this conclusion. That's (at least) two trials.
No, it is one trial. Appeals courts do not (in general [0], and did not in this case) conduct trials.
[0] There are cases where what is usually an appellate court, like the SCOTUS, has original jurisdiction over certain cases and conducts trials, but in those cases it is not an appellate court and there is no prior trial, and there are cases where specialized lower courts (small claims, traffic courts where they are separate and not a function of a court of general jurisdiction, etc.), can be appealed to a trial court of general jurisdiction, which will conduct a trial, either in the normal sense or on the record of the prior trial.
For a business that had a public store front(1) and a yelp page. How many legitimate people had their property seized without due process.
(1) https://beverlypress.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/03/US.Priva...
Off topic: I hadn't heard of reason.com before, and this article seemed like decent reporting so I looked around a bit for more. Then I found an article affecting my state on their front page, and oh boy it is chalk full of so much spin and loaded adjectives, it's such an obvious example of an opinion piece masquerading as journalism. Very disappointing.
Reason is, and always has been, a political and opinion publication. It's not exactly shy about its motivations, either.
I feel this should set precedent for search of other protected property and information, including encrypted data.
Given the number of times the government has been shown to be corrupt or criminal in the past, does anyone ever consider if declassifications and FOIA requests might actually just be met with even more propaganda/lies? I'm curious how others approach this or might think about the problem?
And nobody at the FBI who authorized this illegal seizure will be charged with a crime or even be fired.
I can't find source now, but I'd read before that they didn't properly inventory the items, and so now some large amount of it can't be traced back to owners.
It's more complicated than that. The reason for the raid in the first place was because the FBI suspected (correctly) that the owners of this lockbox company knowingly facilitated money laundering.
The company was setup to maintain privacy. By it's nature, who owned what was ambiguous. There was none or no identifying information.
What's at issue is if the FBI could use the contents of these boxes to further prosecute previously unknown crimes. The lower court said yes, the upper court no.
The initial taking was legal, it's how the property was handled after the fact that ran afowl the law.
There's the whole civil asset forfeiture angle to this: they may have been ostensibly planning to have people defend their deposit box in court, only to get charged with a litany of crimes related to its contents. They didn't keep any of the articles separate, though, which makes me think this was just a legal robbery.
Definitely a case of malicious non-compliance. The police love to ignore their oath when they face no repercussions.
I hate everything about our anarcho-tyranical state.
A 'state' in the sense of a government is the antithesis of anarcho-anything.
Anarcho-tyranny means a government that doesn't enforce any of the laws that protect people, only enforces laws that protect itself. So it's like the absence of a government in the sense that a government is supposed to be tasked with protecting people's life and property.
Well that's objectively poor phrasing, then. 'Anarcho-' as a prefix refers to Anarchy, which refers to a society being in a state of not having authorities.
You could argue that having authorities that abuse their authority to self-serving ends renders that authority illegitimate, but by the admission of Anarcho-tyranny's own proponents (as a theory), they still recognize the existence of these "authorities", and just contest the governance decisions made by those authorities.
That's certainly a bad government, but to call it anarcho-anything is just downright confusing.
Emphasis mine. The Government failing to recognize it's own laws and founding principles absolutely qualifies as anarchy.
Anarchy as a state(1) of disorder predates Anarchy as a form of government for a state(2).
If you want a real understanding of a word, look to its etymology.
Anarchy 1530s, "absence of government," from French anarchie or directly from Medieval Latin anarchia, from Greek anarkhia "lack of a leader, the state of people without a government" (in Athens, used of the Year of Thirty Tyrants, 404 B.C., when there was no archon), abstract noun from anarkhos "rulerless," from an- "without" (see an- (1)) + arkhos "leader" (see archon).
From 1660s as "confusion or absence of authority in general;" by 1849 in reference to the social theory advocating "order without power," with associations and co-operatives taking the place of direct government, as formulated in the 1830s by French political philosopher Pierre-Joseph Proudhon (1809-1865).
This has been the default for thousands of years and I wouldn't expect any less from our current government.
The anarchic aspect comes from the void in accountability that comes with large bureaucracies like states.
It is this dysfunctionionality that makes free market oriented societies that place greater limits on the power of the state generally more prosperous than societies with significant government intervention, despite the latter theoretically being better able to address a litany of collective action problems.
I get what you're saying and agree. But even theoretically a corporation is much better at dealing with collective action problems. Setting up a new entity that looks a lot like a corporation is the standard approach to moving a needle.
The government doesn't have the bandwidth to move on collective action problems that people don't already have figured out by some other means, voting isn't a great tool for doing more than the really basic stuff like keeping a military and police force functional. And even for things like the military, private sector institutions are better at building all the components.
We have corporations (using a very wide definition that includes non-profit entities that are legally similar) that tackle every problem under the sun. You can't expect beat an entity that exists for the sole purpose of addressing a problem with a general purpose schizophrenic institution like a government.
Yeah, that sounds dodgy as all heck.
So if someone had (say) $1000 in cash in there, they'd be told to pick out the bank notes or something.
At which point it's just gambling as to whether any particular bank note is going to get you arrested or not due to it having a bad history.
Related story: 4 or 5 years ago my brother got held up on the street in Baltimore in a daytime robbery. The cops drove by 30 seconds later, my brother pointed out the guy, and they caught him right away. My brother was told he could only get his money back if he could provide the serial numbers for the cash he had stolen. Of course he couldn't do that.
I smell BS in this story..
Baltimore police is known to be corrupt, what’s BS about the police officers citing unreasonable demands for proof in an attempt to pocket the money?
Hah. Yeah.
Maybe 10y ago I was robbed. The investigator who took my case, a month later, asked me if I had anything to drink that night. I said, yeah, one beer about 7hr earlier. He said that because I drank that night that would close the investigation and that was that.
You may want to watch The Wire, which was problematic enough. But then, nearly two decades later We Own This City (based on the non-fiction book of the same name) which breaks down a lot of the endemic corruption in Baltimore PD.
Were there witnesses or video or some other proof independent of your brother’s claims?
Civil forfeiture has turned into legalized robbery in the US. This is just an exceptionally egregious example, and you can see why people don't trust the FBI when things like this happen.
Why are you lying or making up stuff? Even the raiding party's memo doesn't claim that:
The memo states that “[e]ach inventory [would] likely include the following”: the USPV box door with its lock, a form with emergency contact information, the physical deposit box, and the box’s contents.
Opinion by Judge Milan D. Smith, Jr.: https://cdn.ca9.uscourts.gov/datastore/opinions/2024/01/23/2...
Saying "By it's nature, who owned what was ambiguous. There was none or no identifying information." seems reasonable given what was reported.
In an indictment against U.S. Private Vaults, Inc., the U.S. attorney for Los Angeles accused the company of marketing itself deliberately to attract criminals, saying it brazenly promoted itself as a place customers could store valuables with confidence that tax authorities would be hard-pressed to learn their identities or what was stored in their locked boxes. To access the facility, customers needed no identification; it took just an eye and hand scan to unlock the door.
“We don’t even want to know your name,” it advertised, according to prosecutors.
https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2021-04-02/fbi-beve...
So basically anything that protects the customers privacy is automatically “deliberately to attract criminals”?
That’s a problem.
It was ambiguous to the owner. Not necessarily the FBI.
My understanding was the identifying info may placed by the customer inside the box, with the agreement being the box would not be opened by the hosts except under defined exceptions.
That is not the ruling at all
The FBI lied to the court system, and was never authorized to take the boxes at all, they were only authorized to secure them and identify the owners of the property to enable returning to those owners
That was all the original warrant authorized
Then after they executed that warrant, they then initiated (illegally) "inventory" procedures far beyond what was authorized by the court (warrant) and once inventoried further initiated (illegally) forfeiture proceedings of the property.
The original warrant only authorized the FBI to "take" aka seize property belonging to the company itself for the purposes of their criminal case everything beyond that was actually specifically barred in the actual warrant, which the FBI ignored and did what ever the hell they wanted anyway. It was further reveled that was their plan all along and they deceived the court from day 1.
So when are all the agents involved getting charged?
I already know the answer, but still…
Not a good enough reason to violate people's rights.
Every single gas station near the US major border knowingly 100% facilitate money laundering, and knowingly engage in a business where there is no doubt they are both taking and generating the proceeds by selling their gas.
Their gas pumps should be seized for investigation.
Of course. Best way to rob a bank is to be an officer of the law.
I highly doubt the fba didn't tag and bag the contents by box #. they didn't just throw them into a big pile in the middle of the floor
Is this a joke? Did you read about this case? Because that is basically what happened. Some people got parts of their things back.
I read the article. The article ruled they broke the terms of the warrant. How in the world do you think that the FBI wouldn't bag and tag stuff if they planned on using it in court at a later date? Any fresh out of school lawyer could get that tossed in a heart beat. The people will get back their stuff after the appeals. How could they do that without the fbi tracking what was in the SDBs?
Well it make sense when you understand that the FBI is not about seeking "justice", it is about enforcement and punishment.
The process is their goal, to make peoples lives miserable and to do "street justice" not to win in the court system and get a conviction
Further in this case, was also "Policing for Profit" which is what the entire civil asset forfeiture scheme is about.
This naive view that the FBI, or law enforcement in general, today is about "protecting the public" and "getting justice for victims" is laughably absurd
No they won’t this is a highly public case because of their mishandling of all of it. They are claiming they can’t give people back their things and much of it was “lost”. Another addition to the long list of civil forfeiture cases in which us law enforcement legally steals people’s assets without consequences. They are incentivized to do so as local and federal agencies get kickbacks from what they seize. They’ve taken tens of thousands of dollars from taxpayers with little to no cause. Look up civil forfeiture.
Apologies for being flippant, I thought you were trolling. The FBI has lost (or stolen) some of these people's items.
https://ij.org/press-release/innocent-security-deposit-box-r...
Not this article, there's been plenty of reporting on this case as the seizure happened back in March 2021. He's not exaggerating, the FBI has "lost" the contents of some of the boxes when some owners fought back on the civil asset theft.
https://youtu.be/O436x2zbRwI?si=dB7GFWxpguEOObr8&t=235
This is assuming the fbi doesnt drop the case and keep the goods.
There’s a better chance they destroy the items and destroy the records of ownership of cash out of spite.