The FBI seized safe deposit boxes knowing ‘some’ belonged to ‘honest citizens’
reason.com
reason.com
Whether the warrant should have been issued is one debate worth having. But the other problem is that the FBI didn't even follow the terms of the warrant.
If law enforcement (at every level) won't follow the law even in procedural matters, we're 100x worse off than most people thought.
A thoughtful person will also ask: "Wait, when did the FBI begin undertaking clearly illegal activity? What other investigations have been tainted as a result?"
I don't think this matters at all. The FBI has been rife with controversy[1] and legally dubious actions[2] since just about their founding. Despite this, it's well out of the mainstream to ask if the FBI should exist and very few question whether people convicted by the FBI are actually guilty.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_FBI_controversies#Dome...
You can read a history book to find out why the FBI was founded and why every country has its own variation of it.
No matter how desperate I am for heart surgery, I won't go to the surgeon who kills all his patients.
The very first director of the FBI was J. Edgar Hoover, who ran the FBI as a lawless private army for literally fifty years.
And there has been really no systematic reform since.
Systematically corrupt law enforcement is worse than no law enforcement at all.
Systemically broken organizations are unfixable, particular ones that have been broken for over a century.
If the US really needs the law enforcement that the FBI is supposed to provide and mostly doesn't, they should set up a new, non-corrupt, competent organization to do it, and fire everyone in the FBI.
They won't, of course. Accountability is not any sort of value in US government.
I understand why you used a question mark, but this is a true statement on its own.
"If you assumed that the FBI got completely off the hook for this Ferrari F50 crash, you’d be correct. According to Jalopnik, Motors Insurance decided to file a lawsuit to recover $750,000, the F50’s market value at the time. However, the U.S. Department of Justice reportedly denied the claim and decided that the insurance company was not entitled to any payment."
The warrant allowed the "nests" of boxes to be siezed, but not their contents.
However, the government is supposed to safeguard items that are innocently affected by a seizure.
So instead of simply dumping the contents on the floor of the vault and leaving the building unattended and unguarded they inventoried the box contents and stored them. They provided a mechanism, which the article notes is somewhat suspect in its underlying effect, for owners to identify their property and retrieve it.
This is basically a dispute about how the government can best respect the rights of "innocent" vault owners while still carrying out their duty under the warrant and established rules. It's not about the government stealing people's property. It's about whether the box holders should have to identify themselves to obtain the contents.
They post a notice at the site of the warrant and anyone with an interest goes to them.
Since the owners allege that they put their name and contact information on that box, we can presume they would have no qualms about providing same, and a description of the contents, to the custodian of the property to claim it.
Can you explain why the government has no duty to treat its law-abiding citizens in an honest and open fashion?
Six weeks later, apparently they don't have the contents back. Searching you can find many similar cases where people simply never get their stuff back.
What sort of procedures are there to safeguard innocent people? Are there two people present at all times to prevent a single person from just taking things? Is there an inventory of each box taken at the start and checked at the end?
Government works for the people. They aren't kings or dictators. We are innocent until proven guilty. If they can't investigate _suspects_ without fucking up _perfectly innocent people_ then they shouldn't do it at all.
Lockboxes where the contents are legal will presumably be claimed by their owners, unless the contents are somehow embarrassing. Illegal lockboxes won't be claimed, and the FBI has effectively seized them without needing a warrant for the contents.
I'll be surprised if the FBI wins this in court, but it won't make any difference. This will take years to hash out, and by the time it's done, all the legal lockboxes will have already been claimed. The illegal ones are presumably anonymous, and the FBI will just say "oh well, if they won't claim it then we don't know whose it is, so I guess it's ours".
> The warrant allowed the "nests" of boxes to be siezed, but not their contents.
By omitting the part of the article that very clearly discusses this aspect, just one sentence below that, I put it to you that you are the dishonest one here.
"In court filings, however, Gluck and other attorneys representing anonymous plaintiffs argue that the seizure of the nests "does not appear to be the government's true purpose here."
"A reasonable person could easily conclude that taking and searching the contents of the boxes was the true purpose of the USPV seizure, not just an unintended but unavoidable byproduct as the government seeks to portray and justify it," they write.
Do they think we are stupid? "We want to seize these useless shelves, because we don't have the legal authority to search the boxes. Oh, now we've moved the shelves, we get to look into the boxes! What a surprise!"
They got a subpoena for something with _no informational value_ because they knew they could _abuse_ the law to look into and take things they had no right to take.
"They provided a mechanism, which the article notes is somewhat suspect in its underlying effect, for owners to identify their property"
This is clearly referring to the text you quote. I assume readers have read the actual article.
So, since I clearly included reference to the information you are incensed about, who is it that is doing a dishonest reading here? You have misleadingly claimed I didn't include the reference.
So they can say "well, it's not our fault that happened, we followed the rules" wink wink
In New York City, where I lived for many years, sometimes the landlords remove _the stairs_ when trying to evict people.
Sociopaths abound.
https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2013/jul/26/chain-emai...
Perhaps it's still just a conspiracy theory with respect to the DHS rather than the FBI. It doesn't seem to be out of line with civil asset forfeiture policy, other than it being from safe deposit boxes rather than vehicles or luggage.
> Law enforcement took more stuff from people than burglars did last year (2015)
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2015/11/23/cops-...
>"What the government has done here is completely backward," writes Frommer. "The government cannot search every apartment in a building because the landlord is involved in a crime. After all, when somebody rents an apartment, that apartment is theirs."
I disagree. Let's say you "rented" a room at a crackhouse. The house later gets seized and your stack of cash is seized. Is it reasonable to show up to the police station and say "yeah that's my cash, no it wasn't involved in anything illegal, can I have it back?"
Yes. Why wouldn't it be reasonable?
Edit: clarifying since I'm being downvoted... it should be reasonable but the way our system is currently "working" makes it unreasonable because the system will just ignore you. Hell, if you annoy them, they might find a reason to harass you more.
https://www.justice.gov/archive/amerithrax/docs/08-431-m-01....
This is an excellent typo. It’s like Pablo got into banking.
Regardless if it happens or not, that is the single stupidest statement for anyone to show as proof. Of course the bank is going to say their service is secure and nothing bad ever happens. That is basically Apple's response to "touch disease" back in the day. If you are going to call yourself a fact checking site, you need to do some actual fact checking.
That group then founded a culture around this odd distrust of monarchs, that in later generations became a distrust of governments in all forms - even going as far as to conjure fantastical secret societies like the 'illuminati' that maintain a strong thumb on the scales of justice.
It's just a part of the psyche that built the U.S.A. - it's a feature, not a bug
Much of the rhetoric was dressed up as against taxes, but really all of the actual action was against unfairness in government (especially the lack of taxes). A worthy goal, and a decent reason to revolt. But I wish current politics would occasionally get the facts right.
In other words, if you have $500 in cash, the police can say, "I suspect that is being used in a drug deal," with no actual evidence, and they take your $500. It will cost you around $2500 in attorney fees to try to get it back. The federal government also gets a cut. In 2010, this accounted for about 2.5 billion dollars in revenue, no trial required.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civil_forfeiture_in_the_United...
"Civil forfeiture in the United States, also called civil asset forfeiture or civil judicial forfeiture,[1] is a process in which law enforcement officers take assets from persons suspected of involvement with crime or illegal activity without necessarily charging the owners with wrongdoing."
I'm surprised you haven't heard about this. It's been going on for decades.
No, civil asset forfeiture is an ongoing problem and 2010 is not some unusual outlier.
As the original article states:
>...Still, boil down all the numbers and caveats above and you arrive at a simple fact: In the United States, in 2014, more cash and property transferred hands via civil asset forfeiture than via burglary.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2015/11/23/cops-...
Looking more broadly:
>...Since 2000, states and the federal government have forfeited at least $68.8 billion—that we know of. Not all states provided full data, so this figure drastically undercounts property taken from people through forfeiture.
https://ij.org/press-release/new-report-finds-civil-forfeitu...
And to reiterate, I agree with you that there needs to be changes to civil forfeiture. I just think we should be honest about the numbers and reasoning we use in that debate.
The article addresses this issue:
>..."In a given year, one or two high-dollar cases may produce unusually large amounts of money — with a portion going back to victims — thereby telling a noisy story of year-to-year activity levels," the Institute for Justice explains. A big chunk of that 2014 deposit, for instance, was the $1.7 billion Bernie Madoff judgment, most of which flowed back to the victims.
>For that reason, the net assets of the funds are usually seen as a more stable indicator — those numbers show how much money is left over in the funds each year after the federal government takes care of various obligations, like payments to victims. Since this number can reflect monies taken over multiple calendar years, it's less comparable to the annual burglary statistics. Still, even this more stable indicator hit $4.5 billion in 2014, according to the Institute for Justice — higher again than the burglary losses that year.
>...Also burglaries are basically never justified, but sometimes civil forfeitures are justified.
Criminal forfeitures are done after someone has been convicted and are justified. Civil forfeitures on the other hand are done before anyone has been convicted and the victim doesn't get free legal representation and is assumed guilty until proven innocent. Police agencies have to be funded, but it shouldn't be done by stealing from the public.
I have said elsewhere in this thread that the burden of proof shouldn't be on the owner to prove innocence, but I'm not sure simply changing that turns it into criminal forfeiture. My understanding is that criminal forfeiture only happens when the owner is convicted of a crime. Meanwhile civil forfeiture can happen when the crime is committed by someone else (technically the item being forfeited).
Back to the Madoff example, not all of the money was taken from Madoff directly. Other people benefited from Madoff's crimes without being aware that crimes were being committed. I think it is acceptable for that third party profit to be forfeited despite the owners not committing a crime.
It gives a sense of the scale of the abuse. A number of states refused to give out the data, so it is a low estimate.
>...My understanding is that criminal forfeiture only happens when the owner is convicted of a crime.
Yes, and that is justifiable. Abuses like confiscating a person's money because they went on a domestic airline flight with a large amount of cash are not justifiable.
>...Back to the Madoff example, not all of the money was taken from Madoff directly.
It is a mistake to just focus on a large forfeiture as that is rare:
>...Data from 21 states show half of all currency forfeitures are worth less than $1,300, hardly the stuff of vast criminal enterprises and far less than it would cost to hire an attorney to fight back.
https://ij.org/press-release/new-report-finds-civil-forfeitu...
If by "reform" you mean "complete elimination", then I agree.
Civil forfeiture is such a clear and obvious violation of your Fourth Amendment rights. How it lasted more than even a few DAYS before being struck down by even the lowest level courts is beyond me.
Of course the practice got expanded to contexts and situations that have nothing to do with smuggling because government will use any excuse to expand its powers.
Bernie Madoff turned himself in and was convicted. Sounds like they could have seized the money some other way.
So the 2010 thing is just a coincidence and either isn't included in the equitable sharing agreement, or if it is, it shows the Madoff seizure is just a drop in the bucket. Either way, it's pretty bad.
The easy fix for civil forfeiture is assign the burden of proof to the state, not the citizen. Some states have done this very thing.
>Carl J. Shapiro and various related people and entities have agreed to forfeit $625 million to the United States, all of which will be made available to the victims of the fraudulent investment advisory business which was owned and operated by Bernard L. Madoff
[1] - https://archives.fbi.gov/archives/newyork/press-releases/201...
https://ij.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/seize-first-questi...
"Still, boil down all the numbers and caveats above and you arrive at a simple fact: In the United States, in 2014, more cash and property transferred hands via civil asset forfeiture than via burglary. "
The below linked incident exposed a broad conspiracy to arrest and jail people with a primary purpose of padding overtime timesheets. The city and former chief continue the coverup to this day.
You know what really blows my mind? Is that in some states, possession of merely a dimebag of weed can get you a prison sentence and that "smelling marijuana" is used as a justification for bringing out the drug dog.
Meanwhile, in Oregon, I literally have an ad for a weed shop on the back of my grocery store receipt. Proof: https://imgur.com/gallery/b1sicuL
I definitely see this in Tech, so it likely happens in policing as well - where they're given ever so forceful tools, they'll find reasons to justify that cost.
Here is just 1 exmample https://projects.tampabay.com/projects/2020/investigations/p...
Further when the police target you there is zero recourse you can take to resolve the harassment, when your neighbor does it there are many avenues. I would 100% rather be beat by my neighbor than my police.
So let's sum it up. You agree that the cops can seize property without any evidence and require the original owner to get a lawyer prove they are innocent before they get their property back.
You believe the idea of "guilty until proven innocent" is unimportant, because the police are mostly going after bad people.
And it doesn't bother you that the police departments actually get to keep the stuff their seize. You don't see any possible conflict of interest when the police departments can just seize property and keep it and never present any proof at all unless the person they confiscated it from spends a lot of money on legal assistance, and often not even then.
To me this reads like some dysfunctional dystopia, but then I find strongly authoritarian societies frightening.
I think they’re some sort of pre-internet relic people thought offered more security than they do.
Today it seems like banks don’t care about them and don’t want to be in the business.
You’re probably better off just having a fire safe box under your bed.
Garden beds, somewhere in your crawlspace, beneath a compost pile, etc are all fine places to stash things.
It might be time to go back the good ol' days of treasure maps (only half joking).
[1] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5L4EjtXyg6k [video, auger]
[2] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zo7yu84s7Dc [video, rock auger]
Not really. You're trading one threat (negligence on the part of the bank) for another (your home getting robbed/burgled).
Whether that's true would depend on the false positive rate of civil forfeitures. Even if it's some absurdly high number (eg. 50%), you'd still need 2x as much civil forfeitures than burglaries for the risk to be equal (presumably nobody "deserves" a burglary). Also in theory civil forfeitures can be recovered, if you can provide documentation that the items aren't ill gotten gains. I'm not sure what the recovery rate for burglary is, but I'd imagine that P(assets recovered from civil forfeiture|you are innocent) is much greater than P(assets recovered from burglary).
It's plausibly even higher than that. The incentive for civil asset forfeitures is for law enforcement to seize in exactly this sort of "a medium amount of money from a large number of people" type of situation. Because it makes this useless:
> Also in theory civil forfeitures can be recovered
"I got back my $9000 and all I had to do was pay $25,000 to a lawyer."
And when people do the math on that and decide not to pursue it, law enforcement gets to keep the money. Hence the incentive for them to do it.
This is just absolutely bonkers.
"Innocent until proven guilty" was supposed to be a core tenet of our justice system.
The court needs to prove that the money was acquired illegally, not assume it was, and then expect us to prove its innocence. They need to have evidence and a warrant before seizing.
The "Second Amendment" types often claim that the Second Amendment protects the First Amendment. Well shouldn't it also enforce the Fourth Amendment?
As a practical matter, if one were to respond to a 4A violation with a 2A application, the 4A violators respond immediately with overwhelming force, after which you don't get to tell your story, and the violators get to write the report. Victors, history, etc.
In theory. It will cost you a shitton of lawyer fees that might exceed the amount you lost, and you can also expect to be constantly harassed by the cops during and after the process, plus forget about ever getting help from them again if you need it.
If it was a legit use of government power they would go for the better, more ethical criminal forfeiture where by they prove a person committed a crime and then take the assets related to the crime
Civil Asset forfeitures are an end run around the 4th and 5th amendments, and should be viewed as unethical by every reasonable person
Only "Assert Forfeiture" overall is a larger volume than theft, because yes it includes recuperation from white-collar crime. The money from civil kind is much smaller (not that it excuses it).
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2015/11/23/cops-...
the act of breaking and entering a dwelling at night to commit a felony (such as theft)
They aren't digging into insulation in your attic or going through multiple boxes of kids clothes in your basement.
I imagine most safes get burgled because their owner can't keep their mouth shut.
Only one of these are you in any control over.
Banks are also bigger targets. Bank robber Willie Sutton was famously asked why he robbed banks. "Because that's where the money is," he said. That's the problem with putting all the valuables together in one place.
Meanwhile you can't so easily get your stuff caught up in some robbery or "investigation" of somebody you have nothing to do with.
Maybe the reply was just imprecise, but the sentiment seems to still be valid in that hiding your vault in your home/on your property somehow is surely more secure in many cases and circumstances, especially in this time where it should be clear to essentially everyone that fundamental rights once accepted as universal and violations of them harshly punished, are now being essentially totally ignored and even nullified through various legal and legislative gaslighting; civil asset forfeiture being of course only the most commonly known perversion of the most basic and fundamental concepts of civilization and basic logic.
The shittiest thing is if a teller messes up and just let's someone who stole your key from your box, you're SOL. It's like the scene in Casino where De Niro's wife is clearing out the box. The bank manager couldn't stop her cause legally he had to let her in.
The bank can do an extended identity verification and drill the lock out for a fee.
Edit: not to mention that it was a Democrat, John Chiang, that took on the task of attempting to return the property. I'm not trying to paint democrats as good guys, but I don't know how this event could be used to paint them as bad.
I thought the laws and constitution were supposed to protect people?
https://www.npr.org/transcripts/799345159
>QUINN: Yes. We forget about retirement accounts, insurance policies, safe deposit boxes. When you forget about stuff like that, after a certain amount of time, the state is able to step in, take ownership of your unclaimed stuff and hold onto it until you can come and claim it.
Edit: Removed comment unnecessarily insulting to ugly strippers
The ATF is busy 4am porch-stepping on law abiding gun owners, shooting their women, children, and dogs in the process.
I don't like it when police get exempted from these laws. Why are they allowed to buy post-86 machine guns? The rest of us have to buy machine guns registered prior to 1986 or get a machine gun manufacturing license. Pre-86 machine guns are very expensive at auctions, but since the police are exempt from this they are allowed to buy comparably dirt-cheap machine guns brand new. Make the same rules apply to them, and if that means they can no longer afford machine guns, so be it. And all the better if that excess paperwork stops them from using grenades too.
If there's anyone that's time-proven competent at tactical equipment handling, it's law enforcement. It's sad to see the guys on the frontlines denied equipment when soldiers can fire $50k missiles at mud huts and request air support. This is coming from a 2A supporter.
And you might think it's sad, but I'm not shedding a single tear for the police who don't have access to $50k missiles and air support. This too, is coming from a 2A supporter.
> "If there's anyone that's time-proven competent at tactical equipment handling, it's law enforcement"
This in particular is a strange claim. Most cops spend the bare minimum time at gun ranges that is required of them. If there is anyone that is well trained with any sort of grenade, I expect it to be soldiers not police officers. And on that note:
> Methods: Ten years of data were extracted from Dallas Police Department records. LEOs who were involved in a shooting in the past 10 years were frequency matched on sex to LEOs never involved in a shooting. Military discharge records were examined to quantify veteran status and deployment(s). Multivariable logistic regression was used to estimate the effect of veteran status and deployment history on officer-involved shooting involvement.
> Results: Records were abstracted for 516 officers. In the adjusted models, veteran LEOs who were not deployed were significantly more likely to be involved in a shooting than non-veteran officers. Veterans with a deployment history were 2.9 times more likely to be in a shooting than non-veteran officers.
> Conclusions: Military veteran status, regardless of deployment history, is associated with increased odds of shootings among LEOs. Future studies should identify mechanisms that explain this relationship, and whether officers who experienced firsthand combat exposure experience greater odds of shooting involvement.
I want police to have access to simple technology without crappy paperwork. I want most influential civilian paper work like silencer tax stamps and the NFA to be invalidated, too. It makes no sense.
I don't think technology is the solution to these problems. Not this sort of technology anyway. At the end of the day police will still have to physically interact with suspected criminals. And in America, where common people often own guns, that means risking their lives. But just how risky is it actually? I think we need more training to put these risks into perspective. The odds of any particular cop ever getting shot are quite low, but cops who consume cop media on cop websites and hang out on cop facebook groups or other cop echo chambers created by social media algorithms will naturally be exposed to more headlines about cops getting hurt. I believe these fear-mongering echo chambers induce an unjustified level of fear in the police officers who participate in them. Giving the police more high tech toys won't assuage these irrational fears; if anything I think it will might validate those fears. If you're a well-meaning cop who spends half your weekend watching videos of police in shootouts with criminals, then on monday your boss gives you a bunch of high tech body armor and drones, wouldn't that validate your perception of having an exceptionally dangerous job?
> I want most influential civilian paper work like silencer tax stamps and the NFA to be invalidated, too.
Here we agree, particularly with respect to silencers, which are safety devices. But for as long as those laws exist for the common people, I oppose police having exemptions to them.
[0] https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/ex-georgia-deputy-acqui...
If all else fails, the officer has to explain in detail why he shot an unarmed man holding his eyes in pain, "in the heat of the moment".
Sheesh
Police aren’t well trained.
Because of this when they use any lethal or non lethal device innocent bystanders are frequently hurt maimed and even killed, especially when police use flash bangs.
I shot $30k missiles at mud huts, AMA.
Daunte Wright would disagree
We have proof that law enforcement can:
-Steal from you. (Civil Asset forfeiture, no warrant required) -Apply excessive force with good odds of not having to explain themselves. -Lie to your face. -kidnap you -Utilize illegal/unconstitutional investigation techniques, then launder the evidence through parallel construction.
We also have proof that LE is nowhere near as good or thorough as they should be regulating themselves.
The "I have nothing to hide" is spoken like someone who has never been on the wrong side of an automated, impersonal system before. It'sall fun and games and justifiable until it's you caught in the civil rights blast crater.
I'd prefer no one ended up as collateral damage. It is better criminals go free than innocents get caught in dragnets.
For example, the Supreme Court has ruled that you have a Constitutional right to record the police, and yet, some police are still trying to arrest people for recording them.
I guess. In this case it's happening to a bunch of rich folks in Beverly Hills (literally) buying boxes from a seemingly-shady places called "US Private Vaults" (vs. say, the Wells Fargo down the street) that in fact appears to be under legitimate investigation.
My "cry me a river" reflex is twitching hard, sorry. Reason is silent for decades as cops everywhere snatch property from minorities, but they decide to take a stand for their rich donors[1]? Ugh.
[1] Per the article, the victim was a supporter. I'm not making this up. At least they disclosed it, I guess.
we've got other articles in this thread explaining how fewer and fewer local banks are offering safe deposit boxes, and they generally want out of the business. and indeed, how when they exit the business, they ship your stuff to a warehouse in alaska and lose it.
so the business which does nothing but rent safe deposit boxes actually sounds like the reasonable place to do business with.
> Reason is silent for decades as cops everywhere snatch property from minorities
you're just making stuff up.
https://reason.com/tag/civil-asset-forfeiture/
they've absolutely been writing about it for decades.
That is a pretty lazy and false accusation. They're a libertarian rag so they produces pages of articles on this topic every year:
https://reason.com/tag/civil-asset-forfeiture/
Albeit they do have a tendency towards using very white people as victims.
note, being a citizen in good standing with the law does not necessarily prevent this from happening.
I don't understand why you would want it to be easy for your property to be seized.
Lastly, the "I got nothing to hide" argument is a fallacy - as Snowden has said, it is analogous to being against freedom of speech because you have nothing to say.
We've come a long way.
There's a Vice News article on this same event that's been shared elsewhere in the comment thread, and that article includes an advertisement the company put out:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lT5AJh_j-GE
The company is openly marketing itself as refusing any form of identification in order to provide total anonymity. Aside from the one user who claims they added identifying data to the exterior of the box, how do you propose identifying the owner of an otherwise-featureless box without opening it?
If sufficient time (decades, at least) passes without any claim after proper notice is given, the property can be considered abandoned. At that point someone may attempt to open the box by force.
The article doesn't say if all of the boxes are marked in the same way, but at least that one was.
For what it’s worth, the original article is pretty awful — it provides only one perspective (that of a wronged customer), didn’t mention if the author contacted the FBI for comment, and also didn’t mention that the FBI was authorized to seize the “vaults” of boxes, but not granted the right to open the boxes themselves. Most of this is mentioned in other media reports, and in total paints this story very differently: USPV was involved with wrongdoing, there is a high likelihood that some boxes contain evidence of further crimes, but there will need to be some court-appointed team that has to go through the boxes in order to uncover this evidence while protecting all the other owners (and their identities) from the FBI.
People should read this story and see it as a brazen abuse of your 4th amendment rights. It should be upsetting, and worrying.
It seems that our liberty is under attack on almost every front. The “speech is literally violence” crew, those that cheer the abuse of state surveillance because the target is a political enemy, and the “blue lives matter” crew who close their eyes to police tactics that are literally killing innocence people.
These civil liberties are not additive qualities to the American constitution. They’re foundational elements that can’t be removed without a collapse.
By and large, civil liberties as defined haven't been removed. They've been superseded by higher levels of structure, because the Bill of Rights was narrowly framed as only applying restrictions to the bona fide "government".
The modern censorship movement is focused on tech middlemen, which as the refrain goes, are "private companies". Freedom from state surveillance wasn't laid out in the founding documents (although the spirit is there), but even so the state is just buying cooperative access from third parties - qualitatively "the state" is best seen as including Equifax, Lexis-Nexis, Google, etc, but legally they're "private companies". And criminal police are independent conspiracies that the state has simply decided to do nothing about, akin to (and seemingly descended from) historical lynching + jury nullification.
I don't necessarily know what a productive synthesis is, besides that legal fundamentalism won't get us anywhere. The problem is not straightforward decay, but rather a foundational framework that is increasingly inapplicable.
Somethings like large amounts of money are worth the trouble to secure.
https://www.vice.com/en/article/akgwwb/criminals-hid-guns-ca...
Some quotes:
>According to the DEA, the company encouraged drug dealers to stash controlled substances in its safe deposit boxes, advised its customers on how to avoid government scrutiny, used a nearby gold business to help its customers launder money, and facilitated drug deals inside the business.
>To access the vaults, customers had to use an iris and hand print scanner. The keys they used to open their vaults were unmarked so the employees and law enforcement couldn’t know which key goes to which vault. "Since we don't know your name we can't provide information on your box to anyone,” Steven Gregory, prescient of U.S. Private Vaults, said in a 2012 commercial.
>In retrospect, U.S. Private Vaults’ advertisements are telling. “I’ve heard horror stories about individuals who have lost everything when their bank safe deposit box was frozen due to court order or a tax lien,” an actor said in one commercial. “At U.S. Private Vaults, I never have to worry about anything like that. My personal information is never shared or stored in a big bank computer system.”
>“Employees of defendant [U.S. Private Vaults] would conduct counter surveillance of the neighborhood and warn customers when they observed law enforcement,” the indictment said. If employees figured out the cops were on to them, “they would attempt to warn the customer, delay law enforcement, or even remove all but a nominal amount of cash from the box for the customer, to prevent law enforcement from discovering and seizing the bulk of the cash.”
Given all of the above, I can see why the FBI thought it needed to seize everything. As long as they are giving stuff back to their rightful owners, I don't see that much of a problem.