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Comment by sackfield | Hacker News Reader

How does it survive? Is it that there hasn't been a big enough legal challenge against it?

It dates back to British maritime law from the 1600s and pirate ships on the open sea. When the owner of the ship was unknown and likely residing halfway around the world, the thinking was just seize the ship and charge the property itself with the crime. Obviously this makes zero sense when applied to an American citizen driving their car down a public highway with some cash in their possession, but here we are.

Because cops get to drive around in sports cars repainted black and white. Every Corvette squad car you've ever seen out on the highway is one of those. I'd bet money that some large fraction of the world's largest television screens reside within police station break rooms, too.

Police unions don't play around either. If a politician were to play hardball, some small town or another would just go without a police force at all until it cried uncle, anyone at the state level trying it would simply see insane amounts of cash dumped on their rivals' campaigns and lose, and Congress can't even muster up the ambition to pass feel-good-do-nothing resolutions on its best day, not even one of which we've had since either of us became adults.

You act like this is just city level. That would still be a relatively easy fix. But federal organizations like the FBI routinely benefit from asset forfeiture. People traveling with large amounts of cash for any reason are a common target. And if you think TVs are are something, imagine the hauls from a large scale federal bust.

> But federal organizations like the FBI routinely benefit from asset forfeiture.

Oh, but that's a little different. Worse of course, not different for the better.

As states do prohibit asset forfeiture, the FBI can dangle it back in front of the locals with their "sharing" program. It's the federal government interfering with state sovereignty to undermine it. They've soft-federalized every single municipal police department and every sheriff's office in one fell swoop.

The argument as to why it's constitutional is something like this: The constitution keeps the government from taking your stuff. This was never your stuff, it was stuff you just happened to have in your possession. Therefore, there should be a civil trial over ownership of this stuff to determine whose it is, and if it's not yours the government can take it.

The key points here are that there should be a trial, that it’s up to the government to prove that the stuff is not yours, and that the taking happens after the trial.

CAF inverts all of these. They take your stuff, sometimes they allow you an administrative hearing, and the burden of proof is on you to prove that the stuff is actually yours.

Because politicians trust politicians to use it responsibly or failing that, to use it where necessary

Left/right politicians will lean in the generally expected directions on what things they would stop with it and what ways they would responsibly use the proceeds, but reasonable people could be convinced that the only problem with civil asset forfeiture is that it doesn't protect the innocent from its consequences -- and that's not too far off the mark, but that it can be used without having to wait for its victims to have exhausted the appeals process to it at first is the cancer from which all its other ills originate

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