Civil Asset Forfeiture?

_{Lamers hard at work.}

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The other day I saw this ascii meme from a prominent libertarian account with 200k followers and I couldn't help but think:

Civil asset Forfeiture?
Do I know what that is?
I've never actually heard the term but surely I must know.

Turns out I've written about it at least twice without even realizing.

Here's a picture that gets returned if you Google it:

Sanctioned armed robbery

Sanction is a very odd word that has two different meanings that are almost completely opposites. To sanction something means to give it approval or permission, but to be sanctioned means to be punished for not having permission. Go figure! All part of the establishment's doublespeak tactics no doubt.

In any case civil asset forfeiture is basically just the fancy 'scientific' way of saying the cops came and took all your shit. It's much more common for the term 'confiscated' to be used, but civil asset forfeiture must be how it is referred to within the legal system on a technical level.

This is something I've written about (or at least mentioned) on-chain at least twice within the context of the Beverly Hills situation. I can't for the life of me find those references even though I searched a dozen different keywords on both peakd and my own personal database... but it goes something like this:

I reported on this when it happened and then two years later when the cops got away with it scot-free.

A federal judge ruled Thursday that the FBI didn't break the law by seizing and making an inventory of the contents of about 700 anonymous safety deposit boxes at U.S. Private Vaults in Beverly Hills last year.

Essentially what happened here is that the cops kept tracking back drug deals and the money associated with it back to this U.S. Private Vaults establishment. Eventually they got a warrant to raid the place, but instead of conservatively only taking what they needed they just took everything. Then anyone who tried to come forward to collect their belongings was treated like a criminal and had to prove that their own assets were 100% legit and not involved in any crimes. Basically the opposite of innocent until proven guilty, which is clearly a violation of civil rights in this country, but they don't care because they can get away with it.

None of this really comes as a surprise because the Los Angeles police department is notorious for being one of the most corrupt institutions in the world. They steal. They plant evidence. They frame. They even kill people. Because of their position of power they can easily get away with their crimes the vast majority of the time. It is what it is. Of course I may be jumping the gun a bit because this particular situation was a sanctioned federal FBI raid, but still the statement stands uncontested: very shady things happen in places that have a lot of money. LA and New York are honeypots for corruption to manifest.

Confiscation of Bitcoin

The authorities stealing Bitcoin from 'criminals' and whoever else is an even more cringe situation. We all know that the value of the network is contained within the spot market and razor-thin liquidity pools. We measure the value of a network by market-cap, but that market cap can be manipulated x10 or more by the actual amount of USD that was pumped or dumped on the market.

So when the government seizes assets from "drug dealers" or whoever else and then dumps those coins on the open market: they are stealing from everyone in the network. It's really quite blatant, and very few people fight against it or even see it this way. Most will just chalk it up to "it is what it is" and "that's just the way things are".

This is an extremely bad policy to tolerate because there are several severe implications and downright infringements of freedom associated with them. I don't know if that statistic is true about 80% of these confiscations not being charged with a crime, but it doesn't really matter. Even 1% would not be acceptable. Not only does a crime need to be declared, they should obviously be convicted as well. The police state is drunk with power, and it shows.

The government seemingly has the power to tax or outright steal anything and everything that we own with very little justification. The implication here is that we actually don't own anything. The government owns it and are simply lending that property to us until they decide to take it back. Full scale wars have been started over less, and ironically enough this country was founded on exactly such a war. The hypocrisy of imperialism has no limits.

Cash is dangerous.

I've heard multiple stories of people simply driving around with a large amount of cash in the car, totally legitimate, and the cops will just steal it for absolutely no reason. Of course they have to make up some bullshit about thinking that maybe the money was involved in a crime (usually drugs), but that's about all that needs to be done.

In many cases the only reason the officer in question knew about the cash in the first place is that the citizen having their rights infringed upon is the one that admitted the cash was there in the first place. No good deed goes unpunished. Being transparent with police is a terrible policy. "I have nothing to hide," is an ignorant thing to say. The right to privacy and the right to remain silent can't be overstated.

Another war-on-drugs failure

A huge percentage of these legally illegal confiscations are all tied to the war on drugs. Many of these confiscations would not be possible if the officers involved couldn't just be like, "That's drug money I am justified in this action". The biggest Bitcoin confiscations were all drug-related. Just ask Silk Road.

Basically the war-on-drugs takes a completely victimless 'crime' and escalates it to the moon. By attacking the supply of drugs but not lowering demand, the war-on-drugs only serves to make the Schedule 1 drugs in question extremely valuable. So valuable in fact, that people are willing to kill over it. They turn victimless non-crimes into the worst crimes imaginable by filtering them through literal 'war' legislation. In many instances the murdering over drugs doesn't even have anything to do with the money involved, but rather avoiding the penalty of being sentenced to life in prison.

This has been confirmed time and time again from real-world documentaries on the subject. Once the police start sniffing around life-long friends are sometimes heavily incentivized to legit order assassinations on each other to stay out of prison. What started as a fun and exciting way to make easy money in your 20's becomes a battle for survival 5 or 10 years later. And most blissfully ignorant citizens believe that this is the best way to "keep the streets clean".

We've already seen that three-letter agencies like the CIA have zero respect for the laws of the country that is supposed to govern them, and they've been caught numerous times using the war on drugs to their own benefit, controlling all the backchannels and turning massive profits by picking and choosing who wins and who loses. The corruption is outright disgusting and hypocritical on every level.

Counterpoint: don't own things that can be seized.

The interesting thing about Bitcoin (and just crypto in general) is that confiscating it is nearly impossible if the assets are secured properly. Of course almost no one actually secures their crypto in this way, and I'm honestly shocked that Silk Road had their Bitcoin confiscated so easily. Were the keys just sitting right there on a single encrypted laptop? Silly. Why wasn't a passphrase used? Why would the information be accessible just because the laptop was open and currently in use? Insane. That's just lazy. Where is the cold-storage?

As crypto becomes more and more mainstream, people are going to wise-up on ways to secure it. It's also important to realize that not all government agencies are created equal. While it would be much easier for the CIA or the NSA to steal your crypto than someone like the FBI, they also have much less reason to. How many drug-dealers and murderers and whoever else does the CIA know about and they simply take no action? I have no idea, but I do know that such things are not in their job description. They do not exist to make waves like that, and such enforcement often runs contrary to their own interests. There are many reasons why 3-letter agencies do not work together well and are constantly trying to one-up each other.

I lost it in a boating accident.

Hive is particularly interesting within the context of confiscation due to account recovery. It will be very interesting to see law-enforcement try to confiscate someone's account only for that account to be confiscated right back. Something like this could be done even if the user in question was in prison. It could be done by a family member or even by a lawyer in some cases. I'd like to see their faces when it happens, but alas I never will.

What would happen if one of our witnesses was arrested and detained simply for being a witness of Hive? Would we really allow some foreign government punk us like that? Or would we simply soft-fork to code and freeze the account like we did to Justin Sun? Think about that for a moment because freezing someone's account who wants it to be frozen is a lot more justified than freezing someone's account who doesn't want it frozen. Would we really allow the government to come in here and steal from us like that? I certainly wouldn't vote in that direction.

I think at a certain point hard issues like this will be forced, and Hive will either have to bend over backwards for imperialism, or draw a line in the sand and prove that we actually have sovereignty and agency over our own network, and that imperialism is powerless to control us as a whole, even if they can target individuals and try to make examples of people at the top.

Conclusion

Civil asset forfeiture has reached a point where the common practice in this country is a clear violation of 4th Amendment Rights (search & seizure) but the judicial branch refuses to check this type of illegal enforcement. The war on drugs has been used, among other things, as a simple but deceptive tool that gives the police state exponentially more power than they would otherwise have.

Eventually the issue will be forced and crypto will have to fight against this kind of tyranny. We must assume that crypto infrastructure will keep getting better and corruption such as this will keep getting worse. It's only a matter of time before these two worlds collide. I hope we win.