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DEA regularly mines Americans' travel records to seize millions in cash

153 points by tantalor 10y ago

cloudjacker 10y ago
I count on this so I can buy cheap Outside Lands tickets from cash poor drug dealers that "had something come up"
SixSigma 10y ago
> “We won’t release that information without a subpoena,” American Airlines spokesman Ross Feinstein said. Just because Ross said something, doesn't make it true. > And a police dog smelled drugs on the cash There is so much wrong with that assertion 1) Dogs are trained to find money 2) Most cash is cocaine contaminated [1] 3) A dog indicating is not proof of anything [2] usually nothing more than what the handler wants to happen [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contaminated_currency https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contaminated_currency [2] https://nevergetbusted.com/2014/07/20/university-study-tricked-certified-police-dogs-to-false-alert-200-times/ https://nevergetbusted.com/2014/07/20/university-study-trick...
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
zeveb 10y ago
> Federal drug agents regularly mine Americans’ travel information to profile people who might be ferrying money for narcotics traffickers — though they almost never use what they learn to make arrests or build criminal cases. > Instead, that targeting has helped the Drug Enforcement Administration seize a small fortune in cash. So, they're basically the Sheriff of Nottingham, or the old Central European robber barons.
- gtirloni 10y ago
  > DEA units assigned to patrol 15 of the nation’s busiest airports seized more than $209 million in cash from at least 5,200 people over the past decade after concluding the money was linked to drug trafficking So was it drug money or not?
  - emodendroket 10y ago
    I mean, it's plausible in all these stories that it is. But it seems like there should be a higher standard before the feds can take tens of thousands of dollars from you.
    - cloudjacker 10y ago
      Ok some cognitive dissonance here I see: If someone told you Brazilian police were taking people's cash you wouldn't for one second think there was some non self serving aspect to this. You wouldn't even look to see if there was any law supporting it. You would just dismiss it as corrupt police officers in a corrupt system, just like you should be doing in this case. Forgot for a moment that you recited that pledge every morning for 13 years of your life, and think about how someone not from America would perceive this
      - emodendroket 10y ago
        I'm not saying "hey, it's totally OK that they're doing this" or that it's not self-serving. What I'm saying is that these people are not exactly as sympathetic/blameless as some of the other asset forfeiture articles I've read.
        MaysonL 10y ago
        So what? Drug dealers have constitutional rights too, and depriving them of their rights weakens your rights and my rights.
        cloudjacker 10y ago
        not blameless when viewed in support of a victimless crime and flawed law riddled with conflicts of interest, discriminatory discretion, and self serving ends. if you want a grand jury to find that the federal officers acted within agency guidelines, then great, you will continue to be able to sleep at night if you want the supreme court to continue to find those laws constitutional, then great you will continue to sleep at night. Eugenics programs are constitutional and so politically unpopular that all 50 states have laws that nullify the practice. The rest of us see this perverse practice for what is and would prefer if Congress modifies laws to instruct its agencies to stop the practice and stop funding themselves by taking citizen's money instead of preparing funding pitch decks for representatives which require oversight
- CelestialTeapot 10y ago
  Yep, legalized theft. Civil forfeiture works to fleece the peasantry (and the criminals) equally. The DEA and police use this method to fund their organizations, because in most cases, they're allowed to keep most if not all of the money seized. That's an enormous conflict of interest that has caused many innocent people to get shafted by the government, as has been shown here (and elsewhere) in prior stories related to civil forfeiture. TL;DR: Never travel with cash, gift cards, or cash cards.
  - wldcordeiro 10y ago
    I had an acquaintance that had the police seize $10k in cash from him after he had gotten in a car accident, along with bags of clothing he had bought at the mall. After court and everything the clothing was never reported and the $10k became $4k. It's not just money they'll take, it's anything of value they feel like.
    - Retric 10y ago
      Used to be people would wait a while, and then go and shoot people who did this. I can't decide if it's progress that people no longer consider this reasonable.
      - jrowley 10y ago
        Yeah I don't consider myself a supporter of the mafia but in some situations it'd be nice to have an equalizer.
      - wldcordeiro 10y ago
        I think the thing I was trying to point out is that while there is the legal theft that goes under the guise of civil forfeiture there's also plenty that I feel goes unnoticed by officers acting independently of the bureaucracy.
homulilly 10y ago
Law enforcement is the biggest and most dangerous gang in America.
Roboprog 10y ago
So, anybody discussing decriminalizing drugs and proposing they are a medical issue instead can count on the fact that he/she is threatening the livelihood of both the dealers and the "enforcement" agency??? (and be appropriately wary)
- api 10y ago
  Throw in police unions, the private prison industry, the surveillance industry, criminal lawyers, ...
  - WalterSear 10y ago
    And the lobbyists, and ultimately the politicians, that count on them. In other words, the circle is complete. I wouldn't be surprised if it ever wasn't broken.
  - rbanffy 10y ago
    And the criminals. It's much less profitable if you pay taxes and can't kill your competition.
    - frandroid 10y ago
      Parent already mentioned "the dealers".
- a3n 10y ago
  Bingo.
mattnewton 10y ago
The most ridiculous part of these stories to me is that the ending was repeatedly "you got us, we can't prove this money is from illegal sources, but we're only returning part of it." It's like they are trying to return the minimum amount to make it no longer worth the victim's effort. Definitely doesn't inspire confidence that this done in good faith. If this were an article USA today was writing about Mexico it probably would have just gone out and called it corruption. I am certainly convinced from these cases it is a massive abuse.
- Bartweiss 10y ago
  > The Justice Department agreed in May to return half the money, without explanation. That's about the ugliest thing in the entire story. It makes total sense if you're trying to defuse legal proceedings by making them not worth the price, and no sense at all if you're trying to freeze money from drug traffickers.
dmix 10y ago
It seems the NSA analysts can wake up in the morning and reassure themselves "hey, at least we're not DEA agents".
pfarnsworth 10y ago
Why hasn't this been successfully fought by the ACLU? What issues are keeping this legal for so long?
dmayle 10y ago
There is no world where this practice could pass constitutional review. What they are doing is called out as unconstitutional in no less than three (!!!) different amendments. At this point in time, the supreme court should be buckling under the weight of requests to review this practice, and have it struck down as un-American. "The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized" - Fourth Amendment "No person shall be held to answer for a capital, or otherwise infamous crime, unless on a presentment or indictment of a Grand Jury, except in cases arising in the land or naval forces, or in the Militia, when in actual service in time of War or public danger; nor shall any person be subject for the same offence to be twice put in jeopardy of life or limb; nor shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself, nor be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation." -- Fifth Amendment "The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects,[a] against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized" - Fourteenth Ammendment
- rosser 10y ago
  > There is no world where this practice could pass constitutional review. And yet, civil asset forfeiture has been sanctioned by SCotUS. If we're ever going to change this kind of crap, indignation and, "But, but, but ... nuh-uh!" are not the places to start.
  - throwaway_reply 10y ago
    (Original poster, but my procrastination settings prevented me from responding) Generally, SCotUS approval of civil forfeiture falls into two categories: 1) Assets involved in a crime you didn't commit (e.g. lending your car to someone who robs a bank and uses it as a getaway car). 2) Assets involved in a crime where there is no access to, or evidence of the owner (e.g. a pile of money found with a pile of drugs, or the home of a criminal who has fled the country) The form of seizure mentioned in this article is quite clearly unconstitutional.
hx87 10y ago
At its core, the problem is that the DEA has a monetary incentive to seize cash, since it can keep the cash for its own use. What if that were no longer possible, and all money confiscated by government agencies are incinerated under external supervision, if cash, or sent to the monetary equivalent of /dev/null (buying 0% Treasury perpetuities, perhaps) if electronic.
6stringmerc 10y ago
It is my sincere hope that in my lifetime a Whistle Blower cripples the DEA and exposes a profiteering, disturbing agenda that so many seem to sense is at the belligerent, Constitution-ignoring soul of the organization.
pmarreck 10y ago
The easy solution to this (from the perspective of the criminal) is to just move the money via a cryptocurrency (traded for cash privately) and it seems completely idiotic to me that this hasn't occurred yet, there is basically zero risk of LE compromise. I'm also rather surprised that I'm the first person to even mention it here, since this is basically a solved problem.
- arcticfox 10y ago
  Is it that easy to trade $50,000 of a cryptocurrency for regular currency without leaving an ugly papertrail? I guess theoretically you can have a clean accomplice that does it for you on the regulated exchanges and hands you the cash, but I'm not sure how well that works for evading LE.
  - pmarreck 10y ago
    Well, you can do that, or you can try to establish a complete shadow economy on the blockchain, where both buyers and sellers use the crypto as a currency, and it only gets exchanged for cold hard (more troublesome) cash at the "leaves" which are ostensibly much smaller and more invisible amounts
- dmix 10y ago
  I'm guessing you've never seen prices on localbitcoins or other trading sites. There is always a big markup for buying bitcoin with cash. It'd be extremely expensive to buy 5k let alone $50-100k. Then cashing out your bitcoin you'd likely losing money again. Besides the difficulty in finding people who have $50-100k in bitcoin they want to sell then finding another person who wants to buy $50-100k in bitcoin. The market simply isn't there for this to be practical. There would have to be a big healthy black market here for people both buying and selling BTC for cash. You'd then have to hide this transaction from the DEA/IRS (on both ends A buying -> B selling) rather than just shipping cash from point A->B. So without a market already in place for this then you're no better off then before.
zanethomas 10y ago
Note that the DEA is probably, in some cases, using information obtained by the NSA and shared with the DEA. See also: parallel construction, https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20140203/11143926078/parallel-construction-revealed-how-dea-is-trained-to-launder-classified-surveillance-info.shtml https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20140203/11143926078/paral... The war on drugs has wreaked havoc on our country by providing huge incentives for the criminally-minded to act as they do. And yes, I'm referring to all of the criminals involved.
- 20yrs_no_equity 10y ago
  The brilliant thing (For them) about this is they don't need the hassle of parallel construction if they're not building a case-- they can just use the NSA information to steal the money, and then never file charges, and thus never have to justify to a court how they acquired the knowledge that the money would be there. The NSA gets a cut, I'm sure.
  - rhizome 10y ago
    The NSA doesn't need the paper-trail of a cut, and at any rate the cut would be small potatoes to them.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
20yrs_no_equity 10y ago
The tighter their grip, the more value will slip thru their fingers into bitcoin.
- l4xecz 10y ago
  Yup, although the cost of a procedure such as buying bitcoin in city "A" via lbtc, traveling, selling in city "B" via lbtc will have to weigh the risks of civil forfeiture. If you're running a drug op and paying random people to transport cash, I suspect that a very small percentage of funds will be lost to this BS. Unfortunately it will be the ignorant folks who travel with their life savings in cash to buy cars or retirement homes who will be the most harmed.
diego_moita 10y ago
From a Latin American perspective, the US deals with corruption in a very interesting way. * Here in Latin America the police extorts corruption and you know that it is illegal but good luck complaining. In the US they just legalize the extortion. * Here in Latin America it is illegal to bribe a politician but everyone does it. In the US they just legalize lobbying and corporations financing campaigns. So, to avoid corruption, the US just makes it legal?
- rosser 10y ago
  Well, by definition, corruption is illegal. So if you make the behavior legal, in specific, defined circumstances, then it's not corruption any more. Magic!

153 points by tantalor 10y ago

I count on this so I can buy cheap Outside Lands tickets from cash poor drug dealers that "had something come up"

> “We won’t release that information without a subpoena,” American Airlines spokesman Ross Feinstein said. Just because Ross said something, doesn't make it true. > And a police dog smelled drugs on the cash There is so much wrong with that assertion 1) Dogs are trained to find money 2) Most cash is cocaine contaminated [1] 3) A dog indicating is not proof of anything [2] usually nothing more than what the handler wants to happen [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contaminated_currency https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contaminated_currency [2] https://nevergetbusted.com/2014/07/20/university-study-tricked-certified-police-dogs-to-false-alert-200-times/ https://nevergetbusted.com/2014/07/20/university-study-trick...

deleted 10y ago
[deleted]

zeveb 10y ago

> Federal drug agents regularly mine Americans’ travel information to profile people who might be ferrying money for narcotics traffickers — though they almost never use what they learn to make arrests or build criminal cases. > Instead, that targeting has helped the Drug Enforcement Administration seize a small fortune in cash. So, they're basically the Sheriff of Nottingham, or the old Central European robber barons.

gtirloni 10y ago
> DEA units assigned to patrol 15 of the nation’s busiest airports seized more than $209 million in cash from at least 5,200 people over the past decade after concluding the money was linked to drug trafficking So was it drug money or not?
- emodendroket 10y ago
  I mean, it's plausible in all these stories that it is. But it seems like there should be a higher standard before the feds can take tens of thousands of dollars from you.
  - cloudjacker 10y ago
    Ok some cognitive dissonance here I see: If someone told you Brazilian police were taking people's cash you wouldn't for one second think there was some non self serving aspect to this. You wouldn't even look to see if there was any law supporting it. You would just dismiss it as corrupt police officers in a corrupt system, just like you should be doing in this case. Forgot for a moment that you recited that pledge every morning for 13 years of your life, and think about how someone not from America would perceive this
    - emodendroket 10y ago
      I'm not saying "hey, it's totally OK that they're doing this" or that it's not self-serving. What I'm saying is that these people are not exactly as sympathetic/blameless as some of the other asset forfeiture articles I've read.
      - MaysonL 10y ago
        So what? Drug dealers have constitutional rights too, and depriving them of their rights weakens your rights and my rights.
      - cloudjacker 10y ago
        not blameless when viewed in support of a victimless crime and flawed law riddled with conflicts of interest, discriminatory discretion, and self serving ends. if you want a grand jury to find that the federal officers acted within agency guidelines, then great, you will continue to be able to sleep at night if you want the supreme court to continue to find those laws constitutional, then great you will continue to sleep at night. Eugenics programs are constitutional and so politically unpopular that all 50 states have laws that nullify the practice. The rest of us see this perverse practice for what is and would prefer if Congress modifies laws to instruct its agencies to stop the practice and stop funding themselves by taking citizen's money instead of preparing funding pitch decks for representatives which require oversight
CelestialTeapot 10y ago
Yep, legalized theft. Civil forfeiture works to fleece the peasantry (and the criminals) equally. The DEA and police use this method to fund their organizations, because in most cases, they're allowed to keep most if not all of the money seized. That's an enormous conflict of interest that has caused many innocent people to get shafted by the government, as has been shown here (and elsewhere) in prior stories related to civil forfeiture. TL;DR: Never travel with cash, gift cards, or cash cards.
- wldcordeiro 10y ago
  I had an acquaintance that had the police seize $10k in cash from him after he had gotten in a car accident, along with bags of clothing he had bought at the mall. After court and everything the clothing was never reported and the $10k became $4k. It's not just money they'll take, it's anything of value they feel like.
  - Retric 10y ago
    Used to be people would wait a while, and then go and shoot people who did this. I can't decide if it's progress that people no longer consider this reasonable.
    - jrowley 10y ago
      Yeah I don't consider myself a supporter of the mafia but in some situations it'd be nice to have an equalizer.
    - wldcordeiro 10y ago
      I think the thing I was trying to point out is that while there is the legal theft that goes under the guise of civil forfeiture there's also plenty that I feel goes unnoticed by officers acting independently of the bureaucracy.

homulilly 10y ago

Law enforcement is the biggest and most dangerous gang in America.

Roboprog 10y ago

So, anybody discussing decriminalizing drugs and proposing they are a medical issue instead can count on the fact that he/she is threatening the livelihood of both the dealers and the "enforcement" agency??? (and be appropriately wary)

api 10y ago
Throw in police unions, the private prison industry, the surveillance industry, criminal lawyers, ...
- WalterSear 10y ago
  And the lobbyists, and ultimately the politicians, that count on them. In other words, the circle is complete. I wouldn't be surprised if it ever wasn't broken.
- rbanffy 10y ago
  And the criminals. It's much less profitable if you pay taxes and can't kill your competition.
  - frandroid 10y ago
    Parent already mentioned "the dealers".
a3n 10y ago
Bingo.

mattnewton 10y ago

The most ridiculous part of these stories to me is that the ending was repeatedly "you got us, we can't prove this money is from illegal sources, but we're only returning part of it." It's like they are trying to return the minimum amount to make it no longer worth the victim's effort. Definitely doesn't inspire confidence that this done in good faith. If this were an article USA today was writing about Mexico it probably would have just gone out and called it corruption. I am certainly convinced from these cases it is a massive abuse.

Bartweiss 10y ago
> The Justice Department agreed in May to return half the money, without explanation. That's about the ugliest thing in the entire story. It makes total sense if you're trying to defuse legal proceedings by making them not worth the price, and no sense at all if you're trying to freeze money from drug traffickers.

dmix 10y ago

It seems the NSA analysts can wake up in the morning and reassure themselves "hey, at least we're not DEA agents".

pfarnsworth 10y ago

Why hasn't this been successfully fought by the ACLU? What issues are keeping this legal for so long?

dmayle 10y ago

There is no world where this practice could pass constitutional review. What they are doing is called out as unconstitutional in no less than three (!!!) different amendments. At this point in time, the supreme court should be buckling under the weight of requests to review this practice, and have it struck down as un-American. "The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized" - Fourth Amendment "No person shall be held to answer for a capital, or otherwise infamous crime, unless on a presentment or indictment of a Grand Jury, except in cases arising in the land or naval forces, or in the Militia, when in actual service in time of War or public danger; nor shall any person be subject for the same offence to be twice put in jeopardy of life or limb; nor shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself, nor be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation." -- Fifth Amendment "The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects,[a] against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized" - Fourteenth Ammendment

rosser 10y ago
> There is no world where this practice could pass constitutional review. And yet, civil asset forfeiture has been sanctioned by SCotUS. If we're ever going to change this kind of crap, indignation and, "But, but, but ... nuh-uh!" are not the places to start.
- throwaway_reply 10y ago
  (Original poster, but my procrastination settings prevented me from responding) Generally, SCotUS approval of civil forfeiture falls into two categories: 1) Assets involved in a crime you didn't commit (e.g. lending your car to someone who robs a bank and uses it as a getaway car). 2) Assets involved in a crime where there is no access to, or evidence of the owner (e.g. a pile of money found with a pile of drugs, or the home of a criminal who has fled the country) The form of seizure mentioned in this article is quite clearly unconstitutional.

hx87 10y ago

At its core, the problem is that the DEA has a monetary incentive to seize cash, since it can keep the cash for its own use. What if that were no longer possible, and all money confiscated by government agencies are incinerated under external supervision, if cash, or sent to the monetary equivalent of /dev/null (buying 0% Treasury perpetuities, perhaps) if electronic.

6stringmerc 10y ago

It is my sincere hope that in my lifetime a Whistle Blower cripples the DEA and exposes a profiteering, disturbing agenda that so many seem to sense is at the belligerent, Constitution-ignoring soul of the organization.

pmarreck 10y ago

The easy solution to this (from the perspective of the criminal) is to just move the money via a cryptocurrency (traded for cash privately) and it seems completely idiotic to me that this hasn't occurred yet, there is basically zero risk of LE compromise. I'm also rather surprised that I'm the first person to even mention it here, since this is basically a solved problem.

arcticfox 10y ago
Is it that easy to trade $50,000 of a cryptocurrency for regular currency without leaving an ugly papertrail? I guess theoretically you can have a clean accomplice that does it for you on the regulated exchanges and hands you the cash, but I'm not sure how well that works for evading LE.
- pmarreck 10y ago
  Well, you can do that, or you can try to establish a complete shadow economy on the blockchain, where both buyers and sellers use the crypto as a currency, and it only gets exchanged for cold hard (more troublesome) cash at the "leaves" which are ostensibly much smaller and more invisible amounts
dmix 10y ago
I'm guessing you've never seen prices on localbitcoins or other trading sites. There is always a big markup for buying bitcoin with cash. It'd be extremely expensive to buy 5k let alone $50-100k. Then cashing out your bitcoin you'd likely losing money again. Besides the difficulty in finding people who have $50-100k in bitcoin they want to sell then finding another person who wants to buy $50-100k in bitcoin. The market simply isn't there for this to be practical. There would have to be a big healthy black market here for people both buying and selling BTC for cash. You'd then have to hide this transaction from the DEA/IRS (on both ends A buying -> B selling) rather than just shipping cash from point A->B. So without a market already in place for this then you're no better off then before.

zanethomas 10y ago

Note that the DEA is probably, in some cases, using information obtained by the NSA and shared with the DEA. See also: parallel construction, https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20140203/11143926078/parallel-construction-revealed-how-dea-is-trained-to-launder-classified-surveillance-info.shtml https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20140203/11143926078/paral... The war on drugs has wreaked havoc on our country by providing huge incentives for the criminally-minded to act as they do. And yes, I'm referring to all of the criminals involved.

20yrs_no_equity 10y ago
The brilliant thing (For them) about this is they don't need the hassle of parallel construction if they're not building a case-- they can just use the NSA information to steal the money, and then never file charges, and thus never have to justify to a court how they acquired the knowledge that the money would be there. The NSA gets a cut, I'm sure.
- rhizome 10y ago
  The NSA doesn't need the paper-trail of a cut, and at any rate the cut would be small potatoes to them.

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

20yrs_no_equity 10y ago

The tighter their grip, the more value will slip thru their fingers into bitcoin.

l4xecz 10y ago
Yup, although the cost of a procedure such as buying bitcoin in city "A" via lbtc, traveling, selling in city "B" via lbtc will have to weigh the risks of civil forfeiture. If you're running a drug op and paying random people to transport cash, I suspect that a very small percentage of funds will be lost to this BS. Unfortunately it will be the ignorant folks who travel with their life savings in cash to buy cars or retirement homes who will be the most harmed.

diego_moita 10y ago

From a Latin American perspective, the US deals with corruption in a very interesting way. * Here in Latin America the police extorts corruption and you know that it is illegal but good luck complaining. In the US they just legalize the extortion. * Here in Latin America it is illegal to bribe a politician but everyone does it. In the US they just legalize lobbying and corporations financing campaigns. So, to avoid corruption, the US just makes it legal?

rosser 10y ago
Well, by definition, corruption is illegal. So if you make the behavior legal, in specific, defined circumstances, then it's not corruption any more. Magic!