Can someone explain why they would be granted a warrant to go open random boxes in the first place? They say the warrant was to identify the owners but... why? Don't you need to show some sort of...
Can someone explain why they would be granted a warrant to go open random boxes in the first place? They say the warrant was to identify the owners but... why? Don't you need to show some sort of reasonable suspicion of a crime to get a warrant to search for evidence of that crime?
Under the warrant, agents were only supposed to “inspect the contents of the boxes”—not to search for potential violations of law, but simply to “identify their owners in order to notify them so that they can claim their property.”
Ya, as if police aren't going to go looking for a crime in a situation like this.
Well... ya... I did finally click through and read part of the court document that was linked. There were 700 boxes searched and it was the company that was under investigation NOT the box owners....
Well... ya... I did finally click through and read part of the court document that was linked. There were 700 boxes searched and it was the company that was under investigation NOT the box owners.
This case arises out of the government’s “inventory” of 700 safe deposit boxes at US Private Vaults (USPV), a company the government was investigating for various criminal activities, including money laundering. The government obtained a warrant to search and seize USPV’s facilities and instrumentalities of its crime, including its “nests” of safe deposit boxes. The warrant issued by the magistrate judge explicitly “d[id] not authorize a criminal search or seizure of box contents,” and required agents to follow their “written policies” to inventory items and contact box owners so that they could claim their property after the search.
Emphasis added.
After years of investigating individual USPV
boxholders, agencies like the FBI, DEA, and USPIS concluded that the individual investigations “weren’t doing anything effective” because the “real problem” was USPV, which they believed served as a “money laundering facilitator.”
The investigation confirmed that the owners of USPV knew of its use by criminals to launder money, solicited illicit business, and committed several crimes themselves, not limited to money laundering
Can someone explain why they would be granted a warrant to go open random boxes in the first place? They say the warrant was to identify the owners but... why? Don't you need to show some sort of reasonable suspicion of a crime to get a warrant to search for evidence of that crime?
Ya, as if police aren't going to go looking for a crime in a situation like this.
Apparently there was $100m in cash and valuables in these boxes, so I don’t expect they were random boxes.
Well... ya... I did finally click through and read part of the court document that was linked. There were 700 boxes searched and it was the company that was under investigation NOT the box owners.
Emphasis added.
There were earlier articles, possibly even here on Tildes, but I didn't find them yet.
Can't wait for more, "We're being stopped from upholding the law, so we won't do it at all" rhetoric to come from the police
fratmob.