Tag Archives: freedom

Asset Forfeiture

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Attorney General Jeff Sessions has withdrawn President Barack Obama’s (D) blanket hold on asset seizure, but with safeguards.  I think those safeguards need improvement.

Stop sharing seized assets with local law enforcement.  Each State has its own laws regarding asset seizure by local law enforcement; these laws should be respected and not bypassed.

Also:

Sessions’ new guidelines say that state or local agencies seeking forfeiture under federal law must demonstrate probable cause within 15 days of the seizure. The sponsoring federal agency must notify the property’s owner within 45 days, so he can challenge it, including by going to court.

This is much too slow.  These agencies already have probable cause, or they couldn’t have conducted the raids and seizures in the first place.  Where a seizure is made pursuant to an unwarranted but otherwise legitimate stop or arrest, the seizure has its probable cause in the same process with which the police after the fact justify their stop/arrest.

The sponsoring agency knows at the moment of the seizure what it’s seized and what it intends to do with it; there’s no reason for a 45-day delay in notification other than to make the seizure as irrevocable as possible and, in the case of financial asset seizure, to make as great as possible the cost to the owner of his property’s recovery.

Finally, absent an actual conviction, there shouldn’t be any asset seizure outside the strictures of the already existing civil and criminal sections of the RICO statute.  That law provides sufficient grounds for seizure prior to conviction, when the seizure is made solely on the basis of an accusation.

It’s Murder

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That’s what one of the signs held by a protestor says in the lead image of the Wall Street Journal piece on the soon-to-be-fatal plight of baby Charlie Gard.  The baby suffers from a rare mitochondrial disorder that usually is fatal.  The baby’s doctors insisted this case can only be fatal, and a British court (and a European Union court!  Is there any stronger argument for the Brits taking themselves out of the EU?)—because in Great Britain Government gets the final word on babies, not parents—agreed and agreed with the doctors’ further demand that baby Charlie be taken off life support to die.

But.

An American doctor has treated babies with this mitochondrial disease, and he has had some success with his treatment.  He indicated he had a 10% chance of helping Charlie.

However.

Charlie Gard’s parents’ legal fight to keep him on a ventilator and take him abroad for experimental therapy, against the opinion of his doctors, ended Monday when they dropped the case, saying his muscular damage was worse than feared and the treatment wouldn’t help.

Charlie’s parents struggled for months (months!) to get their baby out of gaol so they could take him somewhere to get treatment, however long-shot.  Now the doctors claiming to treat him and the court that said “No further effort to treat is allowed” must explain the impact those months of interference and delay had on baby Charlie’s chances.

This is what Brits can look forward to, now that their government and its death panels have asserted their absolute control over the fate of British children.  The sign isn’t far wrong.

The Coming Campaign

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The Progressive-Democratic Party is rolling out a new plan of campaign for the 2018 elections.  It’s a populist one, but what interests me is this.  The Republicans have run, for the last several election cycles, on “take back our country.”

Senator Elizabeth Warren (D, MA), in endorsing her party’s new campaign plan, said

This is one step that Democrats are offering to take back our government[.]

What an instructive, illuminating difference.

International Censorship

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France wants to enforce a “right to be forgotten” law (recently enacted by the EU that allows persons to demand publicly available information about them to be erased from links in search engine results) inside other nations than the EU membership—inside the United States, for instance.  Google, et al., is demurring, and France has taken the matter to the EU’s highest administrative court, the Court of Justice.

The case will help determine how far EU regulators can go in enforcing the bloc’s strict new privacy law….

It has wider implications than that. It will set a legal precedent, explicitly for the EU to reach inside the United States and censor our Internet, and that won’t be limited to EU privacy sensibilities, or EU views on censorship.

It’s broader, still. It will set a precedent for the PRC, which can intercept messaging images and erase them from the message before the intended recipient gets the message, to be exercised inside the US.

The Court of Justice ruling—likely to be in favor of France—will need to be explicitly rejected by us, with strong cyber consequences taken against the EU on its every attempt to enforce this first step at rank censorship against us.