Audits Of Asset Forfeiture Program Uncover Funds Used To Pay Student Loans, Property Used As Rent-Free Housing

from the stealing-our-way-to-justice! dept

Student loan debt is a serious problem here in the US as the price of higher education continues to outpace every standard economic yard stick. Lots of people think the government should step in to do something about it. While the administration makes helpful noises and tries to figure out how it can effectively tell Americans it's alright to rack up debt and walk away from it without actually, you know, encouraging Americans to get deeply in debt and walk away from it, one government employee is taking the bold steps the US government won't to eradicate student loan debt… specifically, his.

In a 2014 audit of the DA’s office representing Washington and Nowata counties [Oklahoma], the State Auditor’s Office found that $5,000 in forfeiture funds had been used to make payments on an assistant district attorney’s student loans.

That's a pretty egregious abuse of seized funds, and that's even if you find the whole asset forfeiture system mostly abuse-free when it comes to seizing property. Unbelievably, the DA's office defended the use of the public's money to pay off personal student loans.

The report said the district attorney maintained the expense was justified because most of the cases the assistant DA prosecuted were drug cases.

Which means what? That he was involved in several drug prosecutions and therefore entitled to a percentage of the take for his own personal use?

But no need to worry about the misspent $5,000. The DA's office has already "repaid" it using money seized a bit more lawfully via taxation.

After the issue came to light, the Oklahoma District Attorneys Council reimbursed the $5,000 using funds from its own student-loan program, the State Auditor’s report states.

So, everything's cool now. Except:

A 2009 audit of the District Attorney’s Office that represents Beaver, Cimarron, Harper and Texas counties found that a Beaver County assistant district attorney began living rent-free in a house obtained in a 2004 forfeiture. A judge had ordered the house sold at an auction, but the prosecutor lived there through 2009.

A bold new opportunity in real estate! Open to law enforcement members only!

There's so much more.

Schroedinger's seized pickup truck -- listed as "sold" at an auction -- remains in a sold/unsold state as neither the pickup, the paperwork nor the cash generated from the sale can be located. One district further perverted the perverse incentives by spending seized money before it had even been processed by the courts. In other instances, the money made its way onto the ledgers as "seized," but forfeiture cases were never filed. (This is particularly evil because without a filing, there's almost no way to challenge the seizure.)

The violations found by these audits are the sort of thing everyone should have expected when they allowed law enforcement to start seizing property without bringing criminal charges. Guns, vehicles and cash go missing. Proceeds from auctions are used to pay court costs and fund retirement parties. The program basically allows officers to steal from people they've already dehumanized as "drug traffickers." So, if someone's property goes missing and ends up as an off-the-books personal use vehicle/gun for some cop, no one's going to spend too much time worrying about the supposed "criminal" whose property has been seized. That's why the accountability is so lax and that's why the laws granting officers these powers need to be -- at minimum -- rewritten, if not taken off the books entirely.

And, as is always the case when asset forfeiture is attacked by legislators and regulators, there's a caricature of law enforcement on hand to offer homespun words of wisdom in defense of the legalized theft:

“I know for a fact we all try to work very hard to rid this devil’s candy (drugs) off of our state. And for someone to try and push us back — sheriff’s departments, police departments — that’s how we continue our fight, is to take that money and go forward,” Stradley said. “That will set us back many, many, many years.”

Will it set you back to 1990? And put you right in the middle of the crack epidemic? Or will it take you back to the 1920's, when marijuana was making jazz music tolerable and turning non-Caucasian males into rapists? How many years exactly will forcing Oklahoma law enforcement to accompany seizures with criminal charges set back these agencies? We all want to know. Even those of us who swore off the devil's candy years ago or never made it past anything harder than devil's food cake.

Filed Under: abuse, asset forfeiture, law enforcement, misuse, police, student loans

EFF Files Brief In Support Of 'Cannibal Cop' To Keep The CFAA From Becoming Even MORE Abusive

from the strangest-of-bedfellows dept

The US legal system took a step towards criminalizing thought when a New York court convicted a former NYPD officer of conspiring to kidnap, rape, kill and eat 100 women. The evidence against Gilberto Valle included chat logs and internet searches.

The details uncovered were nightmarish. But at the end of it all, it only amounted to Valle giving his very vivid imagination a long leash. On appeal, the court overturned the conspiracy charges, stating that Valle's "conspiracy" was little more than thoughtcrime, something the legal system isn't* in the business of punishing. (And yet, "conspiracy" remains a valid criminal charge -- one used extensively by the FBI to bag its handcrafted "terrorists." Go figure.)

*About a million caveats apply.

But the court left one charge on the table: a CFAA violation. During the course of Valle's fantasizing, he used police databases to look up information on one of his "victims." This, of course, is an egregious abuse of his position and access, but it is not -- as the EFF argues -- a CFAA violation.

Despite acquitting Valle on the conspiracy charge, the court upheld the CFAA conviction, believing that the restrictions placed on Valle concerning the database—which permitted him to access any part of the database as long as it was for a valid law enforcement purpose—was an access restriction, not a use restriction, simply because of the way the restriction was phrased. The distinction between "access" and "use" restrictions is critical because serious prison time is at stake. Congress clearly intended the CFAA to criminalize the act of breaking into computer systems a person is not allowed to be in otherwise, but violating a use restriction—a (usually written) policy that governs the purposes for which someone can use their access—is clearly not that.

The EFF has filed an amicus brief in Valle's case (now before the Second Circuit Court), arguing for this charge to be overturned as well. In it, the EFF points out that Valle's unauthorized access didn't involve him actually breaking into the NYPD's computers -- a key element of CFAA charges. Instead, he already had access. He just didn't have permission to do what he did.

So, while Valle's abuse of his access was certainly immoral, possibly illegal under a New York state law, and a clear violation of NYPD policy, it was not the sort of circumvention Congress had in mind when it crafted the bill. There should definitely be consequences for this activity (including Valle being subject to civil rights lawsuits from the violated party[ies]), but there definitely should not be a finding that violating an internal use policy is a federal crime.

As it stands now, the decision reached by the lower court poses a serious threat to nearly anyone with access to computers/networks provided by their employers.

Most critically, the court set a dangerous precedent. As we’ve repeatedly warned, this theory of CFAA liability gives employers and website owners the power to make behavior illegal through simply adopting use restrictions in their corporate policies or terms of use, which in turn criminalizes a broad range of innocuous everyday behaviors—like checking personal email or the score of a baseball game.

It's the worst cases -- ones with less-than-sympathetic defendants -- that result in the worst precedents. Valle's extended, detailed cannibalistic fantasies are hard to defend, even knowing that he never followed through with the lurid plans he dreamed up. Free speech is toughest to defend when it's composed of brutal and depraved fantasies that include any number of hideous criminal acts. But the lower court saw it for what it was: thoughts, not deeds.

Now, there's one detail left, but it's hardly a minor one. The remaining charge -- if left standing -- seriously lowers the bar for criminal charges under the CFAA, a law that is already severely flawed. And so, the EFF joins the battle on behalf of a former NYPD officer who abused his position to further his violent fantasies in hopes of protecting far-more-centered members of the general public from abuse at the hands of a broken law.

Filed Under: cfaa, computer hacking, gilberto valle, misuse, nypd, unauthorized use
Companies: eff