The government's war against ordinary citizens

Washington Post - Randy Sowers always expected the government to show up one day and ask where all the cash he was depositing at his bank came from. He thought he had the right answer: from his business selling eggs and milk at farmers markets.

But under a federal law designed to target money laundering, Sowers and his Maryland dairy farm lost a big chunk of that income – $29,500 – to the government. Three years later, he hasn’t gotten any of it back and almost certainly never will. In the court of public opinion, however, South Mountain Creamery has become a potent symbol for the movement against civil asset forfeiture.

Randy and Karen Sowers, run South Mountain Creamery, a farm in Frederick County, Md., that has become popular for its dairy products; they have gained a national following after running afoul of a federal law aimed at money laundering, not dairy farming.

... Sowers was not accused of money laundering or attempting to hide illegal profits. Federal agents who showed up at his farm in February 2012 told him that they thought he was an honest businessman. But he had run afoul of federal law requiring banks to report deposits of more than $10,000 and making it a crime to evade the reporting requirement by “structuring” cash into smaller amounts.

The law is aimed at fighting money laundering, terrorism financing, tax evasion and other fraud, and its use against small businesses has become a target for critics of government overreach.

Forbes, March 2015 - A new report released by the Office of the Inspector General for the U.S. Department of Justice examined the Drug Enforcement Administration’s controversial use of “cold consent.”

In a cold consent encounter, a person is stopped if an agent thinks that person’s behavior fits a drug courier profile. Or an agent can stop a person cold “based on no particular behavior,” according to the Inspector General report. The agent then asks people they have stopped for consent to question them and sometimes to search their possessions as well. By gaining consent, law enforcement officers can bypass the need for a warrant.

But after reviewing the DEA’s policies, the Inspector General concluded, “cold consent encounters and searches can raise civil rights concerns.” In one incident, DEA agents cold-stopped an African-American woman at an airport and allegedly subjected her to “aggressive and humiliating questioning”; the woman was a Pentagon lawyer and traveling on government business.

Little wonder research by the U.S. Department of Justice found that cold consent encounters are “more often associated with racial profiling than contacts based on previously acquired information.” Cold consent has even been compared to stop-and-frisk.

Moreover, agents can seize cash they find during a cold consent encounter. According to data analysis conducted by the Institute for Justice, half of all DEA cash seizures from 2009 to 2013 were under $10,000. Thanks to civil forfeiture laws, law enforcement can take cash and other valuable property, based on an officer’s often subjective determination of probable cause, even from those who have not been charged with a crime.