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Apple’s head of security indicted in Santa Clara County CCW case

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Re: Apple’s head of security indicted in Santa Clara County CCW case

#371

Post by ineedasername »

samatman wrote: post #336
ineedasername wrote: post #311

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Calling it theft is a very far stretch. I know there are stories of police abusing this & taking cash of people in random traffic stops: That's theft. But a huge portion of asset seizures are forfeits from drug crimes. The DEA along takes about $500 million a year in this way, and state, country & municipal departments take even more.

No, it isn't. You are misinformed about the tawdry reality of asset seizure in the United States. If the police take assets from you, you might think you get them back unless you're convicted of a crime. Far from it: you must prove the innocence of your seized assets to get them back, and good luck with that. That this exists at all is a scandal and a moral hazard. Seizure should be strictly temporary until a convict…

A flaw in the legal process to easy & rapidly return assets to those found innocent does not make all seizures theft. Neither does the moral hazard of having assets retained by local jurisdictions. An abuse of a law simply does not make all uses of that law abuse.

Re: Apple’s head of security indicted in Santa Clara County CCW case

#372

Post by btilly »

ineedasername wrote: post #311
SrslyJosh wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Police are responsible for more theft in the United States (through "asset forfeiture") than "real" criminals.

Calling it theft is a very far stretch. I know there are stories of police abusing this & taking cash of people in random traffic stops: That's theft. But a huge portion of asset seizures are forfeits from drug crimes. The DEA along takes about $500 million a year in this way, and state, country & municipal departments take even more.

It is absolutely not a far stretch.

Let's take one example. If the TSA finds more than $10k on you while you are traveling, unless you have proper paperwork, it is ASSUMED to be drug money and gets seized. Most people have no idea that they need this paperwork, and finding out how to fill it out is non-trivial.

From 2000, to 2016, about $2 billion was seized in this way. In an independent audit, in over half of cases the action started and ended with the seizure. In less than 1/3 was anyone arrested. Arrests drop to less than 1/10 if you eliminate arrests for the crime of failing to fill out the paperwork for the money seized. (I am willing to bet that most of those arrests are because people react badly to seeing their life savings taken from them. Cause a scene, get arrested.)

If you go to how many actually were charged with a crime, the figure drops to 0.3%. In other words in 99.7% of cases where the TSA took someone's money, nobody ever found evidence that they money was linked to a crime. (It was still not returned though.)

Now the police will tell you that they are seizing drug money. However anecdotally, they mostly are not. And the fact that they are not even trying to charge people indicates to me that they really KNOW that they are not.

But guess where the money goes? That's right, directly to the agency that seized it! (This varies for local police by state.)

If your budget is filled with money confiscated from people who you have no evidence were involved with a crime, that's theft and you should know it. But their lawyers say that they can do it, so they continue to take people's life savings on little pretext.

Re: Apple’s head of security indicted in Santa Clara County CCW case

#373

Post by geofft »

ineedasername wrote: post #316
gruez wrote: post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>In 2014, $4.5B of property was legally seized via civil asset forfeiture, and $3.9B of property was burgled. But that's a weaker claim than the original, which argued 'Police are responsible for more theft in the United States (through "asset forfeiture") than "real" criminals', which I interpret to mean all thefts, rather than just burglary (a subset of '"real" criminals'). The former seems to be around 12B a year,…

And calling asset forfeiture "theft" is quite an extreme interpretation when it's mostly legitimate seizures from criminal enterprises (especially the drug trade).

It's only "legitimate" because there's a law saying they can do it. It's the removal of property without due process. I'm not on team "taxation is theft," but if this isn't theft, private property doesn't exist.

(I'd be totally okay with seizing property from convicted criminal enterprises with due process. Excusing this because it happens to mostly affect people who turn out to have been criminals seems about as defensible in my mind as excusing vigilantes who happen to be mostly accurate.)

Re: Apple’s head of security indicted in Santa Clara County CCW case

#374

Post by zests »

iaw wrote: post #297
baryphonic wrote: post #249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Can't believe all the Apple apologists here. Bribing public officials is a crime, period. Apple or no Apple, no one in America should be deprived of their Constitutional rights. I'm more concerned that authoritarian states like California can get away with depriving the people of our explicit rights under American law than I am with people paying bribes just to exercise those rights.

California has the most stringent gun laws but also the a lowest gun violence death rate per capita. More people were allowed to pursue the "life" option in the Declaration of Independence. The first item of unalienable rights our forefathers stated all people had. What do you do when two rights directly infringe upon eachother?

The lowest? I checked wikipedia and was able to find that Arizona had a 30% lower rate in 2016 and is a "shall issue" state.

Re: Apple’s head of security indicted in Santa Clara County CCW case

#375

Post by rkt88edmo »

Swizec wrote: post #174
wolco2 wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's probably one of the craziest things I've heard. Never commit a crime to look a certain way because it won't look that way tomorrow. The police could be trapping you. If not they now have dirt on you. How in the world can you explain that to a judge if it came to that?

When a person with a gun says do something, you do it. Especially if said person is an LEO in a country famous for above-the-law LEOs. Principles are easy to have from the safety of a keyboard. How many of us would keep them in a real world situation?

There was zero threat to get the payment. There are certain counties and sheriff's where campaign contributions are one of the main routes towards obtaining a permit. No one is getting pressured by threat of force to do this. This is not a new game in CA. Other's have been called out for it.

Re: Apple’s head of security indicted in Santa Clara County CCW case

#376

Post by [deleted] »

jbuzbee wrote: post #283
brendoelfrendo wrote: post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is illegal according to US law. At my company, we are explicitly taught the opposite: paying "facilitation fees" is prohibited and illegal and that the employer will fire you and throw you under the bus if they find out you did so. They explicitly mention that this is not allowed even if it is the norm in the country in which you are doing business.

There's a difference between a bribe to win a contract or similar vs. the case where you feel in danger - e.g. you come across a roadblock in rural Mexico and an armed official wants a "clear up your paperwork" payoff to let you pass. That's the scenario the training covers.

[deleted]

Re: Apple’s head of security indicted in Santa Clara County CCW case

#377

Post by newacct583 »

paxys wrote: post #98

Can't believe all the Apple apologists here. Bribing public officials is a crime, period. It isn't an "unfortunate situation" or anything else that people are calling it. It also doesn't matter who initiated the bribe. The employee, and potentially the company itself, absolutely need to be charged and prosecuted for it.

> Can't believe all the Apple apologists here. Bribing public officials is a crime, period.

This is absolutely true. Soliciting a bribe, as a public official, however, is a much (much!) worse crime. And that seems to be what happened here.

Absent more detail, I think I'm willing to buy that Moyer was just a normal corporate executive faced with trying to work around a corrupt bureaucracy. But yeah, more detail could change that.

Re: Apple’s head of security indicted in Santa Clara County CCW case

#378

Post by giantg2 »

Spooky23 wrote: post #344
hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #285

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed, this makes 0 sense to me. There should be an explicit list of reasons for which police should be able to deny these permits, and the police should have to show their evidence as to why they believe one of these reasons apply.

The problem with this is pretty obvious. When some scumbag like a pimp or similar without a conviction goes for a permit, you end up in a situation where the police are enabling certain types of undesirable behavior. IMO, discretion for this sort of thing should be with a judge, not a cop.

How are they enabling undesirable behavior? Wouldn't the behavior occur anyways? Most people would be stupid to create a paper trail for themselves if they plan to use a weapon in a crime. Hence the reason close to 50% of guns recovered from a crime were stolen.

How would a judge or a cop have any impact on a situation without a conviction? They wouldn't know any better without additional data.

Re: Apple’s head of security indicted in Santa Clara County CCW case

#379

Post by flowerlad »

paxys wrote: post #98

Can't believe all the Apple apologists here. Bribing public officials is a crime, period. It isn't an "unfortunate situation" or anything else that people are calling it. It also doesn't matter who initiated the bribe. The employee, and potentially the company itself, absolutely need to be charged and prosecuted for it.

> Bribing public officials is a crime, period.

In some countries, seeking bribes is a crime, but giving in to a demand for bribe is not. That seems fairer. When you became a public official you agreed to perform your job dutifully. If a public official refuses to perform his job unless a citizen provides him with a bribe, then it seems like the citizen was forced into bribery by the public official. How is it then fair to hold the hapless citizen responsible for the crime?

Re: Apple’s head of security indicted in Santa Clara County CCW case

#380

Post by newacct583 »

crx07 wrote: post #354
brendoelfrendo wrote: post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is illegal according to US law. At my company, we are explicitly taught the opposite: paying "facilitation fees" is prohibited and illegal and that the employer will fire you and throw you under the bus if they find out you did so. They explicitly mention that this is not allowed even if it is the norm in the country in which you are doing business.

I have never heard of a major company that didn't advise its employees to pay bribes abroad. Whether it's legal or illegal is almost aside the point, someone can choose between either breaking some arcane, unenforced US law, or potentially spending months/years in some hellhole of a third-world jail or prison while the Embassy slowly negotiates a release. And in some places, that's assuming someone doesn't just "disa…

> I have never heard of a major company that didn't advise its employees to pay bribes abroad.

That would be conspiracy. No, absolutely this does not happen. Now, at the micro level it does happen that individual executives rope their employees in to fraud at their direction. But absoutely no "company" anywhere "advises" its employees to pay bribes as a matter of policy.

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