From USA Today, DEA regularly mines Americans’ travel records to seize millions in cash:
Federal drug agents regularly mine Americans’ travel information to profile people who might be ferrying money for narcotics traffickers — though they almost never use what they learn to make arrests or build criminal cases.
Instead, that targeting has helped the Drug Enforcement Administration seize a small fortune in cash.
…
It is a lucrative endeavor, and one that remains largely unknown outside the drug agency. DEA units assigned to patrol 15 of the nation’s busiest airports seized more than $209 million in cash from at least 5,200 people over the past decade
…
current and former agents said, when it came to intercepting individual passengers, the goal was usually to find cash.
“We want the cash. Good agents chase cash,” said George Hood, who supervised a drug task force assigned to O’Hare International Airport in Chicago before he retired in 2007.
I’m remained of what I read in The Gulag Archipelago, Volume 2: An Experiment in Literary Investigation, 1918-1956 and commented on:
in the USSR the political leaders openly wrote about how the thieves “were allies in the building of communism”. This was because they were the enemy of those who owned property.
The more I follow and experience current events, the more parallels I see with the same book, as well as 1984 and anything by Kafka. Scary.
It reminds me of a carton I saw recently, a play on an old joke. “Those that do not study history are doomed to repeat it. Those of us that DO study history are doomed to watch all those around us that didn’t study history repeat it.”
Or, “those of us who DO study history are doomed to be dragged through it all again by those who didn’t study history and insist over our objections that ‘this time it will be different’.”
The average dollar amount seized is about $41k per person, which ain’t much.
I’m guessing there are a lot of seizures of amounts just over the legal-to-carry-out-of-country cash limit ($10k?) or even under it, taken from suspected “drug mules” at airports, and a handful of multimillion dollar, actual drug-related seizures of boxes of cash. And in the world of illegal drug shipments to the US, isn’t $209,000,000 over 10 years essentially a very small rounding error?
What is the estimated amount spent over the past decade by drug cartels on bribes to get drugs into the US? “In a 2010 speech, Mexico’s secretary of public security said that the cartels combined spend more than $1 billion each year just to bribe the (Mexican) municipal police.”
The cash seizures noted in this article are small potatoes, stolen by small time grifters in the government. The point of the post is valid, but of greater concern is that someone like Hillary can take millions for preferential treatment by government regarding billions of federal dollars, and get away with it..