From civil forfeiture to No fly lists and warrantless snopping , the massive power grabs once touted as a necessary means of fighting the war on drugs and the war on terror are being turned against political dissidents. Invariably, proponents of such measures claim to be combating domestic extremism while being extremists themselves. What is more extreme than demanding your enemies be kicked off the internet and stripped of life, liberty and property without due process? What is more extreme than demanding that no one question the official lefty media narrative on issues as paramount as crime, immigration and the pharmaceutical industrial complex?
The Federal Bureau of Fishing Expeditions raided Fuentes' bank account and stole $500,000, half of which a now deceased French programmer donated to him in bitcoin, based on dubious allegations that the money was linked to the J6 protest or used for some other illicit purpose. Fuentes himself was never charged with any crime connected to the J6 protest nor was the French computer programmer who donated 13.5 Bitcoin to him, yet thanks to executive police powers created to fight the war on drugs and war on terror, the Feds can wipe out your savings and destroy your livelihood on mere suspicion of criminal activity. Civil forfeiture itself is based on the Medieval superstition Deodand, forfeiting ‘tainted’ property and possessions up to God, and is more often used to confiscate the assets of small cash based businesses than actual drug dealers and terrorists. In 80% of civil forfeiture cases the property owner is never charged with a crime and instead stands accused of something like structuring (i.e. making multiple deposits under $10,000), having a lot of cash on hand when detained by police or merely being associated with someone who was charged with a crime. In Fuentes’ case mere association with people arrested at the Capitol on January 6th was a sufficient reason to take his savings because the Feds no longer operate under our constitutional principle of innocent until proven guilty but the Stalinist edict show me the man and I’ll show you the crime. Under the same ill conceived war on terror concessions, Fuentes has been denied the liberty to fly through another secretive process that makes decisions he has no means of appealing and which anyone can end up on through either clerical error, being associated with the wrong people or straying outside the Overton window.
In 2014, a major investigation based on leaked documents was published by The Intercept shedding light on how the terrorist watchlist was constructed. A 166-page document titled “March 2013 Watchlisting Guidance,” exposed a covert program that blacklisted large numbers of people based on unchallengeable secret criteria. The watchlisting guidance revealed the levels of “derogatory information” that could lead to someone winding up on the list, exposing an opaque system with few checks and balances that was ripe for abuse. It was easy to get yourself on the list and suffer its consequences, but very difficult to know how to clear your name if you were actually innocent.
The DHS uses “reasonable suspicion” to determine who meets their criteria and like civil forfeiture does not require the suspect be charged with a crime because mere association or sympathy with individuals or groups suspected of terrorism or labeled terrorists is enough to be deprived of liberty. Adding individuals to watch lists and no fly lists relies solely on the internal process of the department with no judicial oversight. It is one thing to prevent foreign nationals linked to Al Qaeda or Narcotics trafficking from entering the U.S., but it is an entirely different matter to deprive U.S. citizens of their 5th and 6th amendment rights and prevent them from traveling internally within their own country. Imagine if DMVs automatically suspended the driver’s licenses of people suspected of speeding and running red lights, and the criteria wasn’t even based on footage from red light and speed cameras, which have been ruled unconstitutional in several states, but on reasonable suspicion that you are associated with people who speed and run red lights, own a sports car or turbocharged truck or have yourself done so in the past. The uproar would be immediate and deafening as very few people would be allowed to drive. The same agitation against putting American citizens on no fly lists is absent only because the number of targeted individuals is fewer. Instead of giving Americans their day in court, the feds are playing six degrees of Kevin Bacon with people’s lives.