How are anti-money-laundering laws that require that treatment constitutional? Didn't https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coffin_v._United_States establish innocent-until-proven-guilty? Isn't this at least as bad as civil forfeiture?

Financial restrictions are not the same as incarceration.

And you can be held in jail before a trial anyway, so the comparison just isn't relevant.

No argument to your larger point though: freezing funds can be devastating and applied carelessly!

They’re not, but unconstitutional law can exist and even become precedent for decades before a court with the stones comes along to overturn it.

Both this and CAF violate basic constitutional pillars like not depriving you of life/liberty/assets without due process.

Deprivation of access to property is not quite the same as deprivation of property.

And there is plenty of legal precedent (and justification) for freezing funds in advance of charging.

This line of argument is a dead end.

In the context of banking, I would call it at least a dirty-trick. If you're saying "How can you pay a lawyer if you cannot...speak???", then you're not the good-guy.

The contextual assertion is that the frozen funds were obtained by non-lawful process.

Allowing access to those funds for your defense is not automatic.

Sometimes a judge will partially ease restrictions. And of course a lawyer will be provided for you. :-/

It's reasonable on the surface of things, but mistakes can be devastating. The US legal system often fails to handle the "mistake" case well, despite some intended protections.

The US legal system doesn't care very much if it's those specific dollars or other dollars that have a dirty history. If, God forbid, I'm ever arrested for something, I don't trust those "intended protections" very much.

Nonsense. Depriving you of access to your property indefinitely is no different than depriving you entirely.

The government is welcome to charge and deprive, then provide a speedy trial to that end.

That’s not what is happening though and you know it, they know it, their collaborators know it. Everyone involved here deserves jail time, and in a just world they will see it.

"We can't allow normal constitutional rights because racketeers are too smart. Also, everyone is a racketeer."

Note that this is a corporation not releasing funds, not the government so the constitution doesn’t apply. In this case it would be the terms of service which likely calls out this as a possibility.

But the constitution applies to the law and the law applies to the company. They can't do whatever they want just because they aren't the government.

The government (FBI, HSI, DEA, Treasury) wants to do all of this but can't because of the great constitutional liberties we have in this country. So they decided to outsource all this enforcement to financial institutions (https://www.law.cornell.edu/cfr/text/12/21.11#k). And when financial institutions in the past weren't as arbitrary and capricious in enforcing the vague government's vague rules as the government liked they fined them hundreds of millions of dollars. So now everyone is like Paypal and apparently this is supposed to be a good thing.

Read enforcement actions by the government. There will be a financial institution with tens or hundreds of thousands of customers and the government will use them failing to find three suspicious customers as a basis for enormous fines (https://www.fincen.gov/sites/default/files/enforcement_actio... is a good example). Another thing you'll find if you read enforcement actions is that the government barely even cares what was illegal or not - they fine institutions for not reporting "suspicious" activity (without themselves investigating whether it was legal or not).

I think what comes to people as a surprise is that the government, by default, considers any activity that it, the government, is not doing to be suspicious. The government, as entity, functions to extend its reach and not to serve citizens. This is by design.

The government could care less if you lost access to your money if it means they have more control over the financial system. The tiniest gain of control is worth it for the bureaucracy even if it means locking hundreds of thousands of people out of their savings.

Unfortunately that is often the case.

The question that naturally comes to my mind is, shouldn't corporations who are acting on behalf of government be bound by the same rules as government.

> Note that this is a corporation not releasing funds, not the government so the constitution doesn’t apply.

You'd be right if corporations decided to do that on their own, but the anti-money-laundering law says that corporations have to do that.