Privacy

Again, I would say that should depend on statistics.

Certainly that is a recipe for marginalizing minorities. In the US there is a principle that people are innocent until proven guilty. We could flip that and say guilty until proven innocent, but we don’t because we rightfully prioritize the well being of non-criminals above prosecution of criminals. It is unacceptible to say we can harm some non-criminals in pursuit of making it more convenient for cops to do their job. It’s better to overlook 10 criminals than to harm 1 innocent person. It’s not okay to sacrifice non-criminals for the sake of law enforcement.

Isn’t that the case for many preventive security measures? I mean the baggage checks at the airport are time consuming and restrict everyone on bringing liquids, large batteries, forks, knives etc. into the plane.

Passengers are rightfully allowed to bring knives and guns onto a plane, so long as it is in their checked luggage. This does not materially hinder people’s options. You don’t need a weapon when all potential attackers are also disarmed. But you still have a right to take your weapon to your destination, and rightfully so.

To equate a FedEx cash search with shipping batteries in a dangerous way with a precious payload (human lives) is an absurdity. If someone wants to commit suicide there are many better ways to do so than to carry a battery 10,000 feet up and then have it set fire on your vessel. You are not really materially hindering someone’s personal way of life by taking away the option kill themselves and others during a flight.

The passengers who share the plane with someone who wants to transport dangerous materials that compromise their safety directly mutually benefit from safety checks.

At the same time, if the person flying next to me carries a bit of cocaine, then no I do not benefit from a cocaine search and oppose it because it’s a violation of 4th amendment rights (if carried out by TSA). Such a search is looking for a crime against the state, not a crime against the person who sits next to a cocaine user. It’s extra perverse when non-criminals lives are hindered in an effort to enforce crimes against the state and victimless crimes.

Same with routine controls at a border or on the highway. It’s annoying for many people due to delays just to catch some few smugglers, overloaded trucks etc.

This is a good example of harm coming to non-criminals in the hunt for criminals. They violate everyone’s 4th amendment rights to go on a fishing expedition because the cops are too lazy to get a warrant and properly do a targeted search of suspects.

A security camera in a bank will film thousands of regular customers before it ever (if at all) gets to see a robbery.

That’s private sector. I give less of a shit about that because a bank has a right to secure their premises however they see appropriate in their business model, and as a consumer I have a choice whether or not to use a bank. If I don’t like the way they operate, I can opt-out, (unlike Europe where you now have forced banking).

Law enforcement by definition deals with suspects not convicted criminals.

No we are not dealing with suspects. Indiana is performing a general search without a suspect and without a warrant. If Indiana were to say to FedEx “we have a warrant to search pkgs to and from Bill Harvey at address X, please set aside those packages for us to search”, and then the sniffer dogs were used only on Bill Harvey’s payloads, that would be dealing with suspects and I would not object to seizing those pkgs. But still likely dubious for the police to simply pocket the money, rather than tag it and put it in the evidence room.

But wouldn’t the alternative be even worse for you from a privacy perspective? They keep the practice of scanning packages but rather than seizing the money, they send investigators after the intended recipient. That wouldn’t only dramatically increase the costs of law enforcement but also lead to innocents being supervised.

First of all, whether or not to inform the customer that their pkg was flagged is not obviated by the decision to not confiscate. Some TSA workers will search a bag and insert a tag. When you arrive at your destination you might open up your luggage and see a tag that essentially says “TSA was here”. Apart from whether the search was appropriate in the first place, the transparency is proper when the target is vindicated. They found nothing, but they owe it to the subject to be transparent.

Non-criminals rightfully have an expectation of privacy under the 4th amendment. Criminals do not, as it is 4th amendment compliant to search when there is just cause to do so. They should not be searching pkgs of non-suspects in the first place, but if they do and they find no actionable evidence of crime they absolutely should be doing what TSA does and they should do so without keeping the person’s possessions. If it’s a business transaction that includes indications of taxability, and they can also see no history of tax declarations that exceed electronic revenue (or whatever clues are justifiable as cause for action such as past offenses), then the police should be competent in their trade, which is to get convictions, which implies not tipping off the criminal suspect.

Under the status quo, the police are both tipping off criminals and also creating victims out of non-criminals.

Not all money transfers are taxable income. So if police knows that you received 10,000 in a box last year but didn’t declare it that doesn’t automatically mean you invaded taxes.

Of course. If the metadata (sender & recipient + their criminal records) and other items in the package do not suggest that it’s a taxable transaction, they have no cause to treat the pkg as suspect. In this case, they should not have searched it in the first place but on top of that there is no cause for further action either.

Furthermore, the recipient on the label may not be real person.

This would be cause for suspicion of a crime. But Indiana is not limiting their action to pkgs that give cause for suspicion.

In a drug case, indeed you cannot assume the parties on the pkg are accurate. Someone once received a package of mj. Police staked out the house, saw him accept the pkg, waited breifly, then stormed into the house. The pkg was left inside the door, unopened. The recipient argued that he was not expecting the pkg and did not know what was in it. He rightfully won that case. The mistake the cops made was to raid before he opened it. He needed time to open it and then react by calling the police.

Confiscating the evidence before the pkg even reaches the destination is terrible police work. That is not how you enforce crime. It only creates victims from non-criminals.