Right, the legislator is referring to civil asset forfeiture, which is what the devices in the OP's article does too--just now they will steal money from your bank account if you happen to have your debit card with you instead of just being able to steal the cash you have in the car.

not bank accounts, not debit cards. I'm sure the police would like to plunder that too, but that's not what this technology does.

Edit: After feedback, I deleted my snarky comment, which I wrote based on misunderstanding the use of "plain-old".

>99.999% of everyone who knows what asset forfeiture is knows it because of John Oliver.

Asset forfeiture has been controversial since it started being used much more frequently in the 1980s. I really doubt most of the people commenting on it here first heard of it on John Oliver's show.

Haha, indeed. I think I'd heard of it many years ago, but I didn't really understand how fucking absurd it is until a story about it appeared here on HN. A year (~ish/maybe, my memory of timelines is fucking terrible) later I saw the John Oliver episode.

Radley Balko has been writing about asset forfeiture for about a decade. He has done more to bring this issue to the medias attention than John Oliver has. It is completely unfair to claim that no one knew what was going until someone famous began to popularize it more.

Not that there is anything wrong with John Oliver hopping on the band wagon, that's good thing.

Slow down there. First of all, the parent didn't claim to be a genius who had some pre-existing knowledge. Secondly, even if (s)he learned it from John Oliver, how does that make it less a part of parent's knowledge?

Furthermore, the use of "plain-old" was a way of indicating that this is a new method but an old process; eg, it's not legally any different from normal asset seizure.

Finally, and most importantly, I don't see any bias or why you even call it that.