This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Wednesday, July 30th, 2014.

I'm Caleb Brown.

Civil Asset forfeiture is the government seizure of property in cases where it may not even be clear that any crime has been committed.

Local agencies often use federal forfeiture to profit directly.

It turns innocent until proven guilty on its head, but there is renewed interest in reform.

The Institute for Justice has now launched End Forfeiture.com.

Scott Bullock, senior attorney at IJ offers his thoughts.

There has been recently this renewed interest in asset forfeiture, particularly civil asset

forfeiture to be separated from criminal asset forfeiture.

What has spurred that?

I think a lot of things.

One is just the constant stream of abuses

that are going on.

And those have been documented in reports that we at the

Institute for Justice have issued. There's been numerous news accounts that

have shown that and have told the stories of property owners whose cash and

cars and homes and businesses that have been seized even though they themselves have had

no involvement in criminal activity.

The New Yorker piece that was published last year also pushed the issue into what could be called the elite media circles and got some attention from there.

And it's something that desperately needs to be addressed.

So one of the key problems that we've talked about before and is in the news quite a bit actually

is how the federal government allows individual police agencies to effectively circumvent state law with regard to forfeiture

...