USPS Logs All Snail Mail For Law Enforcement 324
The NY Times reports on a program in use by the United States Postal Service that photographs the exterior of every piece of mail going through the system and keeps it for law enforcement agencies. While the volume of snail mail is dropping, there were still over 160 billion pieces of mail last year. "The Mail Isolation Control and Tracking program was created after the anthrax attacks in late 2001 that killed five people, including two postal workers. Highly secret, it seeped into public view last month when the F.B.I. cited it in its investigation of ricin-laced letters sent to President Obama and Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg. It enables the Postal Service to retroactively track mail correspondence at the request of law enforcement. No one disputes that it is sweeping." This is in addition to the "mail covers" program, which has been used to keep tabs on mailings sent to and from suspicious individuals for over a century. "For mail cover requests, law enforcement agencies simply submit a letter to the Postal Service, which can grant or deny a request without judicial review. Law enforcement officials say the Postal Service rarely denies a request. In other government surveillance program, such as wiretaps, a federal judge must sign off on the requests. The mail cover surveillance requests are granted for about 30 days, and can be extended for up to 120 days. There are two kinds of mail covers: those related to criminal activity and those requested to protect national security. The criminal activity requests average 15,000 to 20,000 per year, said law enforcement officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they are prohibited by law from discussing the requests. The number of requests for antiterrorism mail covers has not been made public."
They take photos? (Score:3, Interesting)
As long as it's only the exterior of the boxes, I don't care.
As long as they don't X-ray packages (could damage sensitive electronics, perhaps?), I don't care.
As long as they don't open up the packages (sensitive electronics and static discharges don't mix), I don't care.
They can take photos of the boxes from my eBay wins, I don't care.
Re:They take photos? (Score:2, Interesting)
What about the Silk road? (Score:2, Interesting)
I ordered some legal products from a person who were busted selling illegal products.
Vendors do not use new addresses for every single piece of mail that goes out because the addresses have to be legit. They have OCR software running on the photos being taken.
For months after that, my mail was regularly opened. I complained repeatedly but my USPS, UPS, and Fedex packages were all pilfered. Nothing was ever taken. Most notably was a laptop case I ordered that was completely and obviously removed from the packaging and examined inside and out, only to be returned and left at my door. They didn't even bother to retape it.
Living with liberty isn't work losing all liberty to a corrupt system of laws. Stop violating laws. If you are concerned with private information being public, such as the talk about penis pumps, sex toys, and all other manor of stuff, then stop shipping through the mail. Stop ordering online. Stop thinking anything you do isn't being watched, because it is. Live like you know you are being watched or expect to be "shocked" when you find this out again.
BTW, this has been well known for over a year in the SR community. This is old news.
Re:Sigh (Score:4, Interesting)
I'm wondering why there are still any unsolved major crimes. The government has access almost all of your communications. And if you have a cell phone they have a record of where that cell phone travels.
If all of this is to fight "terrorism" then why haven't we also wiped out kidnapping, drug gangs, organized crime and such?
If this worked, the USofA should be virtually crime free.
I'm not surprised... (Score:5, Interesting)
I write a lot of snail mail. I correspond with people in jails and prisons which usually requires me to use snail mail. Furthermore, I've maintained a long correspondence with a friend. I have his e-mail address and his phone number but we choose to keep our communication limited mostly to paper letters, usually written by hand. I write mine with a fountain pen!
When I learned of the NSA's snooping I was comforted somewhat by the fact that my most private confidential communications goes through the U.S. Postal Service and is not subject to this. Well, I guess not! The supermarket (and the bank) knows what I buy when I use a credit card to pay for it. The various cities and states know where I drive because of cameras. The cops now are installing license plate recognition cameras to record license numbers. Facial recognition software makes it difficult for me to go anywhere anonymously even on foot. Verizon Wireless knows where I am because I keep my phone on most of the time. I'm waiting to have an RFID tag implanted in my forehead!
Pretty soon we're going to be living in a country like the old DDR (that's East Germany to those too young to remember the Cold War) and a spying apparatus like its Stasi. Watch "Das Leben der Altern" (The Lives of Others), a German film of a few years ago to give you an idea of just how invasive this spying became. And this movie is set in 1984. It's much easier now!
Re:Sigh (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Sigh (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:I'm not surprised... (Score:4, Interesting)
There's a Youtube video of an interview with an ex-Stasi officer about modern surveillance technology: We've long surpassed the pervasiveness of government surveillance that earned East Germany its reputation.
the current in the west surveillance has gone above it in one good way though, it's not so personal. it's not your neighbor who is watching you, but some dude in another state contracted for it. that's actually better from the sense that they don't gather as clear picture about you as a real person and more importantly don't have personal relations reasons to bully you(screw up your date because they're lusting after the same piece of hot ass) - but it's more pointless.
even with all this surveillance they still can't crack down on mail delivery drugs in the USA though, kinda ridiculous.
What about commercial use of the data? (Score:4, Interesting)
If this is legal, and it seems everyone is saying that it is, then why stop at criminal investigations? Think about it, this kind of data is a treasure trove of valuable commercial information. With this data they can determine who writes to who and how often, where a given person shops by mail order and sometimes exactly what they're buying, which utilities are billing us, what offers we respond to, it's likely even one's political leanings could be deduced given a deep enough study of the data. The postal service could solve all their financial woes if they just decided to market this stuff, it's a gold mine! And who could possibly object? It's just metadata, after all, stuff that's right there in plain sight, perfectly legal to examine. All kinds of possibilities open up, as we blindly skip on down that old proverbial slippery slope...
And that's the problem with allowing this type of data collection. The outside of each individual piece of mail might seem harmless enough, but put it all together in a searchable database, one that's cross-linked to other, similar databases, and voila! All kinds of information that was previously assumed to be private suddenly becomes easily available. We really do need legislation on when and how these types of databases can be used, and by whom. The law enforcement aspect is just the beginning, people need to realize just how much private information is hidden in, and easily retrievable from, these big aggregations of "public" data. The ability to run highly refined computer searches on a dataset changes all the presumptions about what is and what isn't private. If we don't put some limits on this type of data collection soon, privacy as we have traditionally known it will be a thing of the past. Perhaps it already is.