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US Post Office Increases Secret Tracking of Mail 112

HughPickens.com writes: Ron Nixon reports in the NY Times that the United States Postal Service says it approved nearly 50,000 requests last year from law enforcement agencies and its own internal inspection unit to secretly monitor the mail of Americans for use in criminal and national security investigations, in many cases without adequately describing the reason or having proper written authorization. In addition to raising privacy concerns, the audit questioned the efficiency and accuracy of the Postal Service in handling the requests. The surveillance program, officially called mail covers, is more than a century old, but is still considered a powerful investigative tool. The Postal Service said that from 2001 through 2012, local, state and federal law enforcement agencies made more than 100,000 requests to monitor the mail of Americans. That would amount to an average of some 8,000 requests a year — far fewer than the nearly 50,000 requests in 2013 that the Postal Service reported in the audit (PDF).

In Arizona in 2011, Mary Rose Wilcox, a Maricopa County supervisor, discovered that her mail was being monitored by the county's sheriff, Joe Arpaio. Wilcox had been a frequent critic of Arpaio, objecting to what she considered the targeting of Hispanics in his immigration sweeps. Wilcox sued the county, was awarded nearly $1 million in a settlement in 2011 and received the money this June when the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals upheld the ruling. Andrew Thomas, the former county attorney, was disbarred for his role in investigations into the business dealings of Ms. Wilcox and other officials and for other unprofessional conduct. "I don't blame the Postal Service," says Wilcox, "but you shouldn't be able to just use these mail covers to go on a fishing expedition. There needs to be more control."
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US Post Office Increases Secret Tracking of Mail

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  • by turkeydance ( 1266624 ) on Tuesday October 28, 2014 @06:26PM (#48256515)
    Tuddy (Frank DiLeo): "You know this kid?" Mailman: "Yeah." Tuddy: "You know where he lives?" Mailman: "Yeah." Tuddy: "You deliver mail to his house?" Mailman: "Yeah." Tuddy: "Well, from now on, any letter from that school to that kid's house comes directly here. You understand?" Mailman: "Yeah." Tuddy: "Another letter from that school goes to that kid's house, in the bleeping oven you're gonna go, head first." Henry: "That was it. No more letters from truant officers. No more letters from school. In fact, no more letters from anybody. Finally after a couple of weeks, my mother went to the post office and complain."
    • by MightyMartian ( 840721 ) on Tuesday October 28, 2014 @06:35PM (#48256557) Journal

      Arpaio pretty much is a gangster.

      • by Anonymous Coward

        Yeah, but he's a right wing gangster, so you won't hear Republicans screaming about it like they do with the IRS.

      • by mythosaz ( 572040 ) on Tuesday October 28, 2014 @07:10PM (#48256827)

        Arpaio is pretty much regarded out here as as the devil we know.

        You can cross the line all you want in Arizona, but as long as you're America's Toughest Sheriff, you can be reelected forever. He's tough on pretty much every hot-button issue out here. Immigration, animal abuse, deadbeat dads, you name it. We elected him 50-46 this time, his closest race ever, I believe, in his 22 years as Maricopa County's sheriff.

        As a young man, I spend a week or two in Tent City when it first came into existence ('93). It sucked, but it didn't suck nearly as much as the temporary loss of freedom for being jailed.

        When discussing him once before, someone posted some fairly awful stats for crime in MCSO jurisdiction. For those people not in Phoenix, the MCSO runs our county jails, but only provides policing for rural areas and unincorporated areas of town, which are, generally speaking, shitholes. If you see MCSO officers on Cops, rest assured they're in an armpit or asshole of Phoenix metro. Laveen and Guadalupe spring to mind. :( They also service a few county islands between cities along the river bottom, but that's a tiny fraction of their service area.

        Arpaio is no doubt a dick, but he wears a target too, since he makes an easy punching bag for the left.

        • Re: (Score:2, Funny)

          curious - when you say he's tough on animal abuse, does that mean he ruthlessly goes after animal abusers or he likes to kick puppies on the way to work?

          • The MCSO has an Animal Crimes Investigation Unit. As much as I wish that were the name of a new show on CBS, it's not :/

            http://www.mcso.org/Mash/Anima... [mcso.org]

            The MCSO:ACIU has "real" police staff, but is supplemented by posse members -- volunteer deputies, who do MCSO "easy lifting" like traffic control, mall parking lot patrols, and serving court orders to nonviolent offenders and deadbeat dads.

            It's still important to remember that the MCSO "..has the responsibility of providing basic patrol, investigative and

            • does it just do animal crimes or is it a catch all for sherriff joe to go after anybody he wants? dig up more illegals and put them in pink underwear?

          • by ShaunC ( 203807 )

            Well there was that time that Sheriff Joe and Steven Seagal partnered up to bust a cockfighting ring [forbes.com], except when they drove a tank into the guy's house, they killed a puppy and reportedly some of the chickens they were trying to save...

          • And when you say he's tough on deadbeat dads, does that mean he throws them in jail for missing a payment even if they're in the hospital or unemployed like they do in the progressive paradise of New Jersey?
        • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

          by zaft ( 597194 )
          Funny, except for all those sex crimes that he left uninvestigated. http://www.azcentral.com/news/... [azcentral.com] He is big on every hot-button issue that can get him elected whether it's part of his role (actual crime) or not (immigration). He is a grandstander with an ego the size of Montana.
        • by whoever57 ( 658626 ) on Tuesday October 28, 2014 @10:36PM (#48257875) Journal

          Arpaio is pretty much regarded out here as as the devil we know.

          If you are from Arizona, just don't complain about all the times the county has had to pay out compensation for something he or his office has done. It's an elected office and people continue to elect him.

          When discussing him once before, someone posted some fairly awful stats for crime in MCSO jurisdiction.

          Perhaps that is because the sheriff is not very good at his job. Yeah, he is great at grandstanding. It doesn't sound like he is great at actually making Maricopa County a better place. Perhaps the reason that those places are shitholes is because Arpaio has been sheriff for 22 years.....

          • I doubt it. Those places (like Guadalupe) are shitholes because they're poor. Places that are wealthy usually incorporate themselves into cities/towns, and hire their own police force instead of relying on the county police. And since they're wealthier, they can afford to spend more on policing. The county police aren't as well funded as city police, and worse, they have to cover a lot more ground since their jurisdiction is a bunch of separate zones all far away from each other.

            • BTW, as I remember it, Guadalupe actually had their own police force for a short time, but it was so corrupt the town disbanded it and went back to having the MCSO provide their police services. That's not the MCSO's fault.

        • He's tough on pretty much every hot-button issue out here. Immigration, animal abuse, deadbeat dads, you name it.

          It's too bad that police discrimination and abuse aren't hot-button issues for Arizonans, who apparently enjoy living in a police state.

  • Wilcox sued the county, was awarded nearly $1 million in a settlement in 2011

    I assume it came out of the salaries of the officials responsible for the mail tracking?

  • We listed the government agencies that do not spy on us in illegal, unconstitutional, and downright wrong ways...

    Peter.

    • department of transportation? wait, RFID car tolls

      department of education? wait, schools are run like prisons

      Food and Drug Administration? Wait, they've made unreasonably expensive standards to get something approved, while at the same time letting dangerous chemicals on the market from large companies.

      Fish and game?
  • Next week's your big chance. Use it or lose it... All these "scandals" have been coming fast &furious. Let's see if it means anything. Clean the House, if you want it to. If not, I got a bucket of tomatoes just waiting for the first complainers.

    • by borcharc ( 56372 ) *

      Obviously we can only clean the house of whatever the opposite side is of our political football team. Our team is really good and they are only involved in minor scandals and they have to be a little crooked to save us from the true evils of the other side. You better vote for your teams guy because the team you mentally associate with is more important than anything else in this world, so be a team player.

    • by silas_moeckel ( 234313 ) <silas AT dsminc-corp DOT com> on Tuesday October 28, 2014 @07:03PM (#48256789) Homepage

      Because you get a choice of the a or b side of bad? The two party system is broken by design to give the illusion of choice.

      • I see more than two parties on the ballot... The voters put those people there. The voters are responsible for the people they vote for, or should be. I'm not going to belabor the point, you are free to stick with the devil you know, just stop passing the blame. It makes you all sound foolish. There is nothing to compel you to vote for people who take the big money you all are always complaining about.

        • Na I vote for who matches my stance on things, that generally means not electable.

          • by ixuzus ( 2418046 )

            This is why I like preferential voting. You get to vote for your preferred candidate and if that person isn't elected your vote still counts toward what you consider the lesser evil. You number your candidates in order of preference. If no candidate gets an absolute majority the candidate with the least primary votes is eliminated and their votes distributed to the next preference and so on until a candidate has an absolute majority.

        • by sconeu ( 64226 )

          Not in California. The politicians f**cked with the "open primary" so that yeah, you can vote for anyone in the primary, but only the two top vote-getters get on the final ballot. Oh, Two Dems made the cut? Sucks for you GOP's or Libertarians, doesn't it?

      • You vote for whatever keeps balance. Like you say, both a and b are bad - so if you keep things even then neither side can implement the full extent of their evil plans.

    • by Lumpy ( 12016 ) on Tuesday October 28, 2014 @07:21PM (#48256903) Homepage

      Problem is there is very few third party candidates.

      Because voting for Republican or democrat is voting for the exact same group of corrupt scumbags.

      • There are plenty of third party canidates, everytime I go vote, there is no shortage.

        I also don't hear any of the juevinile whining, and third grade antics out of any of them either.

        the problem is that we've shut them out.
    • by Lord Apathy ( 584315 ) on Tuesday October 28, 2014 @07:56PM (#48257109)

      Next week's your big chance. Use it or lose it... All these "scandals" have been coming fast &furious. Let's see if it means anything. Clean the House, if you want it to. If not, I got a bucket of tomatoes just waiting for the first complainers.

      How cute. I used to be this way, believe in the system. They only talk about change and doing what is right around election time. Once they get all the votes its back to business as usual. Look at O'bama. Promised change but what we got was pretty much more of the same and then some.

      The system isn't gong to change till elected official can be held legally accountable for the laws they sponsor and vote on. If a elected official could be fined, lose his office, or even be jailed for sponsoring a bill that is later found to be unconstitutional then things would change. When ever the government does something unconstitutional against a citizen, someone should held accountable.

      • How cute. I used to be this way, believe in the system.

        It's not about believing or disbelieving; it's about not giving up no matter what. Giving up will ensure with 100% probability that things stay the way they are. Even if your chances of changing anything are extremely slim, it's still better than giving up or voting for worthless scumbags.

        Promised change but what we got was pretty much more of the same and then some.

        Anyone who did five seconds of research on the policies/laws he supported would have seen he was full of shit. As was Romney, of course.

        When ever the government does something unconstitutional against a citizen, someone should held accountable.

        Getting that to happen would be difficult without enough people.

      • Promised change but what we got was pretty much more of the same and then some.

        Yep, and he got reelected despite all that crap. The voters could have looked for someone to replace him, so screw them for not doing exactly that. Instead they sit and wait for the TV to tell them who to vote for. The system is not going to change and nobody will be held accountable until you vote for somebody that will change it, and if and when you do, all your problems are solved. If you keep reelecting the same old carpetbag

        • I don't believe you understand the full situation. The system is broken as designed. It really donsn't matter which one you vote for, the result is the same. Go back and look at the last 100 years of presidents. Don't look at thier highlights and what the press tells you. Look very deeply and you will see that basically same, with a few minor differences like Nixion and Clinton. The only reason they where held accountable is they where caught with their hands in the cookie jar, or with the smoking ci

          • The system is not broken. It is working exactly as designed, and the people are happily playing along. That is what makes it work. The voters are the enablers. Only they have the power to render every penny spent on political campaigns utterly worthless, simply by tuning out. Attacking the leaders only perpetuates the cycle. You need to address the followers. That is where the actual physical force comes from. And you'll only succeed by appealing to the same natural instincts that the authorities exploit, h

      • O'bama

        I've heard of South African Dutch, but never Kenyan Irish!

    • My option, as always, was to vote for the person who was going to win, or to vote against that person. My district is so gerrymandered as to be meaningless in the general election; the winner was selected in the Republican primary (and the candidate ran unopposed).

    • Next week's your big chance.

      I'm from a bit out of town (country/continent/hemisphere), so pardon my ignorance. But are you telling us that 3-year old stories get dredged up now for the sole purpose of swaying election outcomes?

      • But are you telling us that 3-year old stories get dredged up now for the sole purpose of swaying election outcomes?

        It doesn't matter how old it is. If the problem is ongoing, it should be an issue. But I'm not singling out this story. I'm just saying that if the Americans are interested in rooting out corruption in their house of representatives, this is their big chance to put up or shut up. Even through this thread here I hear nothing but cop outs and excuses, and they're the ones being modded up! I thin

  • J Edgar Hoover (Score:4, Interesting)

    by andydread ( 758754 ) on Tuesday October 28, 2014 @06:56PM (#48256725)
    Seems like Joe Arpaio is the J Edgar Hoover of Arizona. What a piece of work that guy is.
    • by Anonymous Coward

      Seems like Joe Arpaio is the J Edgar Hoover of Arizona. What a piece of work that guy is.

      Take a look at Sheriff Joe's repeat offender business.

      Now compare that to the rest and you quickly see how they rate.

      Give me somebody even half as good in effectiveness and then we can talk about putting a certain Joe in check.

      It's a laugh they deem his prisons "unconstitutional", as if the rest of that fucking document the government cares to follow or uphold.

      • by hey! ( 33014 )

        It works if you select the right statistics. Since 75% of the criminal cases are cleared by the Maricopa sheriff's office without a proper investigation, we really have no idea whether his approach works, or he's just lousy at catching repeat offenders.

  • It's like Wikileaks never happened. Despite the public outrage, despite the revelation that the spying achieved nothing the politicians (so far in Australia and now Canada) have responded with even more spying, plus legal oversight to crush future whistle blowers. Undermining our commercial systems whilst imposing the presumption of guilt on our citizens whilst authorities everywhere say "Papers please".

    This is what our tax dollars are paying for.

    • Why would they? Is someone going to point a gun at their head. They still have their "plausabile deniability".
    • by AHuxley ( 892839 )
      Its all a nice boondoggle. The scanning products, the comparing of names and address to lists of people who need to be watched. Maintenance contracts and new OCR upgrades added.
      Have fun contacting your local journalists with a letter.
      "I've got one that can read and write!"
      Start writing to a lot of the press, thanking for them for their work. Be sure to fill in your large and stylish sender details on the back so the gov database gets it all.
      Increase your own domestic dossier every year. Think back t
  • by chromaexcursion ( 2047080 ) on Tuesday October 28, 2014 @09:19PM (#48257579)
    The former County Lawyer has been disbarred.
    That jackass is financial road kill.
    There is no insurance for this kind of judgement. The county is on the hook. They are worse than broke, since this judgement spans bankruptcy.
    That county is dead. The residence of the county are legally responsible for the debt.
    Their home values are in the dumpster, and paying for the privilege.
    Nice to see the legal system work.
    I'm not being sarcastic, the people that have the most to loose are paying, as it should be, for a change.

    will anyone learn?
    • That county is dead. The residence of the county are legally responsible for the debt.

      Maricopa county has a population of 3.8 million. If a $1 million judgment can destroy their budget they have bigger things to worry about.

      • I should have looked it up. Given the naivete of the sheriff I assumed it was a rural county.
        Having looked it up. Joe Arpaio is likely to have a difficult time when it comes to re-election, if he runs. He has a lot of problems.
  • My dad retired 10 years ago from the USPS. Having grown up listening to the stories of what the people and management were like there, I find any conspiracy theories with USPS being involved (on any level) questionable at best! I'm sure anyone who has ever worked for the government (local/state/federal) would agree. Both the workers and management are either too lazy or too incompetent to tie their shoes.

    • by drinkypoo ( 153816 ) <drink@hyperlogos.org> on Wednesday October 29, 2014 @04:47AM (#48258871) Homepage Journal

      My dad retired 10 years ago from the USPS. Having grown up listening to the stories of what the people and management were like there, I find any conspiracy theories with USPS being involved (on any level) questionable at best!

      It's nice to see you support your dad, but nobody else shares your bias.

      Both the workers and management are either too lazy or too incompetent to tie their shoes.

      Oh, never mind. I thought you were here to support your dad. Is he lazy or incompetent?

      The USPS scans every single piece of mail which passes through a sorting facility. One of those lazy, incompetent postmasters told me (about a month before the revelation that the USPS was handing all this data to the feds) that they simply threw that data away when they were done with it, and that this was the reason that they couldn't give you any information about where your first class mail had been in its lifetime. But in actuality, none of that data has been thrown away, and only laziness and incompetence prevent giving you this information while it is still new and held on near-line storage.

      The point is that it only takes a handful of nefarious fucks to hand all of that data over to the government for interpretation without a warrant. And that is what the USPS does; they hand all information on all mail that they route directly to the federal government, probably via the DHS now which is actually its job: tying together disparate law enforcement agencies.

  • by PopeRatzo ( 965947 ) on Tuesday October 28, 2014 @10:01PM (#48257753) Journal

    This story illustrates the reason why when I send mail, I don't put any names or addresses on the envelope.

    You know what else? I'll bet UPS and FedEx are tracking letters and packages too! In fact, the last time I sent something, they accidentally printed the tracking number right on my receipt. They must really think I'm stupid, but I'm not. I'm smart.

  • With his basic contempt for his fellow Americans and blatant disregard for the Constitution, it is incredible that Maricopa County keeps re-electing Joe Arpaio. It's unsurprising he would try to intercept the mail of his critics.
    • Kevin Beary, the former sheriff of Orange County, FL did something almost as bad a few years back. A lady wrote a letter to the local newspaper criticizing the department and him personally, and he looked her up in the state database to get her address, and sent a nastygram back to her. Of course he didn't face any responsibility for his actions, even though they were clearly in violation of federal law.

      And the lady was right - he IS fat.
      • by Cruxus ( 657818 )
        Arpaio has done many more and frankly worse things than intercept a few people's mail. He's brought his department numerous lawsuits.

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