U.S. Postal Service Logging All Mail for Law Enforcement

Guest · 2013-07-03T15:29:38Z

The USPS is now taking a picture of every letter and package and retaining the data for law enforcement. U.S. Postal Service Logging All Mail for Law EnforcementLeslie James Pickering, the owner of a bookstore in Buffalo, was targeted by a tracking program from the United States Postal Service WASHINGTON â€” Leslie James Pickering noticed something odd in his mail last September: A handwritten card, apparently delivered by mistake, with instructions for postal workers to pay special attention to the letters and packages sent to his home. â€œShow all mail to supvâ€ â€” supervisor â€” â€œfor copying prior to going out on the street,â€ read the card. It included Mr. Pickeringâ€™s name, address and the type of mail that needed to be monitored. The word â€œconfidentialâ€ was highlighted in green. â€œIt was a bit of a shock to see it,â€ said Mr. Pickering, who owns a small bookstore in Buffalo. More than a decade ago, he was a spokesman for the Earth Liberation Front, a radical environmental group labeled eco-terrorists by the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Postal officials subsequently confirmed they were indeed tracking Mr. Pickeringâ€™s mail but told him nothing else. As the world focuses on the high-tech spying of the National Security Agency, the misplaced card offers a rare glimpse inside the seemingly low-tech but prevalent snooping of the United States Postal Service. Mr. Pickering was targeted by a longtime surveillance system called mail covers, but that is only a forerunner of a vastly more expansive effort, the Mail Isolation Control and Tracking program, in which Postal Service computers photograph the exterior of every piece of paper mail that is processed in the United States â€” about 160 billion pieces last year. It is not known how long the government saves the images. Together, the two programs show that snail mail is subject to the same kind of scrutiny that the National Security Agency has given to telephone calls and e-mail. The mail covers program, used to monitor Mr. Pickering, is more than a century old but is still considered a powerful tool. At the request of law enforcement officials, postal workers record information from the outside of letters and parcels before they are delivered. (Actually opening the mail requires a warrant.) The information is sent to whatever law enforcement agency asked for it. Tens of thousands of pieces of mail each year undergo this scrutiny. 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. â€œIn the past, mail covers were used when you had a reason to suspect someone of a crime,â€ said Mark D. Rasch, the former director of the Justice Departmentâ€™s computer crime unit, who worked on several fraud cases using mail covers. â€œNow it seems to be â€˜Letâ€™s record everyoneâ€™s mail so in the future we might go back and see who you were communicating with.â€™ Essentially youâ€™ve added mail covers on millions of Americans.â€ Bruce Schneier, a computer security expert and an author, said whether it was a postal worker taking down information or a computer taking images, the program was still an invasion of privacy. â€œBasically they are doing the same thing as the other programs, collecting the information on the outside of your mail, the metadata, if you will, of names, addresses, return addresses and postmark locations, which gives the government a pretty good map of your contacts, even if they arenâ€™t reading the contents,â€ he said. But law enforcement officials said mail covers and the automatic mail tracking program are invaluable, even in an era of smartphones and e-mail. In a criminal complaint filed June 7 in Federal District Court in Eastern Texas, the F.B.I. said a postal investigator tracing the ricin letters was able to narrow the search to Shannon Guess Richardson, an actress in New Boston, Tex., by examining information from the front and back images of 60 pieces of mail scanned immediately before and after the tainted letters sent to Mr. Obama and Mr. Bloomberg showing return addresses near her home. Ms. Richardson had originally accused her husband of mailing the letters, but investigators determined that he was at work during the time they were mailed. In 2007, the F.B.I., the Internal Revenue Service and the local police in Charlotte, N.C., used information gleaned from the mail cover program to arrest Sallie Wamsley-Saxon and her husband, Donald, charging both with running a prostitution ring that took in $3 million over six years. Prosecutors said it was on...

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04/07/2013 8:14 am

um, that’s easy. It is because of the darling of Dubya and Obummer–the so called "patriot act" infusing lots of money to spy on citizens, to make sure we are not planning to overthrow the evil empire.

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N1lbog4721

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07/07/2013 1:22 pm

No mention of spice, blends, incense or bath salts in the article. I don’t think the USPS has enough time to go through every package and take pictures like this article says, no fucking way.

USPS workers are lazy, unmotivated and angry people most of the time.

They can log my dick, cause that’s all I’ll give them, I can provide a load if they want it.

Thats some funny ass shit bro! Man I swear there is this old mail man that delivers mail in my neighborhood, and man I always get these negative vibes from him. He is always in a pissy ass mood! He needs to smoke a fuckin blunt or get laid or somethin. LOL I’ve been hearing that the DEA are trackin down people who have been getting blends through the mail. Thank god I don’t order shit online anymore. Now I just go to my head shop. FUCK THE DEA! Fuckin cocksuckers! Anyways, that is a pretty fucked up article! They obviously are up to somethin. But seriously though, how the fuck can they keep count of every single package dude? I mean seriously! There are like 1,000s upon 1,000s of packages being transported! I think I heard this on the news the other day!

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