Slashdot Mirror
USPS Logs All Snail Mail For Law Enforcement
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."
While I understand WHY the USPS would do this, I wonder how much money they've spend on storing data (the photos) all the while cutting the hours of employees due to budget cuts, etc. as for the comment by Bruce Schneier: "whether it was a postal worker taking down information or a computer taking images, the program was still an invasion of privacy." I disagree. There is a difference between taking an address down and reading your mail. I don't see Bruce complaining about UPS, FedEx, etc. doing the same. Get over it
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.
Get free satoshi (Bitcoin) and Dogecoins
You will never stop us, dogs of Satan! We are everywhere!
sincerely,
Muhammad bin Occupant
If Slashdot were chemistry it would look like this:Cadaverine
I've been getting a lot of mail lately with no postmark. That's just BS, because postmarked mail can have enormous legal implications.
One of the Post Office's primary functions is to POSTMARK mail! If they aren't doing that -- and in a lot of cases, they haven't been -- they're very seriously not doing their jobs.
Prepaid bulk mail is one thing. But metered mail? How do I know you didn't meter it in your office one day, then actually send it two weeks later? Other mail? Hey, postal service: it's not JUST about cancelling stamps so they aren't used later! It's about marking when the damned thing was sent!!!
They haven't been doing their REAL jobs for a long time. They'd rather track your mail for Big Brother than worry about when you got the notice to appear in court for your lawsuit against the landlord.
Sheesh. And they wonder why they're losing business.
A public debate about blanket surveillance and the meaning of the 4th Amendment is long overdue. The more dirt comes up all at once, the harder it will be for the public and Congress to ignore.
There are really two possible outcomes: either Congress gets off its ass to rein in this kind of BS, or the American people actually admit they don't mind being spied on by the government (and there's a spike in emigration from the US to Europe).
[Sir Garlon] is the marvellest knight that is now living, for he destroyeth many good knights, for he goeth invisible.
http://xkcd.com/325/
just sayin'
Good people go to bed earlier.
It has long been held by US courts that the exteriors of letters and other items sent through the mail are not considered private.
It makes sense that they are allowed to photograph and record them for later use.
I mean, did you really think that a piece of mail sent through a government controlled organization would be hidden from law enforcement?
Now, if they are doing the same for UPS/FedEx/etc, then there might be a slightly larger concern, but still not really a big deal.
Or, if they were opening (or scanning the inside without opening) and recording the contents of sealed mail without a warrant, that would also be concerning.
This one seemed like a "no shit" policy to me. After all of the massive spying scandals that have been revealed, logging all "headers" so to speak on snail mail seemed obvious. Just something for us Silk Roaders to think about..
This XKCD suddenly became topical again: http://xkcd.com/327/
Right?
So the USPS can scan and retain a copy of every single item and find it for law enforcement requests, yet they can't put together a decent package tracking system and insist on delivery confirmation.
-- Slashdot, making the Left look conservative since 1997.
Hopefully the officials didn't send a letter, an email, or make a phone call. If they did, their anonymity wasn't good for much. But, hey, that's just metadata and isn't an invasion of privacy that can be used to political ends.
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.
Do they scan those in too?
What sort of similar surveillance programs are in place at UPS, Fedex and other U.S. couriers?
the growth in cynicism and rebellion has not been without cause
Seems to me that me that more and more often, the headlines on Drudge and /. are the same.
If they used this as a system for tracking mail and not ONLY as a law enforcement tool, I'd be happier. So unless there are cameras at all postal drop locations, you can still spoof and anonymize yourself in useful and various ways, but usually, there is no such need for that. But it does bug me that they could use this technology to improve service but are, instead, using it to collect metadata on the stuff we receive. Now, depending on where something came from, they might know just what's in our plain brown boxes... sad.
When first reading the summary I thought no big deal but the more I think about it, how is this different than recording the Metadata from Verizon and others phone calls?
In reality this is actually worse. The Verizon data has no names directly attached and requires work (albeit trivial for automated systems) to determine the connecting parties. The USPS has all the data. They don't know the conversation but they know one took place.
At some point the only option we will have to keep some sort of anonymity will be to start spoiling the data. Own multiple devices that you randomly carry and pass the other devices off to others to carry. No way to know which device is actually yours. If you have to communicate with someone via mail establish multiple addresses to send ad receive from.
...they are taking pictures of what is publicly available anyways.
Those fuckers lost a check I sent and it will cost me $30 to cancel and resend. I wonder if I can get a record showing it at least made it into the postal system.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
Sorry, but haven't you got it yet? They are ABOVE the law, every law, everybody's law. And nobody can do diddley squat about it, though there will be buckets of pious lip service paid, with the requisite crocodile tears and lots of hand wringing. Most people have already forgotten about all this NSA stuff, after all there's all sorts of exciting circuses on TV and just look how much bread we get at Walmart! C'mon, sit back, and EAT, and WATCH, and EAT, and... You'll soon feel happier.
Just get used to being pwned like the rest of us have.
People who have had a need for privacy/anonymity have been aware of the USPS role in law enforcement for decades. That they are snapping a photo (probably OCR the addresses straight into a database as well) doesn't surprise me.
Decades ago, before Al Gore invented the Internet, mail was a primary means of communication. Back then, I used to live in apartment buildings. Most apartment buildings have a central bank of mailboxes. I was surprised to see how many apartment buildings had more boxes than apartments. In one case, an entire extra floor of numbers. And they all appeared to be in use. I imagine the management makes a decent amount of extra cash renting these out.
I always wanted to watch when SWAT/Homeland Security attempted to storm Apartment #405 in a three story building.
Have gnu, will travel.
...many laws are broken" -Tao te Ching
"SO we bide our time, waiting for a purer kick to bloom and the future is still bleak, uncertain and beautiful" -GSYBE
Not sure how I feel about this. On one hand your send items through a governement agency, how much privacy should one expect? On the other hand I believe the post office is supposed to respect privacy.
If any of you have picked up a piece of mail recently, they require your signature and for you to print your name. Wonder why? I dont.
So you have no problem if fraudsters walk in and claim all your packages with no accountability on the post office's end and no recourse on your end?
"Love heals scars love left." -- Henry Rollins
the anthrax?
... of snail TOR.
address your envelope and seal it up in another: addressed to a snailTOR node.
You're welcome Amerika.
Which has more power: the hammer, or the anvil?
They're merely feigning incompetence. Demonstrating a working package tracking system would be delivering proof that they're tracking everything.
The NSA logs who I call, but not the contents. They log who I email, but not the contents (or so they say). The Post Office logs who I am sending and receiving packages from but not the contents (aside from making sure they don't give off radiation or appear hazardous). The NSA still requires a warrant issued by a FISA Court to actually look at any one individual or to tap communications if they believe it involves an American. Their data mining programs mostly just look for patterns. It's also not clear about whether or not the NSA looks at much data concerning Americans since it appears as though their primary goal was to monitor foreign communications that were routed through equipment in the USA.
By comparison, the IRS demands that I log everything I do financially and turn it over to them. If I make any mistakes, I can be prosecuted and potentially jailed for it. If the NSA misses a call I make, nobody is the wiser. If I forget that I'm no longer able to make a certain deduction, I face harsh penalties.
The NSA's generally pretty tight and there haven't been all that many cases of clear illegality. A lot of what the NSA does and how the FISA courts actually work is in a grey area, so I don't know what to think. By contrast, the IRS has frequently been at the center of many scandals.
Income taxes were legalized by the 16th amendment in 1913. Up until then, we didn't have Federal income taxes save for a couple of brief periods such as during the Civil War. During the 30's the first huge IRS scandal broke. The IRS was allegedly used by FDR's administration to harass political opponents. Most notably, Andrew Mellon, Treasury Secretary under the Harding, Coolidge and Hoover Administrations, was subject to baseless tax investigations. Senator Huey Long, a potential challenge from the left of FDR, also faced harassment. JFK and LBJ allegedly also had an IRS that liked to target political critics like the John Birch Society. Article 2 Section 1 of the articles of impeachment of Richard Nixon accused Nixon of having the IRS investigate people on his "enemies list". While Clinton was in office, a few conservative outfits like the Heritage Foundation allegedly faced "unusual" audits, though true hard evidence of wrongdoing never surfaced. Similar story with Bush. Several liberal outfits claimed Bush's IRS was pestering them, though the IRS actually appears to have audited more right leaning organizations than left leaning ones. Now we get to Obama's huge spat over the IRS. The IRS has admitted to clear discrimination against conservative groups, effectively squashing the Tea Party's activities throughout most of the 2014 election cycle. The IRS is also alleged to have turned over confidential donor information from an organization opposed to gay marriage to one supporting gay marriage so that gay marriage proponents could harass their opponents. A Supreme Court case during the civil rights era in which Alabama demanded the NAACP's donors so that they could be harassed clearly shows the IRS' behavior was illegal. How involved (if at all) the President and his staff are in all of this remains to be seen, but it is clear, given it's history, that if there's any government agency to be worried about, it's the IRS and not the NSA or Post Office.
The Gospel according to lolcat
Send mail in two envelopes: outer, addressed to remailer, and inner, addressed to ultimate destination, with extra stamp as payment. Remailer opens outer and remails inner.
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.
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!
It's really quite a simple choice: Life, Death, or Los Angeles.
So not only do I have to add Fuck You, NSA to my email, now I have to start writing on my envelopes!
If the USPS was smart, they'd sell stamps that say exactly this; they'd be in the black by Christmas.
I guess we need to send our letters in holographic envelopes that can only be read at an angle. Straight on, it just looks blank... or maybe a big finger. And that's probably what the camera will record.
Give me my freedom, and I'll take care of my own security, thank you.
Logging snails makes me think about something altogether different from NSA spying.
It makes me think of someone bashing snails with a log.
Which might be too different from the truth.
We recently had the federal Internal Revenue Service targeting political groups and their supporters because the administration didn't like their politics. Have they exploited this USPS data collection system? Just by looking at snail mail "metadata" they could identify members and supporters of all sorts of nefarious groups such as the National Rifle Association, or if the balance of power shifts, Planned Parenthood and the like.
Now citizen, obey the executive branch or we'll send the IRS after you. With Obamacare, the IRS becomes a law enforcement agency, which makes it that much worse. You failed to purchase the exact type of health insurance that the executive branch dictated? Here comes the IRS. Oh, and we see you're an NRA member. Off to Gitmo with you.. which is actually still open despite certain campaign promises from a somewhat prominent individual.
It's amazing how f'd up things have become.
Since we pay postage and taxes the public should have access to that database. The photo could be proof an item was mailed. Now the only way is to pay to get a piece of paper saying something was mailed but a picture... a picture never lied (that is untill photoshop).
I say use 1K byte QR codes on the outside of your envelopes and use the USPS as cloud storage. Only problem is retrieval. Hmmm...
That number is 160 billion
I am Bennett Haselton! I am Bennett Haselton!
Very likely photographs are taken at initial sorting, so a deliberately failing address label which covers the actual final address but falls off after 12-24 hours would effectively cloak the recipient's address. Something like a white post-it note but with adhesive designed to dry and crumble in a matter of hours. And leave off the return address of course.
People have been clamoring for tracking of the postal service for decades? Who hasn't wanted some type of tracking for things sent through the post office like they get through Fedex or UPS? As long as they aren't opening the envelopes who cares? This is the literal equivalent to looking at the headers of packets sent over the Internet, meh....
As for tracking of things that are not sent through third party systems, such as people and cars on public streets that is an entirely different story. People forget that computers allow us to automate the absurd and otherwise unthinkable. Nobody has a problem with the policeman in the patrol car looking up a license plate of a passing car. Put that same system in a camera that automatically checks all plates and all of a sudden you have all kinds of implications. What was once absurd is now simply a matter of budget.
I hope the law enforcement agencies pay for this service and not the postal service. One reason all this surveillance is happening is because it is so darn cheap to do bulk surveillance. I wonder if one way to reduce surveillance is to make it more expensive.
I really shouldn't have used someone else's email address for this account.
Finally, an explanation for why they invariably have one or two lonely clerks at the front desk but at least 6 more milling around the back-room.
Now if someone could just explain why the same thing happens at the DMV.
War is peace.
Freedom is slavery.
Ignorance is strength.
There is a shade of ink and marking pencil called "non-photo blue" which will not photograph in white light. Years ago a friend used it for writing checks to prevent his bank from retaining copies. He never did time, so either it worked or it was unnecessary.
If you order film or photo paper, and have it shipped by any method, there is a chance it will be ruined by high intensity x-ray screeing. The Fed-ex and UPS sites specifically mention that they are subject to random x-ray screening mandated by DHS and that they are not responsible for damage caused by this.
It's time for everyone to run their own low-power numbers station intermittently on various HF bands so at least recipients can remain anonymous. With SDR it's trivial to frequency hop all over the spectrum and hocketize (I made that word up) the message; the hard part will be to synchronize the receiver without revealing the precise hopping pattern.
There's an ink that is visible in the near-infrared and invisible in the visible spectrum. Digital camera sensors "see" the ink, but eyes do not. Coat your envelopes with this ink and the cameras see nothing, but human eyes will see a plain envelope with normal address information.
Why the USPS has been hemorrhaging money for quite some time. You would think they'd be able to compete with UPS/Fedex in parcel delivery, but not if they're blowing money on employees' time spent photographing everything and also money on cameras and digital storage media.
This just makes me want to start using W.A.S.T.E instead.
IIRC back in the 90s or even earlier the machines were using OCR to scan hand-written addresses. Anything that the machine couldn't read was sent over the Internet to someplace where labor was cheap. There, individuals read the addresses and re-enterred it so the letter could get on its way. I have no idea what they did if the address was so bad a human couldn't read it.
So. I've known about them reading and transmitting the exteriors of letters for a while. It's the storing of the information beyond a reasonable period after delivery that's news.
Someone dropped that in deliberately, but didn't want to be another Snowden!
Not just landlords, lost a book from the local library. The only way to pay for the book is a check, won't take cash unless I go to the central office, won't take a credit card.
The last personal check I wrote was 8 years ago. Now I have to do downtown or go to my Credit Union and get a bank check to pay for the book.
How useful is the information on the letter?
I've never been ID'ed when delivering a package, and anyone can drop an envelope in the mailbox with whatever details they want on the cover.
What's to stop somebody from creating a package/letter/etc containing something nasty with somebody else's details on it?
I hereby propose we pass a new amendment to ban government agencies from communicating with communication facilitators or otherwise monitoring communications or its meta data.
In addition no new technology should be implemented by law enforcement or those working/acting on behalf of law enforcement. This includes psudo-private/public agencies like the postal service and completely (or mostly) private / publicly traded companies as well as organization and individuals and machinery.
The government has abused our trust and they should pay for the consequences. They should have to go back to using pen, paper, and delivery by hand of communications to the courts and individuals of legal communications. Make them work in order to issue you that speeding ticket. If it's not worth taking you into the station over then let it be.
See, a long time ago, it was OK if a few random postal guy saw the outside of your mail, heck even if they *systematically* did it for all your mail. Since thousands passed in their hands, and probably nobody could remember all of them, especially keep track of all the friends/package. The human factor make it so it was not important to look at the outside of the letter.
Now with technology, massive storage, and automated scanning, this *all* changed. They can keep the name of destination/senderfor every mail. Collate the data. And if they wanted, say which package you got from whom, which letter, who do you write often, etc...
And that was the "exterior of the letter has no privacy implication" is terribly outdated and alson terriibly wrong : you could now have a pretty good picture of what and whom from a person do order, and whom she is mailing to, and with which frequency. That has implication of privacy *because* of the collation and easy availibility of the data, since it is not anymore a sets of random human not seeing the whole picture, but a cloud of machine with a database havign a very precise picture.
So since now somebody back decades ago did not see the implication against privacy of letting "just the exterior of the envelop has no expectation of privacy", well now your snail mail will say much more about you than some might want to wish. If you are fine with that, be aware, that not everybody is.
Frankly I do not care but I can see why some folk would not be happy.
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
Don't you already put your address on the letters you send? How is this different than them looking at the letter and going to the origin location if something is awry?
Wait, what? That's it? Just the visual exterior? Data the eyeballs of handlers already have? Anything that can be freely seen/listened to even once is, in my book, officially "out in the wild" and free game. I accept this works both ways, and against any art/code/work I distro.
The mail contents are private, but the envelope is not. The wasted taxes is debatable, I won't touch that. Turnover from UPS/FedEx is disgusting, but I don't think they've claimed or implied that those records are private. And AFAIK it's still possible to send mail anonymously, which is good for everything from whistleblowers to a shy Thank You note.
OCR is used on every letter to decipher the address with high 90s% accuracy. Then often it is printed as a bar code on the envelope or magazine. So all they have to do is to reserve the analysis image and its decoding. Its becomes a storage and retreival issue then.
P.S. One of the vendors sells about the same technology for moving license plate reading.
The only solution for privacy here is to put your letter in multiple envelopes addressed through different friendly gateways who will each remove an envelope layer and resend. Privacy comes with the price of a few extra stamps.
Perhaps the real purpose of the system is the USPS trying to induce a conspiracy theory that will sell more stamps...
... although it's probably a sufficiently old trick it won't work any more. :(
I wonder if they can help me look up the sweet letter art I sent to Nintendo Power when I was 10.
To be fair, it is wonderful for tracking spies. If you start with one known spy, it helps find others. See Using Metadata to Find Paul Revere", written from the point of view of the British.
It's less useful for identifying spies (or bombers) from a cloud of data, because if you start with Aaron Swartz, you do get a list of supposedly suspicious people to investigate. Unfortunately, for the spy-trackers, they're actually innocent bystanders.
--dave
[You can always charge them and see if they suicide. Just like the old trick of throwing a witch in a pond and seeing if they float. If they do, they're evil and you kill them. If they don't, they drown. Either way, you get rid of them.]
davecb@spamcop.net
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.
You may have written checks and not been aware of it.
Do you use your bank/credit union's online bill payment? If the place (or person) you're sending money to isn't hooked in with ACS or some other newfangled electronic system, they just print a check with your name on it and mail it out.
(How do I know this? Because I have received such checks from both people and businesses for services I've rendered. They look a little funny, and have way too many words on them, but they turn into cash just fine.)
Kid-proof tablet..
What about in the case of misdelivered mail, since now that other person might not be aware of the rules the postal carriers follow and thus not follow them themself.
I mention this mostly because my mother's house got two new mail carriers a while back who were notoriously bad about pre-sorting their mail and ended up mixing up mail a few weeks in a row (Until I caught and notified one of them of the problem.) It was generally partially her mail mixed with a neighbor within about three houses of her's.
Here is the reason that the USPO cannot balance its budget !
Also, it answers why my snail mail arrives late and in bushels.
Damn that Bush.
The article makes the claim that at least one form of this program has existed for over a century.
This is not news. This is mythbusting. Today's myth: That law enforcement are (for whatever reason) prohibited from the same information freely given to postal carriers.
Myth: Busted.
Do you like the envelopes I just had printed? They say "FU NSA" on them.
"When freedom is criminal only criminals have freedom"
So, why the hell can't they find a box I shipped from Japan last November? It left the New Jersey sorting facility and vanished, no further tracking on that number exists. I sent in a form and photos of what the box would look like, along with the contents, and nothing. Now it seems the government may know where it is, but there's no way for me to find out.
I hope whoever got the manga and J-Pop CDs enjoys them in whatever Customs or other office has them. Bureaucratic b**tards.
By the taping of my glasses, something geeky this way passes
Just another way for the government to keep a eye on us along with controlling, we have lost our freedoms period.
Stop in the USPS, you can use your debit card to get a money order. It's cheaper then most ATM or certified check fees. Every other money order places require cash, but the USPS will let you use a debit card and their system pulls it out of your accout instantly.
Cheap storage VM.
let lance keep the $