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New Privacy Concerns About US Program That Can Track Snail Mail
Lashdots writes: A lawyers' group has called for greater oversight of a government program that gives state and federal law enforcement officials access to metadata from private communications for criminal investigations and national security purposes. But it's not digital: this warrantless surveillance is conducted on regular mail. "The mail cover has been in use, in some form, since the 1800s," Chief Postal Inspector Guy J. Cottrell told Congress in November. The program targets a range of criminal activity including fraud, pornography, and terrorism, but, he said, "today, the most common use of this tool is related to investigations to rid the mail of illegal drugs and illegal drug proceeds." Recent revelations that the U.S. Postal Service photographs the front and back of all mail sent through the U.S., ostensibly for sorting purposes, has, Fast Company reports, brought new scrutiny—and new legal responses—to this obscure program.
a range of criminal activity including fraud, pornography, and terrorism
In general, pornography is legal throughout the US, no? Sure, you add certain adjectives and it becomes illegal pretty quick, but as written this list does not make sense.
Color me profoundly unsurprised, with hints of "so what?".
Searching for Drug trafficking just sounds like an excuse now days. Really? Can't they sniff the mail with modern drug detecting machines? Tracking meta data is almost guaranteed to be used for something different.
I am tired of the boogie men of terrorism, drug trafficking, and safety that the U.S. three letter agencies keep using to justify attacking freedom and privacy.
Is for the Supreme Court to find that information that can only be collected by the government under the mosaic theory of information and that could not be gathered by an individual actor is covered by a right of privacy, they manage to find all sorts of rights that we hadn't noticed before, it's time for them to find this one.
-jon
Well, it is for sorting purposes. (They've got massive machines running Linux doing OCR which replaced manual sorting, and that requires... taking pictures of the mail.)
Whether all the pictures are also retained is a completely different story. 10 years ago, I'd have said, "No; too expensive." But storage costs have plummeted, so nowadays, maybe so.
"I don't know, therefore Aliens" Wafflebox1
Its a surprise for the Millenials who seem to edit this site these days - they'll all be furiously looking up what "snail mail" and "post office" mean.
so some people out there, who know perfectly well that non-govt owned property, like phone calls in the air, are being sniffed, actually trusts a govt. provided asset (i.e, USPS)? If it was up to me, I wouldn't communicate using mail. I'd use metadata enclosing the mail to communicate sensitive information (time sent, addressee, etc.)
So..... the Postal Service?
Snail Mail: Tinned Escargot sent via parcel delivery.
The USPS has been using automated systems of sorting mail for decades. It's why mail across town goes to a consolidated center (perhaps halfway across the state) first for sorting into carrier routes and has been for decades.
That Homeland Security want to capture this information - which has long been determined to accessible (the original pen-trace) isn't surprising at all.
And they only have to photograph/image the ones that the machines can't read. It's only surprising to people who drink the conservative kool-aide that government can't do anything right.
If it was a non-government corporation, would you be more concerned? And it is a corporation, just one owned by the federal government.
Gamingmuseum.com: Give your 3D accelerator a rest.
I actually had to look up "snail mail" :)
But to be fair, I'm a foreigner.
But Post Office (RFC1939) was superseded by IMAP (RFC3501).
put a GPS tracker - say an old model burner Android phone in box, make an address label out of one of these and set it to change destinations to different parts of the country every four hours......
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A lot of our problems today are the result of people in power fundamentally misunderstanding what Big Data is good for.
We used to assume it was impractical for the Government to keep records of everything we do in the public sphere. Those things have gone from possible to practical to inevitable, mostly due to Moore's Law.
Just because you have everything recorded, doesn't mean it's useful, though. Technologists who should know better talk about searching these records to find the "needle in the haystack", selling the vision of complete records + powerful search tools = Total Awareness.
What they conveniently skip over is:
* All records have inaccuracies
* If the inaccuracy rate is higher than the occurrence rate of what you're searching for, the search is not useful
Consider medical screening tests. If you have a test with a false positive rate of 1 in 1000, it is useless to use such a test to search for a condition that happens to 1 in 1000000 - 999 times out of a thousand, the test will say you're sick when you're fine.
Now, consider:
* The error rate of address OCR
versus
* The rate of secrets being exchanged via US Mail
Anyone in the Government who can't produce an estimate of those two numbers shouldn't be allowed anywhere near those records - it would be like giving a child a loaded gun, or a politician a Twitter account.
To a Lisp hacker, XML is S-expressions in drag.
Did anyone else initially think that this official's title was actually, "Chief Postal Inspector Guy"?
Wait a freeking second!
They can actually track this shit? The best I ever got out of them was once a day. They actually have a computer with this data and did not give it to me?! They know where it is and can track it? I usually get runaround excuses about 'cant and wont'.
This is like basic web presence 101 stuff. I always get the excuse they cant do it. But under it all they are.
This would make their service a billion times better. Basically free tracking of all mail. What truck is something on etc etc etc.
That is seriously sad. They spent all the money and time actually tracking it then at the last part said 'fuck it dont show anyone except the NSA'.
when the automated sorting system v.2 was installed, maybe 15 or 20 years ago, the USPS at that time said that they captured pictures of all mail. doubtless it was seen as a marvel of engineering that they did all that at one fell swoop, and a big boast. the initial automation system of the 70s/80s didn't.
if this is supposed to be a new economy, how come they still want my old fashioned money?
Oh no! The Federal agency that picks up, sorts, and delivers the mail keeps a record of having done so? God forbid!
Color me profoundly unsurprised, with hints of "so what?".
Unless you are sending registered mail or parcels handled by their own courier, the post office should not be recording the addresses of the sender and recipient nor even the date the envelope is stamped by the post office. There is a difference between tracking a package and wholesale surveillance of every postal item.
If you wanted to hide stuff in the mail you could just omit the return address. And if you really wanted to disguise it mail it out of town. Without a return address all the photo would show is the center where the postmark was affixed and the delivery address. Not a lot of meat there.
Germans use the identical expression for their system, Schneckenpost.
The metadata collection of mail, or specifically knowing senders, receivers and dates of communication etc. has long been known as a law enforcement tool. The contents of private correspondence has been protected not only by the fourth amendment but also affirmed in 1878 ex parte Jackson:
a distinction is to be made between different kinds of mail matter -- between what is intended to be kept free from inspection, such as letters, and sealed packages subject to letter postage, and what is open to inspection, such as newspapers, magazines, pamphlets, and other printed matter purposely left in a condition to be examined. Letters and sealed packages of this kind in the mail are as fully guarded from examination and inspection, except as to their outward form and weight, as if they were retained by the parties forwarding them in their own domiciles. The constitutional guaranty of the right of the people to be secure in their papers against unreasonable searches and seizures extends to their papers, thus closed against inspection, wherever they may be. Whilst in the mail, they can only be opened and examined under like warrant, issued upon similar oath or affirmation, particularly describing the thing to be seized, as is required when papers are subjected to search in one's own household. No law of Congress can place in the hands of officials connected with the postal service any authority to invade the secrecy of letters and such sealed packages in the mail; and all regulations adopted as to mail matter of this kind must be in subordination to the great principle embodied in the Fourth Amendment of the Constitution.
Of course based on reasonable suspicion law enforcement could always obtain warrants or with the help of postal inspectors focus in on one group or hierarchy of mail delivery to focus in on collecting this metadata. The protection for criminals conducting illegal activities was that there was so much mail that it would be hard to filter through it unless suspicious activity was observed. The FBI under Hoover however took it a bit further and intercepted mail and examined it without warrants under the guise of "counter intelligence." The Church Committee found:
Too many people have been spied upon by too many Government agencies and too much information has been illegally collected. The Government has often undertaken the secret surveillance of citizens on the basis of their political beliefs, even when those beliefs posed no threat of violence or illegal acts on behalf of a hostile foreign power. The Government, operating primarily through secret and biased informants, but also using other intrusive techniques such as wiretaps, microphone "bugs", surreptitious mail opening, and break-ins, has swept in vast amounts of information about the personal lives, views, and associations of American citizens. Investigations of groups deemed potentially dangerous—and even of groups suspected of associating with potentially dangerous organizations—have continued for decades, despite the fact that those groups did not engage in unlawful activity.
So, the NSA and it's surreptitious activities are nothing new to the Feds.
With the advent of OCR technology now you could sort the mail faster, 1000s of times faster than before but the side benefit was that huge amounts of metadata could be easily collected and it didn't require warrants or suspicions. Since sending letters requires another party, the Third Party Doctrine and in 1967 the Supreme Court in Katz v. US established a test to determine if when a person could assume that their communications were private:
1) "The Government's activities in electronically listening to and recording the petitioner's words violated the privacy upon which he justifiably relied while using the telephone booth and thus constituted
Harrison's Postulate - "For every action there is an equal and opposite criticism"
Hmm. Maybe it's the "you don't have a way to opt out of receiving mail" part of things?
Protest the imaging of first class mail by placing your stamp upside down.
There was an order from DX.COM sent from Singapore that did not arrive after 5 weeks. I did send a mail to USPS with the tracking number and they send me several pictures of the envelope (different qualities and angles, from different sorting stations in the US).
From those pictures it was clear that DX.COM messed up the ZIP code so USPS send it back to Singapore. It is good to have this proof to DX.COM to explain it was their fault, it was bad that USPS did not deliver it the first time because the rest of the address was all correct.
So, yes. They make pictures and they keep them for at least for a month.
I worked on the machines that do this. It cancels the mail, and captures the images of both sides of the mailpiece including the cancellation date stamp. The address information is OCR translated into digital data to route the mail to it's destination. Mail sorting is automated and computerized; sortation machines handle about 40,000 letters an hour. A small facility handles almost 1,000,000 letters on a slow day.
Some of the mail (a small percentage) cannot be 'read' by the algorithm due to very bad handwriting. The images of these unreadable mailpieces are displayed for a human to enter the address data. The address data is stored into a database record that is tied to the orange barcode on the back of the mailpiece. The lifespan of this record is from a few days to 30 days, depending on the policy of the cancellation facility. After this the data is gone from postal service systems. I've suspected that nefarious 3 letter agencies obtained the data for their own purposes.
I thought it was an email provider, like gmail or startmail :P
which device to create your own path to record the route the mail took... and potentially compare to the record this produces?
lot of mail gone missing lately... just about ontopic...?
A blog I run for the wealth
Just the same one there's always been - don't tell anyone where you live.
Nope. I'd still expect it to be the case. As it has been for centuries.
Great Job!