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.

Comments

Drug trafficking?

[NotARealUser]

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.

ostensibly for sorting purposes

[Nutria]

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.