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.

The solution for all this government intrusion

[jcrb]

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.

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.

Re:ostensibly for sorting purposes

[drinkypoo]

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.)

Right, but then the USPS was claiming that they simply threw away all of the resulting data when they were done with it. That's a ridiculous claim in every way.

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.

So what? They don't have to OCR anything that has a properly printed label; they just can it for bar codes. Those pieces of mail, which are the bulk of what passes through the postal system, never has to be photographed at all because they already know where it's coming from, where it's going, what it weighs and whether the package weight was reported accurately. The scans of the remaining minority of mail could quite reasonably be saved ten years ago, especially if you were not picky about resolution. Today, it's trivial.

But the real "so what" is that they are OCRing the mail, so even if they were throwing away all of those scans, they would still reasonably be storing the metadata. Why would you ever throw that away, unless forced? It's small, and it's valuable. But moreover, one of the Snowden revelations was that they are in fact storing all of that OCR data, it all gets handed straight to the feds. Before Snowden, it was generally believed (heh heh) that this data was simply flushed, and only the fringe believed that it was handed to the feds as a matter of course. Now we know that to be the case.

Re:ostensibly for sorting purposes

[tlhIngan]

But the real "so what" is that they are OCRing the mail, so even if they were throwing away all of those scans, they would still reasonably be storing the metadata

I would expect them to OCR the mail. in fact, the postal system has the best OCR in the business which can read printed/typed/stickered labels (even at an angle), and handwriting. The accuracy of the system is beyond what you can find - 99.99% accuracy means 1 in 10,000 letters has an error, and if you're dealing with millions of pieces of mail that's not pre-sorted, correcting that requires lots of manual assistance. (they have special stations that let the operator view the mail but not actually handle it and type a corrected address).

Storing images of the OCR'd labels is simply smart because it means you have a set of working scans, a set of failed scans (with corrected addresses) and can run tweaks to the OCR software through actual real live labels that passed and failed and discover whether or not your fix improved matters or made things worse.

Re:Really? This is a surprise?

[Viol8]

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.

Re:Not all of these are equal...

[Nutria]

In times past, sending porn through the mail *was* illegal, and the antiquated version of this program tracked porn mailers and receivers.

Wait a second...

[__aabppq7737]

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.)

Re:Really? This is a surprise?

[ChunderDownunder]

Snail Mail: Tinned Escargot sent via parcel delivery.

Automated sorting of mail and metadata?

[userw014]

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.

Re:Automated sorting of mail and metadata?

[swb]

There are four things government is in a position to do better than anyone else: military defense, law enforcement, public works, and the erosion of liberty.

I don't know, the experience with company towns makes me think big business can do erosion of liberty on par with the government and with greater efficiency.

Re:Really? This is a surprise?

[operagost]

If it was a non-government corporation, would you be more concerned? And it is a corporation, just one owned by the federal government.

Big Data stupidity

[alispguru]

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.

recent revelations, my speckled behind

[swschrad]

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.