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U.S. Postal Service Logging All Mail for Law Enforcement
- coldcode 13y agoEverything you do is subject to some kind of informational storage by the government. Some day our thoughts might be recordable too.
- coldcode 13y agoI also assume that Fedex and UPS et all are required to record your data as well?
- djent 13y agoI'm sure they record your data for other reasons, like checking to see where lost packages were actually delivered, optimizing delivery routes, etc. But yes, the government probably can request their data on you too.
- trotsky 13y agoI have no idea if they are required to do so, but it's worth noting that while the government requires a warrant to open US mail and inspect the contents, your agreement with UPS/FedEx allows them to open anything they see fit to.
- mpyne 13y agoTo be clear, it allows UPS/FedEx to open it, not the government. Although UPS/FedEx can then voluntarily give it to the government should they open it...
- jonknee 13y agoThat's extraordinarily obvious considering Fedex and UPS have advertised tracking for years. They even let you use the system.
- rayiner 13y agoCouldn't they pick a more sympathetic guy to talk about: "Mr. Pickering said that although he was arrested two dozen times for acts of civil disobedience and convicted of a handful of misdemeanors, he was never involved in the arson attacks the Earth Liberation Front carried out." Gee, this guy was a member of a group that conducted arson attacks and the government is keeping track of the mail he gives to the government to deliver? I'm shocked, really... That said, this is a great article, and the second page gives a good description of what I think is the legal theory behind the NSA programs: 1) Don't need a warrant to keep track of meta-data (whatever is readable on the outside of the mail). 2) Don't need a warrant to access contents (opening the mail) in foreign intelligence cases (i.e. where the target is a non-U.S. person). 3) Need a warrant to access contents otherwise.
- EliAndrewC 13y ago> Couldn't they pick a more sympathetic guy to talk about "The trouble with fighting for human freedom is that one spends most of one's time defending scoundrels. For it is against scoundrels that oppressive laws are first aimed, and oppression must be stopped at the beginning if it is to be stopped at all." - H.L. Mencken
- sneak 13y agoThis is way better than all the explanations I've been able to come up with for people about why it's important to defend weev.
- ceol 13y agoThat might be telling you that there isn't a good reason to do so.
- sneak 13y agoOh, I had good ones, and still do: things about unpopular speech being the canary in the coal mine, things like that. It's much the same explanation. Mencken is just a lot more eloquent than I was describing it, though.
- javajosh 13y agoGoddamnit this is NOT OK. This is the dark side of the technological improvements to "productivity": we have enabled a level of productivity that allows the few to track the many. It's time we technologists all sat down and though about ways to turn the tide - they are using technology to track us, how can we use technology to thwart them? My best answer is: data flak. We should all start building system that include extra data. Browser components that load other pages in the background. Phones that text at random. Snail mail to nowhere. You're gonna snoop on all my data? Take it ALL and choke on it.
- loceng 13y agoThe problem is then you're still paying for it, and they'll just make your country go bankrupt - but their spying will be the last services they take money from.
- delinka 13y agoThe response will be more charges for extra data usage, and a cry from the public to have apps with leaner data appetites.
- btbuildem 13y agoNot sure, they'll just throw more resources at the problem. I think the problem is in "the few". If they snoop on us, we should be able to snoop on them -- especially since it's our tax dollars that pay their salaries and (although yes it's a joke of a broken system) we elect these officials more or less directly. Just to level the field a little bit. For example, London is full of CCTV cameras -- why is it that only a small group of twisted perverts has access to the feeds? The cameras are in public places, the public should be able to see what the cameras are seeing.
- criley2 13y agoAren't the majority of London's CCTV's privately owned and operated?
- kintamanimatt 13y agoI've known one of those people that watch those cameras and I'd struggle to call him a pervert. He's was just normal guy who paid his bills by doing an incredibly dull job. All it came down to was making sure that when petty shit happens in the street (drunken fights, etc), the police and so on are called to the scene. I'm usually someone that's very fond of privacy, but I'm not entirely sure I have any qualms with CCTV in public places and in fact I'd love to hear arguments against them.
- rdp 13y agoI guess that the government's legal justification for this is that people have no reasonable expectation of privacy under the 4th Amendment re: the info on the outside of the mail (name, address, etc.). That is why the need a warrant to actually open the mail.
- carsonreinke 13y agoSo does the same apply to email headers? "We didn't look at the body or subject".
- rdp 13y agoThe best analogy re: address info on mail is to garbage that you leave on the curb for the trash collector. You probably don't have a reasonable expectation of privacy in that garbage because you exposed it to the public by leaving it out on the curb. There is case law to back this up. Similarly, if you hand over a letter to a postal carrier, you arguably wouldn't have a reasonable expectation of privacy in the info on the envelope since that info can be gleaned by anybody who looks at the letter. Email would be different since that is presumably store on your computer or a server or some other place or thing that would fall under the 4th Amendment protections (and require a warrant).
- mpyne 13y agoIn a way email is worse, due to all the third-parties who might conceivably be "shown" the email en route. Perhaps the courts will come up with a legal construct that information which is processed and handled in a completely automated fashion does not "count" as having been seen in public. Something similar to DMCA safe harbor and "common carrier" provisions already defined in telecommunications law, except that it would apply in general and not just to 'large enough' websites or telecom companies.
- oinksoft 13y agoAh, I see I've arrived at Hacker/USA Government Abuses News. And I say that as somebody deeply interested in these stories.
- adestefan 13y agoGotta get in your daily outrage.
- emddudley 13y agoTwo minutes hate.
- loceng 13y agoI think it's important so people can build a picture that includes the full scope, and with the more areas and dots to connect, the more prominent it will become in ones' mind.
- MWil 13y agoBetween here and Reddit, it's overkill...until you realize here the people might actually have the ability to execute to do something about it more quickly and over at Reddit well...just throw up the best meme you can and sit back and reap the karma.
- Vivtek 13y agoOn the other hand when Reddit does something, the talking heads notice that something happens (however badly it all comes out), while when HNN carps about things nobody cares.
- oinksoft 13y agoBetween your comment and loceng's, there seems to be an agenda, and the latent idea of co-opting programmers and decision makers to make "something" happen. I understand people are furious, but people are furious about all sorts of things that maybe folks here could intervene on if prodded. I think long-time HN users mostly care about where technology notably intersects with these scandals (or anything for that matter).
- kmfrk 13y agoGuess Outbox isn't looking so bad? :P https://outboxmail.com https://outboxmail.com https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5822052 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5822052 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5972640 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5972640
- spullara 13y agoIndeed! If the post office has the ability to scan all my mail before it is delivered they could at least give me a digital feed of that mail.
- bentcorner 13y agoHaha, why bother backing up your mail when the NSA has copies of it all? The NSA should just go all-in and make a business of all this.
- elmuchoprez 13y agoMaybe I'm alone here, but I never had an expectation of privacy in regards to what I write on the outside of a envelope and drop into a public receptacle (mailbox). I expect the contents to be considered highly private, but not the outside. There's also this issue of willing disclosure of information to an entity. When I put a stamp on something and drop it in the mailbox, I know I'm handing that information over to a government authority (or whatever you want to call the USPS's weird relationship to the government). Regardless of what they are or aren't supposed to do with it, the fact is that I know I'm putting my info in their hands and trusting them. This is unlike PRISM, where I send an email through Gmail with no expectation that it should ever pass through government hands. Also, I'm under the impression that most if not all hand-written addresses are digitized for sorting purposes. I think you have to be naive to assume the postal service wasn't keeping that data on file.
- asdf3 13y agoAbortion protesters used to write down the license plates... just some publicly available meta-data, right?
- thrownaway2424 13y agoYes. What is your point? Nobody has any expectation of a right to drive anonymously.
- nitrogen 13y agoBut they do have a right to privacy in their medical history. Recording license plate numbers at a hospital, abortion clinic, etc. is a violation of that right, even if it might otherwise be legal.
- thrownaway2424 13y agoThat logic isn't obviously correct. People do not have a right to go about in public, to and from notorious places, in a 2-ton death monster that requires licensure and indemnification to operate, anonymously. People requiring a higher degree of privacy than that offered by cars would be better served taking their bicycles.
- bediger4000 13y agoIs the "Mail Isolation Control and Tracking System" ever used to do anything other than decide guilt by assocation? That is, does the to/from data they collect ever get used to exonerate someone from a crime, or is it just used to decide who to put on "no fly" lists and other such un-American things? Can this data have any use other than providing guilt by assocation? Can this data be used to say "no, not a terrorist" or something like that? If it's just one sided, used or useful only for prosecution and persecution, then it needs to be done away with. As it stands, this practice is just Soviet. It's un-American to do guilt by assocation, and to have prosecution evidence that the defendant can't challenge in public.
- anigbrowl 13y agoProsecutors are required to hand over all evidence to defense counsel on request, and almost invariably do (which is why it's news when a conviction is overturned on the grounds of a prosecutor concealing evidence from the defense). Likewise, a defense lawyer could subpoena this information from the USPS if it was likely to be probative.
- chime 13y agoAbout seven years ago, I was at a sushi bar and struck up a conversation with an older gentleman sitting next to me. He told me he was a developer and created systems for USPS. I am always fascinated by the technology used in large scale systems so I picked his brain for a good hour. From what I recall, he said at the key distribution centers, USPS scans every single mail (in standard envelop sizes) and in under a second, runs OCR for the destination address. Results from OCR are matched to the address database and if the match is significant, the mail is automatically diverted to the correct queue. Now here's the fun part - if OCR fails or print/handwriting is unreadable, a photograph is immediately sent to one of the hundreds of humans waiting to decipher the address and type it in (think Amazon Mechanical Turk). The humans have under 10 seconds to read, decipher, type, and submit the correct address. During this time, the letter is held up in a waiting buffer and the moment the correct address is available, it is diverted to the correct queue. I asked him if that means USPS took a photo of every single piece of mail and he said yes, they had to, otherwise nobody would ever get any mail due to the sheer volume of mail they had to manage. I asked if the photos of envelopes were saved forever and he said, well, I'm pretty sure they are but I'm not allowed to publicly admit that. I know it's a personal anecdote but that was seven years ago. I can't even imagine what they're doing now.
- eli 13y agoBetter OCR (and, cynically, perhaps a higher tolerance of error to cut costs) is making the human handwriting readers obsolete. http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/04/us/where-mail-with-illegible-addresses-goes-to-be-read.html?pagewanted=all http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/04/us/where-mail-with-illegib...
- tokenadult 13y agoI have lived in a country (Taiwan under its previous dictatorial regime in the early 1980s) where I assumed that all my postal mail, domestic or foreign, was read by the ruling party's secret police as part of the delivery process. The postal service in Taiwan was always awesomely efficient when I lived there, with residential mail delivery twice a day all days of the week, year-round except for a brief set of holidays for Chinese New Year. Because I assumed that all my mail would be read, I set up procedures to check whether any of it was seized. My dad and I would write weekly letters to each other, numbered consecutively. The course of post between Taiwan and Minnesota in those days was a week or less, so after a while each weekly letter would take the form of including a phrase like "This is letter number 12, replying to your letter number 10, which I received on [date]" and so on. As far as I can ascertain, all the letters I wrote and all the letters addressed to me were delivered, but I assumed that they were read by the secret police. Foreign magazines and newspapers were sometimes seized and not delivered to subscribers, usually when they included articles about domestic politics in Taiwan. (I learned to respect The Economist as a news source by observing how often it was seized in delivery, either in entirety, or with blacking out of particular articles.) Local people who could read English could pay their hard-earned money to subscribe to (rather expensive, in those days) publications like The Economist or the Asian edition of the Wall Street Journal, but they couldn't count on receiving all of what they paid for. The dictatorship in Taiwan eventually fell, after a largely peaceful people power revolution that forced a transformation to an open political system. Along the way, people I know, including the father of one my children's godparents, were imprisoned for leading peaceful protests urging free and fair elections and a stop to censorship. Most people don't have the courage to go to prison--especially prisons like those in Taiwan at the time. But courage is what it takes to undermine a dictatorship. A successful movement for greater freedom requires great courage, and a degree of social trust among the movement participants that is not easy to find. Allow me to repeat advice I have shared here on Hacker News before. If you really want to be an idealistic but hard-headed freedom-fighter, mobilizing an effective popular movement for more freedom wherever you live, I suggest you read deeply in the publications of the Albert Einstein Institution, http://www.aeinstein.org/organizationsde07.html http://www.aeinstein.org/organizationsde07.html remembering that the transition from dictatorship to democracy described in those publications is an actual historical process with recent examples around the world that we can all learn from. Practice courage and practice collective action.
- scrabble 13y agoCould you not just refrain from writing a return address on your mail? Or instead, put down a false return address? In that case there'd be no tracking of who is mailing whom, but instead just how many letters someone is receiving.
- anigbrowl 13y agoYes, and for most private mail that's perfectly fine as long as there is adequate postage. People who are required to furnish an accurate return address include senders of prepaid mail (you know, where it's printed on the envelope with a number), distributers of periodicals, senders of priority and registered mail, and a few other similar examples.
- nitrogen 13y agoIt's still possible to identify where the letter was sent based on the postmark and unique barcode printed on the envelope when it is scanned. Based on https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5986635 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5986635 and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5986011 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5986011 Edit: this comment is for scrabble's sake, as you and I already exchanged comments on the subject.
- ck2 13y agoAnd yet all the anthrax letters get through to their destination and they are clueless for weeks until someone says something. Makes you wonder what they are really doing with all this data and with the Dark Star.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- Torgo 13y agoIt will just sit there until they have eroded our rights sufficiently that it can be used for any purpose. Storage is cheap, in particular when you print your own money.
- nostromo 13y agoIf you need to send an anonymous letter - hopefully for good (say, whistle blowing) and not evil - you can still do so. Use a fake return address (duh). Drive to a mailbox far away from your work or home. Pick a mailbox that has no security cameras. Don't go into a Post Office, where there will be security cameras. Turn off your phone before going anywhere near the drop location. (This is all coming from a PBS documentary about how they went about the 2001 anthrax attack investigation.)
- gojomo 13y agoAlso: Buy the envelope, stamp, and any mailed material (eg paper) far from your home. Exclusively handle all the materials to be sent in a clean environment far from your normal haunts. You may want to wear a hair net, breathing mask, and gloves. Do not lick the stamp or envelope. Be careful about handwriting anything, if authorities may have any samples of your handwriting — as for example on prior letters addressed, or archived forms filed. Also, do not use a computer laser/inkjet printer, which may add unique invisible tracking codes. After leaving behind your own phone, be sure not to use a vehicle with its own phone (OnStar etc) or any RFID transponders (eg tolltags, which can be read for traffic jam analysis even on non-toll motorways). Similarly, put aside any personal ID or payment cards (passports, some driver's licenses, mass-transit stored-value cards, etc) which may have remotely-readable RFID transponders. Try to arrange for your phone, computer, or residence to continue giving off its usual signals of your presence – so that the period of the letter mailing doesn't show up as a suspiciously idle time for you. Avoid all private and public surveillance cameras, or disguise yourself (and your car's license plate from automated readers). Still: Even with all these steps, it's likely the individual's capability to opt out, with effort, from being tracked will soon be obsolete. It will be too cheap and appealing to video-record all public spaces, or even regularly dust all public spaces with unique molecular tags so that when examining an artifact later (a letter, vehicle, article of clothing, etc), all other places it has recently been are evident to careful analysis.
- DanBC 13y agoMI5 had a nickname of "Box" or "Box500" because postal mail was sent to "PO Box 500". The letter would be put in an envelope. That envelope would be addressed with a department (but not a name). That envelope would then be put in another envelope. The outside envelope would be sent to Box 500. It is kind of weird that in the 21st century we're re-learning ancient tradecraft from retired spies.
- charonn0 13y agoI can think of no legal or Constitutional arguments against this program. Yet, I am still deeply troubled by its existence. I call it unconstitutional by reason of scale.
- mpyne 13y ago> I call it unconstitutional by reason of scale. Which is actually the kind of argument which justices on the Supreme Court might be comfortable with. "Yes, this program somehow squeezes into the letter of the law, but not anywhere close to the intent of the law or the Constitution".
- lifeguard 13y agohttp://media.boingboing.net/wp-content/uploads/2013/07/Screen-Shot-2013-07-03-at-12.26-600x319.jpg http://media.boingboing.net/wp-content/uploads/2013/07/Scree...
- Metrop0218 13y agoWhy is this news? Of course they log mail for law enforcement, that's a no brainer! This has nothing to do with the NSA fallout and the fact that it's being framed as such is just silly.
- anaptdemise 13y agoExcept... "Law enforcement officials need warrants to open the mail, although President George W. Bush asserted in a signing statement in 2007 that the federal government had the authority to open mail without warrants in emergencies or foreign intelligence cases." The scanning of the envelope is rather benign and critical to efficient operation of the mail sorting/routing system. However, the long term storage of correspondence and association in light of recent NSA disclosures is more concerning. The possibility of abuse is enormous. All you would have to do is find someone that is being tracked and start placing letters addressed to any of your political enemies in their mailbox for pick up.
- jurassic 13y agoI wonder if private carriers, e.g. FedEx, are also under surveillance.
- guruz 13y agoEverytime I read things like this, I'm wondering why the US still has no strong Pirate Party. (Yes, I know, Winner-takes-it-all-2-party-system..) Are you guys not getting fed up at some point? Land of the free, please be it again.
- krapp 13y agoWell, people getting fed up (with how left-wing and liberal the US was getting) is how we ended up with the Tea Party, which is now apparently enough of a force that it controls the Republicans by proxy, and meanwhile Occupy seems to be so much dust in the wind, so make of that what you will. I would vote for the Pirate Party. Unfortunately I can't.
- wesleyd 13y agoThe US predilection for writing a sender's details on the outside of mail has always struck me as poor civic hygiene.
- ChuckMcM 13y agoIf its an image it suggests that it might be fun to print QR codes on your mail which refer to specific URLs. If the URL is accessed you get a hit on who looked it up. Sort of like putting a 1x1 gif in an email which is loaded from your web site as cheap analytics (pro tip, don't do this if you work at Google, the security guys don't like it :-). Always interesting if you can get the other side to reveal information by playing on the fact that they are trying to get as much information about you as possible.
- jack-r-abbit 13y agoThat assumes that what ever is getting the images is also going to process them as QR codes and follow any URL encoded in them. Based on what the system is described as doing, I don't see why it would have any concern over a QR code since QR codes are not an accepted form of addressing a envelope.
- ChuckMcM 13y agoAll US mail gets a delivery bar code imprinted on it when it is sorted. There are quality checks that verify that the delivery bar code is accurate. Electronic postage is also created using 2D barcodes. My guess is that the folks who build such systems have them just eat bar codes for lunch (which is to say interpret all bar codes) and include that interpretation in the meta data. If as you say they are never looked at (and I can certainly believe that is true) then the URL you encoded would never be accessed. If however you got a web log entry on your web server that your URL was fetched from a machine run by Booz Hamilton, well there ya go, a bit of information extracted by putting a puzzle in front of them. :-)
- hnriot 13y agoI think it's naive to ever have thought that all network and mail were not being monitored. America has been a police state since the "threat" of communism, and it's only now that we're seeing proof.
- graycat 13y agoFrom a secure, undisclosed location from some secret intercepts via advanced technological means from an interview in a secure vault inside a Faraday cage with multi-sensor shielding in bedrock deep under the Senate chamber: Interviewer: Chairman Feinstein, what can you tell us about the USPS data collection just reported by the NYT? Chairman Feinstein: Our committee received highly confidential, double secret, triple national command authority top secret, quadruple crypto secret, eyes only, not to be remembered (as in the movie Men in Black -- it wasn't just a movie) on the main threats to US national security. Interviewer: And? Chairman Feinstein: We got the best of the best of the best. Interviewer: And? Chairman Feinstein: Well, we learned about the main threats to US national security, in descending order of seriousness, (1) invisible squads of ETs corrupting our precious bodily fluids, (2) marauding giant herds of 100 ton, angry, rabid mastodons destroying our cities, and (3) progress in the genetics of intelligence that produced a strain of giant rats with intelligence and cunning far above that of humans. Yes, the rats have escaped and are now breeding rapidly in the sewers of our major East Coast cities and spreading quickly west. They have been stowaways on airlines and now are colonizing San Francisco and spreading rapidly on the West Coast. Interviewer: And why have we not heard of these massive dangers before? Chairman Feinstein: Isn't it obvious? The intense work of our committee, yes, with that of the House, and our national security command authority has been successful. Interviewer: But what about the Boston bombers? Chairman Feinstein: Well, nearly successful. But that was a small gap compared with invisible squads of ETs, marauding mastodons, and super genius intelligent giant rats. Interviewer: But what did all of that work cost? Chairman Feinstein: The budget is classified, so high that no one can see it, not even God. Interviewer: Ms. Chairman, thank you for your interview, and I'm sure all US citizens will be intensely interested in the work of you and your committee.
- tootie 13y agoGood thing I stopped using mail like 7 years ago.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]