
U.S. Postal Service Logging All Mail for Law Enforcement - rdp
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/04/us/monitoring-of-snail-mail.html?hp
======
chime
About 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
Better 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-
illegib...](http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/04/us/where-mail-with-illegible-
addresses-goes-to-be-read.html?pagewanted=all)

~~~
dchichkov
I wouldn't be surprised if modern domain specific OCR can give you an error
rate that beats that of a time-constrained human reader.

~~~
taeric
While I agree with you at the general level, it sounds like these trained
individuals are ridiculously good at what they do. Even seven years ago, to be
able to take a crack at an envelope in just 10 seconds and type out the result
is impressive.

~~~
mortehu
And their jobs are getting harder:

"It used to be that we'd get letters that were somewhat legible but the
machines weren't good enough to read them. Now we get letters and packages
with the most awful handwriting you can imagine."

------
javajosh
Goddamnit 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.

~~~
mistercow
Essentially what you're proposing is a DoS of the tracking system. The problem
with that (at least with physical mail) is that it takes far more resources to
generate physical mail than to scan it. A DoS shaped like that will never work
unless you have some way of massively amplifying the effect you are having.

Postage on a post card is currently 33 cents. How many postcards do you reckon
you'd have to send before the automatic scanning process costs even one cent
extra?

~~~
malandrew
I would imagine the DoS is half of the benefit. The other half is manufactured
reasonable doubt.

If a person were to send periodic letters with real and fake cryptographic
messages to random individuals of importance, barring a warrant to read the
contents of each letter, that would constitute reasonable doubt as to whether
or not that person was legitimately communicating with another person of
interest.

~~~
mistercow
It would also likely be taken as suspicious in its own right.

~~~
malandrew
True, but given the facts of the past few weeks, it's completely reasonable to
set up such a system like this now for yourself as a hedge for what the
political landscape may look like in the future. I know what is illegal today,
but I have no idea what may be made illegal tomorrow or 10 years from now.
Implementing such a system is a hedge/insurance against dystopian futures that
are becoming reality.

As long as such a system is in place and significantly predates (on the scale
of years) any crime you are accused of, this argument of hedging against a
dystopia makes a lot more sense and is far more defensible.

~~~
finnw
> _I know what is illegal today_

That is impressive, even if you are a lawyer.

~~~
malandrew
Hehe. Yeah, I know. :)

------
elmuchoprez
Maybe 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
Abortion protesters used to write down the license plates... just some
publicly available meta-data, right?

~~~
thrownaway2424
Yes. What is your point? Nobody has any expectation of a right to drive
anonymously.

~~~
nitrogen
But 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
That 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.

~~~
nitrogen
I would argue that a _de facto_ right to privacy is created by the nature of
the destination. It doesn't matter if someone can see you or your car, the
fact that it's a medical destination should create a right to privacy of that
trip.

~~~
mpyne
> It doesn't matter if someone can see you or your car, the fact that it's a
> medical destination should create a right to privacy of that trip.

So what you're saying is that the government should enforce a built-in gag
order on people? Interesting...

~~~
nitrogen
_> It doesn't matter if someone can see you or your car, the fact that it's a
medical destination should create a right to privacy of that trip.

So what you're saying is that the government should enforce a built-in gag
order on people? Interesting..._

They already do with regard to medical information, in the form of HIPAA. A
right to privacy has to include the right to prevent others from disclosing
certain kinds of information about oneself. You could also consider it from a
defamation/slander/libel perspective.

~~~
mpyne
> They already do with regard to medical information, in the form of HIPAA.

HIPAA type records are not publically displayed when people walk outside.

To the extent that a given condition _is_ public people are allowed to note
that. This is why assholes were legally allowed to call me pimple-face, for
instance.

~~~
nitrogen
_HIPAA type records are not publically displayed when people walk outside._

No, but there are some things that ostensibly take place in public but should
still be considered private, absent some urgently pressing higher need that
can only be met by disclosure.

 _To the extent that a given condition is public people are allowed to note
that. This is why assholes were legally allowed to call me pimple-face, for
instance._

At some point of excess, wouldn't that fall under verbal abuse, harassment, or
bullying, depending on whether you're considering laws or school policies, and
thus not be considered free speech?

In general I believe people should be able to say anything they want, but if
what they say or to whom they say it violates someone else's rights, their
victims shouldn't have to put up with it.

~~~
mpyne
> At some point of excess, wouldn't that fall under verbal abuse, harassment,
> or bullying, depending on whether you're considering laws or school
> policies, and thus not be considered free speech?

Perhaps. But should that point come the speech will lose protection because it
is abusive, harassing, or bullying nature. Not because it describes my medical
condition.

------
rayiner
Couldn'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
> 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
This 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
That might be telling you that there isn't a good reason to do so.

~~~
sneak
Oh, 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.

------
nostromo
If 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
Also:

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.

------
tokenadult
I 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.

~~~
javajosh
> ...courage is what it takes to undermine a dictatorship

Yes, and thanks for a great comment. I'm going to read that link,
[http://www.aeinstein.org/organizationsde07.html](http://www.aeinstein.org/organizationsde07.html).

Anger and hatred after 9/11 is what led us down this spiral, and more anger
and hatred would only change the names, not the system.

~~~
specialist
_Anger and hatred after 9 /11 is what led us down this spiral_

9/11 merely silenced the critics, allowing the power elite to bum rush the
Constitution, aka the Shock Doctrine. Panopticon has always been the plan.
There's always a plan, waiting for the opportunity.

~~~
javajosh
It inspired people who knew better to compromise on their beliefs about
freedom and torture and rule of law, and we've been paying for it ever since.

~~~
incongruity
And it scared those who didn't know better into not asking themselves the
tough questions required to become one who does know better.

------
oinksoft
Ah, I see I've arrived at Hacker/USA Government Abuses News. And I say that as
somebody deeply interested in these stories.

~~~
run4yourlives
Agreed, although the top comment here was actually quite interesting.

HN has made an exception for all things US gov't spying related. I even lost
my flagging rights for flagging all the snowden stuff (which I thought was
exactly what you were supposed to do when you thought something was off
topic... not my fault it was the entire front page!)

It's an important topic, but like you I preferred when HN was an oasis of tech
away from this nonsense.

~~~
nitrogen
_It 's an important topic, but like you I preferred when HN was an oasis of
tech away from this nonsense._

Unfortunately, politics have invaded our tech oasis, and I don't mean HN. The
politicization and militarization of technology is undeniable; at this point,
retreating to some new oasis and denying it won't make it go away. While I do
want a site where I can see more articles about Erlang and lambda calculus,
for now at least, I can accept the pressing need to maintain focus on
political issues that undermine our ability to build the technology we want
and have it used for good instead of evil.

~~~
run4yourlives
>The politicization and militarization of technology is undeniable

You make this statement as if it was some sort of new happening. This is as
old as technology itself. Finding new ways to kill each other has been the
number one driver of technology progress, and always has been.

~~~
nitrogen
The web was not invented to kill people.

~~~
run4yourlives
Ah, the web was invented to keep military sites in communication (presumably
so that they could keep killing people) while the rest of the world was dying
a horrible, nuclear death. So it kinda was.

------
rdp
I 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
So does the same apply to email headers? "We didn't look at the body or
subject".

~~~
rdp
The 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
In 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.

------
coldcode
Everything you do is subject to some kind of informational storage by the
government. Some day our thoughts might be recordable too.

~~~
knodi
They already are. Viewing someones data problem, search results, texts, files
and etc one can to surprising accuracy determine the thoughts and inner
working of the through process of a person.

~~~
mortehu
Surprising, you say? Do you have a link?

------
charonn0
I 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
> 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".

------
bediger4000
Is 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
Prosecutors 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.

------
hnriot
I 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.

------
coldcode
I also assume that Fedex and UPS et all are required to record your data as
well?

~~~
trotsky
I 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
To 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...

------
Metrop0218
Why 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
Except...

"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.

------
ChuckMcM
If 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
That 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
All 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. :-)

------
scrabble
Could 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
Yes, 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
It'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.

------
guruz
Everytime 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
Well, 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.

------
graycat
From 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.

------
kmfrk
Guess 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
Indeed! 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
Haha, 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.

------
lifeguard
[http://media.boingboing.net/wp-
content/uploads/2013/07/Scree...](http://media.boingboing.net/wp-
content/uploads/2013/07/Screen-Shot-2013-07-03-at-12.26-600x319.jpg)

------
jurassic
I wonder if private carriers, e.g. FedEx, are also under surveillance.

------
wesleyd
The US predilection for writing a sender's details on the outside of mail has
always struck me as poor civic hygiene.

------
ck2
And 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.

~~~
Torgo
It 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.

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tootie
Good thing I stopped using mail like 7 years ago.

