
U.S. Postal Service Logging All Mail for Law Enforcement (2013) - gwern
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/04/us/monitoring-of-snail-mail.html?pagewanted=all
======
jmadsen
This is the biggest danger we face - the slow deterioration of our privacy to
the point where when things like this emerge, a large part of the population's
reaction is "why didn't you expect this?"

In fact, I would NOT expect the post office to spend millions in technology to
track letters. They shouldn't have any INTEREST in doing that - it isn't
important to their main function of delivering mail.

I expected them to use tech to better be able read zip codes & route more
efficiently, and to count mail to better place people and resources where most
needed.It should stop at that.

Simply because something is public does not mean the govt should be spending
resources tracking and storing it

~~~
theworst
I'm curious about exploring your perspective, if you don't mind indulging me.

Suppose, in the course of their everyday routing systems, the USPS were
tracking the information in question. Pretend it were free to transfer that
data to the law enforcement authorities.

Would you have an issue with it, if it were free as part of doing business?

~~~
Retric
Proactive mass surveillance does not work. So even if the USPS is not spending
money other parts of the government is going to waste money dealing with this
crap.

Sure, we can get into a debate about the ethics of surveillance, but as long
as there is zero benefit it seems pointless.

As to why it fails, there is simply to many false positives.

~~~
chongli
_Proactive mass surveillance does not work._

Sure it does, just not for what it is claimed to by its proponents. The real
point of proactive mass surveillance is to perpetuate a culture of mass fear,
a chilling effect on free speech and to maintain the socioeconomic status quo;
that is, to limit upward mobility and destroy any notion of wealth
redistribution before it gets off the ground.

~~~
csallen
This is the most ridiculous thing I've ever read. Fewer than 1% of the people
I know live in a state of active fear of our government. There are certainly
nefarious goals behind many incidents of mass surveillance, but
"perpetuat[ing] a culture of mass fear" is not one of them. The vast majority
of people don't even _know_ this is going on, let alone care.

~~~
watwut
The vast majority of people is not important, important is whether they feel
comfortable to challenge those in power or not.

State of active fear in everybody is not what it is about. The "benefit" is
state when you think twice before you donate to Wikileaks or when you hesitate
to voice support for Occupy Wall Street, because they might have been used
against you at some point.

It is also the state when those you donated or joined occupy have to be more
careful about what they do and say, because they know things said in
supposedly private conversations might be twisted against them.

~~~
csallen
I know a few people who participated in Occupy Wall Street, and I myself have
publicly spoken out in favor of Wikileaks. Having to "think twice" about doing
either of these things is natural and hardly a "culture of mass fear", whether
the post office is tracking mail or not.

------
aviv
I'm surprised the article did not raise the point that the US government
effectively maintains a huge database of everybody's handwriting.

~~~
ryanmim
If you have enough written content that you've placed online, the US
government can identify you anyway. A person's writing style and specific use
of function words is their handwriting for the digital time. Creepy/cool
linguistics.

------
sampo
_" Earth Liberation Front, a radical environmental group labeled eco-
terrorists by the Federal Bureau of Investigation."_

In 2001, Earth Liberation Front firebombed a Center for Urban Horticulture at
the University of Washington, so they really were eco-terrorists.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/University_of_Washington_firebo...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/University_of_Washington_firebombing_incident)

~~~
zymhan
That's a distinction worth noting. Monitored not for political leanings, but
for membership in a violent organization.

~~~
eli
ELF isn't really an organization, there aren't really members and non-members.
People did actions in the name of the organization, but I don't think there
was much broader coordination.

------
bediger4000
This deserves a lot more attention than it's gotten so far.

Why isn't this data used to do something for good, rather than for what we can
safely presume to be evil? For instance, I'm sure we could use this data to
track down every evil junkmailing sub-human "direct mail marketing" moron,
publicize their contact info, and let's see how they like getting nothing but
poop in their mailboxes?

~~~
CapitalistCartr
First-class mail doesn't pay the bills at the USPS; junk mail does. The junk
mailers are the customer, and as the saying goes about online services, "If
you're not paying you're the product."

~~~
bediger4000
I think you (and the folks making the same point below) misunderstand. The
USPS is indeed part of the problem. They would also be utterly incapable of
carrying out the kind of "enhanced" treatment of direct marketing "people"
that's required.

Since the USPS is only the instrument, giving all the postal covers to the
FBI, I say let the FBI/CIA/NSA/NRO have a shot at the direct marketeers. Those
organizations have demonstrated a willingness to "deviate" from the usual
behaviors in the defense of Truth, Justice and The American Way. They're just
the sort of folks you'd want to "handle" the Direct Marketing Association.

~~~
pessimizer
Because direct mail campaigns aren't crimes, and are crucial to the current
funding model of USPS? They'd sooner decide to stop carrying mail from
individuals, and _only_ deliver mail from customers large enough to drop ship
their mail to the local BMC in palletized presorted bundles.

~~~
smacktoward
We could always drop the (ridiculous) expectation that the USPS should show a
profit and just fund mail delivery through our tax dollars, of course. We did
things that way for nearly 200 years -- the current quasi-private incarnation
of the postal service only goes back to 1970 (see
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Postal_Reorganization_Act](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Postal_Reorganization_Act))
-- and it worked pretty well.

It's always amusing to hear people complaining about the USPS putting junk
mailers before the rest of us. The reason the USPS does that is because _we
forced them to._ If you take a public service and turn it into a for-profit
corporation, you shouldn't be surprised when it starts looking out for the
interests of those it can make the biggest profits off of.

------
pascalo
The Stasi did mail tracking on a massive scale in the GDR before the wall came
down. Funny/Sad how things seem to go in circles.

~~~
SilasX
Except they had to do it all old-school: no modern databases, no quick lookup
and correlation of geographic info, no optical character recognition.

~~~
XorNot
And they also kicked in doors and murdered people routinely.

Which funny enough is _also_ happening in the US, but has nothing to do with
mail tracking and everything to do with approval of no-knock police raids and
general apathy to ever doing something about obvious corruption and brutality
by people like Arpaio.

Who in turn has absolutely no access to any of said surveillance
infrastructure to start with...

~~~
contingencies
Hey, someone's got to stand for _freedom and democracy_ , right? Now let me
rendition you to a situation of torture and solitary confinement without
trial.

------
GabrielF00
The outside of a letter is public information - when you give the letter to a
postal worker you know that a series of people who you will never meet are
going to have to look at that address in order to route it to the right place.
It's not clear to me how you can have a reasonable expectation of privacy.

~~~
scrollaway
It's not so much about expecting things to be private, but more of expecting
things not to end up in databases, virtually forever.

As programmers, we tend to view the world in a very "black and white" fashion,
similar to our security model: If it's public, there is no expectation of
privacy.

But the world is not like this ... shouldn't be like this. While there should
be both technical and legal mechanisms in place to prevent privacy abuses, it
does not mean that, if they're not there, we should simply expect governments
to do as they please, log everything, put us in all sorts of databases, make
those databases accessible to all sorts of people, etc.

~~~
Agnogenic
I have to agree. The issue is isn't about the USPS having access to the
information on the outside of mail, but that they are cataloging it. When I
send a letter, I am providing my information for a service to be fulfilled and
not for it to be put in long-term storage. In some sense, I think this is
comparable to email. If Google was giving out a record of the addresses I've
sent email to and received email from, I would consider it an invasion of my
privacy. Services need to be upfront about what is being done with our data--
anything else is dishonest. When I know what is being done with my
information, I can make an informed decision on what services to use.

~~~
XorNot
We have had actual cases where someone mailed a bunch of anthrax through the
US post.

Given that the post can be used to send dangerous physical objects, it seems
prudent to maintain medium-term records of what was sent and where to assist
in the prevention of this type of terrorism.

Because the alternative, is we wait till it happens, we have no record of
where anything came from, and then we get to engage in a multi-month campaign
of opening and inspecting mail arbitrarily considered "suspect" to try and
prevent the next round.

~~~
wooter
"type of terrorism"

what makes your example "terrorism" and not "crime"?

~~~
XorNot
Why is any terrorism not just "crime"?

Call it what you want: if we have no records of where mail was sent from and
where it got delivered too over a medium-scale timeframe, we are seriously
limiting any ability to deal wit this type of activity effectively.

The term "letter bomb" is a real thing that was and still is really done.

~~~
DanBC
Do terrorists put a correct return address on the mail and use a local
mailbox?

Or do they forge a return address and use a distant mailbox?

Mail data didn't catch the unabomber - has it caught anyone?

~~~
XorNot
You have to travel to the mailbox to send something from it.

That mailbox is generally surrounded by other people who might notice it's
comings and goings, or unfamiliar characters posting large packages.

Frankly, the idea that metadata can't help us solve crimes but it can
obviously be used to nebulously control a population is an oxymoron. Either
metadata is useful, or it isn't. If it's useful, then why isn't it useful or
potentially useful for dealing with crime? You can't have it both ways.

------
delbel
I live out in a rural area and our post office is horrible. When I moved into
town, I didn't receive mail for 8 months even after approaching them numerous
times and complaining. At one point I opened a mail box in a neighboring town.
UPS and FedEx had no problem delivering packages. I actually bragged to my
neighbors that "I don't get mail" at one point. Anyway I finally complained
big time after not receiving some USPS package from aliexpress, and they
started to deliver. I wish I could opt-out, I have never given out my address
before, officially, and only receive junk mail. Makes me think of the Seinfeld
skit, [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hox-
ni8geIw](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hox-ni8geIw)

------
dan_bk
> “I’m no terrorist,” he said. “I’m an activist.”

Same treatment the "Occupy" people got (i.e. raids before they had even done
anything). This is a pattern now.

------
NoMoreNicksLeft
I suspected this months ago, and I pointed out how trivial it would be to log
addresses on reddit. I was called a conspiracy theory nutcase.

I'll go one further: the high-speed sorting machines for envelopes could
easily be modified to photograph the interior of envelopes and that this is
already happening. You only need to shine a light through them to do this.

~~~
harry8
I suspected it months ago too. In July last year, when the NYT published the
story. :-)

~~~
jqm
Right? I thought the guy in story looked familiar. Sure enough, same article
from a year ago.

------
aburan28
The fact of the matter is that until our legal system and laws drastically
change we cannot allow this level of surveillance. We have too many people
wasting away in prisons for personal drug use, disproportionate sentences, and
a increasingly alarming for profit prison industry. Until that is fixed we
cannot allow this kind of power.

------
DanBC
I thought everyone knew this was happening and that it started shortly after
911 when there were some Anthrax postal attacks in the US - hence all the
insistance on people including a return address on all mail and mailrooms
being cautious about mail with no return address.

------
tokenadult
This has been submitted before, so I've had time to think about this issue. 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/downloads/](http://www.aeinstein.org/downloads/)

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.

We have to be courageous. We also have to be grounded in facts. There is still
no indication that any of my postal mail or any of my telephone calls are
being listened in on by anyone in the United States. The program described in
the submitted article looks at the OUTSIDE of mail pieces. I had to assume I
was under continuous surveillance when I lived in Taiwan in the 1980s, and
that nothing I said or did was private. I still expressed support for the
freedom and democracy movement there. I was not afraid. There is even less to
be afraid of today in the United States, but I will still keep speaking up for
freedom, just in case.

~~~
sampo
>
> [http://www.aeinstein.org/organizationsde07.html](http://www.aeinstein.org/organizationsde07.html)

Page not found

~~~
tokenadult
Link corrected; thank you for catching that. I'll repeat the current link here
for good measure.

[http://www.aeinstein.org/downloads/](http://www.aeinstein.org/downloads/)

------
zaroth
This is just a single good example of an extremely wide reaching pattern of
large scale data acquisition, processing, storage, and data mining.

License plate capture, facial recognition, mail and email envelopes, contact
lists, credit card receipts, CCTV, social network trawling... soon enough
drones will capture and store 24/7 aerial video of all major cities.

I take it for granted that the government will know everyone I know, know
everywhere I go, and know everything that I buy, sell, earn, and save. Pretty
much the only thing left you have a chance at keeping private is the content
of your conversations, and good luck with that.

------
wfunction
Reminds me: anyone know why envelopes delivered by USPS sometimes have small
(< 1cm long) and consistent tears along their edges sometimes? Why does the
post office do this?

~~~
Bluestrike2
Life for a letter can be a bit rough. Most likely, those are just from
automated sorting machines.

------
greg5green
> Together, the two programs show that postal mail is subject to the same kind
> of scrutiny that the National Security Agency has given to telephone calls
> and e-mail.

Uhh, I'm pretty sure the NSA scrutiny included the bodies of said calls and
emails. I'm slightly offended by an agency tracking who I'm in contact with,
but I've very offended by an agency knowing why I'm in contact with said
person.

~~~
zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC
You should also be very offended by the metadata tracking. Metadata is much
easier to process and more often than not does reveal why you are in contact
anyhow. It's one of "their" propaganda tricks to make you believe that it's
"just" the metadata, while it actually (a) tells you much more than you
initially think about the content of the communication (after all, they don't
just see the connections, but also the timing and direction, and that tells
you a lot about the relationship between people) and (b) at least for the time
being is much easier to process anyhow.

------
stretchwithme
Amazing. Orwell was just wrong about WHEN we'd all be under government
surveillance.

OK, maybe its not that bad yet. But when we realize its as bad as he
predicted, it will be too late.

Relax, chicken. The hot tub you are in isn't boiling you yet.

------
VonGuard
That's why the library is the only civil service you can trust. They delete
your records when you return books, unless you opt-out.

~~~
schoen
Not necessarily true of every library system. (I know it's true of SFPL, but I
believe not everywhere else.)

------
j4kp07
Sadly, this is old news. This article is a year old and I've read of other
cases that go back 4-5 years.

------
higherpurpose
It's like they don't care at all about the Constitution anymore.

------
dylanrw
The EU's right to be forgotten laws are sounding very attractive...

~~~
bla2
The EU's right to be forgotten says that you can ask search engines to remove
search results about you. It has nothing to do with government surveillance.

~~~
zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC
That's actually not true. There isn't even any actual "right to be forgotten",
there just are data protection directives and laws and the like, which were
the basis for the ECJ decision that got called the "right to be forgotten"
which happened to be about search engines, Google in particular. The same laws
do apply to the processing of personally identifiable information in any
company, and that in principle should include postal service companies in the
EU, as well as to the government itself, though sometimes with limitations.

That does not mean that postal services in the EU don't do the same thing for
various reasons, but the legality is questionable.

~~~
GoofballJones
The EU has it out for Google in particular. Why don't they go after the sites
that have the information in the first place?

Regardless, if you have a news story about you, that you did something, it
should be there as information forever. If the story is correct, then it's
there. 20 years from now, you shouldn't have the right to say to some search
engine that just happens to index it that you don't want it indexed anymore.
The facts are still the same. The news story is still accurate. The site that
has the news story still has it. Just because it may paint you in a negative
light 20 years ago still doesn't mean you get the right to expunge that from
the public record.

The implications of this are just chilling and far reaching.

~~~
zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC
Noone is "going after" anyone. Some guy sued Google, the court decided the
case they were presented with (and said some things that are applicable
outside the specific case).

As for the actual matter, I disagree. In particular, there are quite a few
steps between "expunge from the public record" and "make it the most visible
thing on the web", where the latter quite clearly is in conflict with the goal
of resocialization in the justice system, for example.

------
sfrank2147
I don't think this is comparable to recent NSA actions. The Post Office is a
government agency. It's not reasonable to expect the government not to keep
track of the mail it delivers.

~~~
sage_joch
It's also not reasonable for the public to be excluded from the conversation
of how that data is handled.

------
notastartup
I'm just sick and tired of the herd mentality quick to say "but I have nothing
to hide therefore they can spy on me."

This is extremely short sighted response and one which the government well
expect. This is why they are able to get away with this gross violation of
civil right to freedom and privacy, pillars of the free world which is
attacked.

The terrorists have simply one. To cause this kind of paranoia and
overreaction from the government which attacks every one of our rights as
human beings, is clearly a win for the terrorists and also for those in power,
and keep their power.

