Posted on 07/03/2013 11:34:28 AM PDT by mandaladon
WASHINGTON Leslie James Pickering noticed something odd in his mail last September: A handwritten card, apparently delivered by mistake, with instructions for postal workers to pay special attention to the letters and packages sent to his home. Show all mail to supv supervisor for copying prior to going out on the street, read the card. It included Mr. Pickerings name, address and the type of mail that needed to be monitored. The word confidential was highlighted in green.
It was a bit of a shock to see it, said Mr. Pickering, who owns a small bookstore in Buffalo. More than a decade ago, he was a spokesman for the Earth Liberation Front, a radical environmental group labeled eco-terrorists by the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Postal officials subsequently confirmed they were indeed tracking Mr. Pickerings mail but told him nothing else.
As the world focuses on the high-tech spying of the National Security Agency, the misplaced card offers a rare glimpse inside the seemingly low-tech but prevalent snooping of the United States Postal Service.
Mr. Pickering was targeted by a longtime surveillance system called mail covers, but that is only a forerunner of a vastly more expansive effort, the Mail Isolation Control and Tracking program, in which Postal Service computers photograph the exterior of every piece of paper mail that is processed in the United States about 160 billion pieces last year. It is not known how long the government saves the images.
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
Not to mention that little room in the basement where demoted NSA hacks steam them open.
ELF is a terrorist group. If he is/was a member I HOPE someone’s watching him.
Last Holiday season DHS was opening packages and taping them shut, except a few they left open.
From the article:
Basically they are doing the same thing as the other programs, collecting the information on the outside of your mail, the metadata, if you will, of names, addresses, return addresses and postmark locations, which gives the government a pretty good map of your contacts, even if they arent reading the contents, he said.
I haven’t put a return address on an envelope since I found out about “closed cover” monitoring in the 1970’s.
Can’t find a reference with a quick search, but IIRC the Nixon administration was having the post office record return addresses on letters directed to certain recipients.
Never give a government access to ANY information you wouldn’t give to your bitterest enemy.
Possible NJCT ping.
bttt
No doubt.
If he is/was a member I HOPE someones watching him.
Without a warrant? Or do you care about the Fourth Amendment?
Shocking.
If it is tax deductible, yes. Otherwise, no. If anything, put the address you are sending the mail to in the return spot, in case the handling equipment shucks the stamps off (has happened to me numerous times).
And why we don’t trust the USPS. Not only are they lazy incompetent rude buffoons, they are also spies.
Who said there is no warrant?
>>ELF is a terrorist group. If he is/was a member I HOPE someones watching him.
So you are in favor of the government spying on citizens without warrants unless its against you?
In the old days of Russia there used to be so many people listening to phone calls that the actual people talking had trouble hearing each other.
Sounds like were in a similar position, just with better technology.
One of the requirements for a warrant is it needs to be present to the person who is being searched.
Yes you can have secret warrants but eventually they are required to tell you.
>>Who said there is no warrant?
Who said there was?
My point is the poster assumes there was not.
Elf is a known terrorist group.
This was not Mr Kangaroo.
I have nothing against the government spying on known terrorists. That’s their job.
It is not their job to spy on every single American indiscriminately.
The list, Ping
Let me know if you would like to be on or off the ping list
Most “pre-sort” mail - like monthly bills and advertisements - is handled by sub-contractors, so it might not be digitally archived.
But most personal mail is coded by the USPS, and scanned on both sides, either by computer or by a remote CRT operator.
I know that gets archived for system analysis, but I don't know for how long.
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