When Edward Snowden leaked the existence of an entire web of National Security Agency surveillance, much of it on American citizens, people were outraged that the government was monitoring who they were calling and sending e-mail to. It turns out that the U.S. Postal Service has been tracking regular mail for years, according to The New York Times.
The U.S. Postal Service has two surveillance programs, mail covers and the more expansive Mail Isolation Control and Tracking, it uses to see who certain American citizens may be corresponding with. Computers take images of every single piece of mail that is processed in the U.S., roughly 160 billion pieces, and saves them onto computers. It is not known for how long they keep the images, according to The New York Times.
The mail covers program has been in operation for over one hundred years. At the request of law enforcement officers the post office will record the information on the outside of letters headed to and from a certain recipient. Postal workers cannot open the letters, doing so would require a warrant, thus making the program very similar to how the NSA was recording who people were calling but was unable to listen into the call, reports The New York Times.
"Basically there 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 aren't reading the contents," Bruce Schneier, a computer security expert, told The New York Times.
The larger Mail Isolation Control and Tracking program was created after the 2001 anthrax attacks killed five people. The program had been kept secret until the FBI mentioned it while trying to discover who had sent ricin tainted letters to New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg and President Barack Obama. This program enables the postal service to trace the route a piece of mail took when requested by law enforcement, according to The New York Times.
"In the past, mail covers were used when you had a reason to suspect someone of a crime," Mark Rasch, a Justice Department employee who has worked with mail covers, told The New York Times. "Now it seems to be, 'Let's record everyone's mail so in the future we might go back and see who you were communicating with.' Essentially you've added mail covers on millions of Americans."
Much like with the NSA scandal the law enforcement branches that have used the programs are defending the programs as an invaluable resource that has helped bring down everything from drug smuggling, to fraud to prostitution rings. James Wedick, a former FBI agent, explained the value of the programs to The New York Times, but also warned that it can be abused.
"It's a treasure trove of information," Wedick said. "Looking at just the outside of letters and other mail, I can see who you back with, who you communicate with - all kinds of useful information that gives investigators leads that they can follow up on with a subpoena. It can easily be abused because it's so easy to use and you don't have to go through a judge to get the information. You just fill out a form."
One example of a time that the system has been abused involved Maricopa County, Ariz., Sheriff Joe Arpaio. Mary Rose Wilcox, a county supervisor, won a settlement of nearly $1 million when it was determined that Arpaio had used mail covers to track her mail for purely political reasons, reports The New York Times.
