EXCLUSIVE: Every year, USPS conducts warrantless surveillance on physical pieces of mail going to and from the homes and businesses of tens of thousands of Americans, a group of United States senators says. Lawmakers are working to stop it.
The notion that only a mail carrier will view a piece of mail is based on a quainter understanding of the mail handling process; a Norman Rockwell view of what a modern postal delivery system entails. In the US, the exterior of every piece of mail is photographed. And the information obtained from these photos, such as religious and political affiliations, is more intimate than people may realize. This data has been described byas “easily abused” and a “treasure trove.
The letter to Barksdale is not merely aimed at telling the chief inspector—an official who oversees dozens of field offices and labs and an army of law enforcement agents and other technical resources—things that he already likely knows. Instead, they’d like him to simply end the process.There is no federal statute requiring the post office to allow mail covers.
The senators note that Church Committee, which was formed in 1975 to investigate US intelligence abuses, uncovered that the Central Intelligence Agency had photographed “the exteriors of over 2 million pieces of mail,” while opening hundreds of thousands of others that belonged to “prominent activists and authors.”
Indeed, the senators say, modern fears of postal abuse hearken back to the Founding Fathers themselves, who decried what Thomas Jefferson called the “infidelities of the post office,” surveillance that broadly forced those at odds with the British occupation to resort to encrypting messages they wished to keep private. These messages include, the lawmakers note, “an early proposal for the Bill of Rights.
The lawmakers ask that Barksdale cease allowing mail covers without the permission of a federal judge, “except in emergencies.” And to increase transparency, they say, the post office should begin publishing annual statistics on the mail covers it does allow. It has not done so since at least 2014 .information about Americans’ political leanings, religious beliefs, or causes they support,” the senators write.
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