As Washington officials continue to grapple with the fallout from the NSA scandal, it has been revealed that the US Postal Service photographs the outside of every piece of mail it processes each year - around 160 billion pieces annually.
At the request of law enforcement agencies, postal workers take
pictures of the letters and packages before they are
delivered, the New York Times reported.
The information is then stored for an indefinite period of time
in the event a law enforcement official requests it. Each year,
tens of thousands of pieces of mail are subjected to further
scrutiny.
Reading the contents of a letter requires a court-ordered
warrant, but in the case of ‘mail cover’ requests, law
enforcement agencies submit a letter to the Postal Service, which
“rarely denies a request.”
Although the ‘mail covers’ program has been around for nearly a
century, its updated successor, the Mail Isolation Control and
Tracking (MICT) program, was created in the aftermath of the
anthrax attacks in late 2001 that killed five people, including
two postal workers.
MICT requests are separated into two categories: those related to
possible criminal activity and those that are meant to protect
national security. Requests based on suspected criminal activity
average 15,000 to 20,000 per year, unnamed law enforcement
officials told the Times.
The number of requests for mail covers related to the fight
against terrorism has not been made public.
Although law enforcement officials must have warrants to open
private correspondence, former President George W. Bush signed
off on a document in 2007 that gave the federal government the
authority to open mail without warrants in “emergencies or in
foreign intelligence cases.”
The Federal Bureau of Investigations revealed the existence of
MICT last month in the course of an investigation over
ricin-laced letters mailed to President Barack Obama and New York
City mayor Michael Bloomberg.
News of the US Postal Service’s surveillance program comes as
Washington is facing heated criticism over a formerly covert
surveillance program that gave the National Security Agency
(NSA), in cooperation with nine of the world’s largest internet
companies, sweeping powers to collect data on telephone calls and
internet habits of billions of people both at home and abroad.
The information was made public after former NSA contractor,
Edward Snowden, blew the whistle on the activities.
Officials in the Obama administration, meanwhile, are attempting
to justify the NSA’s surveillance programs, saying the electronic
monitoring amounts to the same thing as examining the outside of
a letter. At the very least, the program shows that traditional
mail is held up to the same kind of scrutiny that the NSA has
given to phone calls, e-mail and internet services.
“It’s a treasure trove of information,” James J. Wedick, a
former FBI agent told The New York Times. “Looking at just the
outside of letters and other mail, I can see who you bank with,
who you communicate with — all kinds of useful information that
gives investigators leads that they can then follow up on with a
subpoena.”
But, he added: “It can be easily 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.”
Bruce Schneier, a computer security expert and an author, called
the program an invasion of privacy.
“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 aren’t reading the
contents,” he told the US newspaper.
The surveillance requests on mail covers are granted for about 30
days, and can be extended for up to 120 days.