[Vision2020] Does This Piss You Off?

[Art Deco]

  [image: The New York Times] <http://www.nytimes.com/>

------------------------------
July 3, 2013
U.S. Postal Service Logging All Mail for Law Enforcement By RON
NIXON<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/n/ron_nixon/index.html>

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. Pickering’s 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 with his wife
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. Pickering’s
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, 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.

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.

The mail covers program, used to monitor Mr. Pickering, is more than a
century old but is still considered a powerful tool. At the request of law
enforcement officials, postal workers record information from the outside
of letters and parcels before they are delivered. (Opening the mail would
require a warrant.) The information is sent to the law enforcement agency
that asked for it. Tens of thousands of pieces of mail each year undergo
this scrutiny.

The Mail Isolation Control and Tracking program was created after the
anthrax attacks in late 2001 that killed five people, including two postal
workers. Highly secret, it seeped into public view last month when the
F.B.I. cited it in its investigation of
ricin<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/subjects/r/ricin_poison/index.html?inline=nyt-classifier>-laced
letters sent to President Obama and Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg. It enables
the Postal Service to retrace the path of mail at the request of law
enforcement. No one disputes that it is sweeping.

“In the past, mail covers were used when you had a reason to suspect
someone of a crime,” said Mark D. Rasch, who started a computer crimes unit
in the fraud section of the criminal division of the Justice Department and
worked on several fraud cases using mail covers. “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.”

Bruce Schneier, a computer security expert and an author, said whether it
was a postal worker taking down information or a computer taking images,
the program was still 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 said.

But law enforcement officials said mail covers and the automatic mail
tracking program are invaluable, even in an era of smartphones and e-mail.

In a criminal complaint filed June 7 in Federal District Court for the
Eastern District of Texas, the F.B.I. said a postal investigator tracing
the ricin letters was able to narrow the search to Shannon Guess
Richardson<http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/08/nyregion/texas-woman-arrested-in-connection-with-ricin-laced-letters.html>,
an actress in New Boston, Tex., by examining information from the front and
back images of 60 pieces of mail scanned immediately before and after the
tainted letters sent to Mr. Obama and Mr. Bloomberg showing return
addresses near her home. Ms. Richardson had originally accused her husband
of mailing the letters, but investigators determined that he was at work
during the time they were mailed.

In 2007, the F.B.I., the Internal Revenue Service and the local police in
Charlotte, N.C., used information gleaned from the mail cover program to
arrest Sallie Wamsley-Saxon and her husband, Donald, charging both with
running a prostitution ring that took in $3 million over six years.
Prosecutors said it was one of the largest and most successful such
operations in the country. Investigators also used mail covers to help
track banking activity and other businesses the couple operated under
different names.

Other agencies, including the Drug Enforcement Administration and the
Department of Health and Human Services, have used mail covers to track
drug smugglers and
Medicare<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/news/health/diseasesconditionsandhealthtopics/medicare/index.html?inline=nyt-classifier>fraud.

“It’s a treasure trove of information,” said James J. Wedick, a former
F.B.I. agent who spent 34 years at the agency and who said he used mail
covers in a number of investigations, including one that led to the
prosecution of several elected officials in California on corruption
charges. “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 said: “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.”

For mail cover requests, law enforcement agencies submit a letter to the
Postal Service, which can grant or deny a request without judicial review.
Law enforcement officials say the Postal Service rarely denies a request.
In other government surveillance programs, like wiretaps, a federal judge
must sign off on the requests.

The mail cover surveillance requests are granted for about 30 days, and can
be extended for up to 120 days. There are two kinds of mail covers: those
related to criminal activity and those requested to protect national
security. Criminal activity requests average 15,000 to 20,000 per year,
said law enforcement officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity
because they are prohibited by law from discussing them. The number of
requests for antiterrorism mail covers has not been made public.

Law enforcement officials need warrants to open the mail, although
President George W. Bush asserted in a signing statement in 2007 that the
federal government had the authority to open mail without warrants in
emergencies or in foreign intelligence cases.

Court challenges to mail covers have generally failed because judges have
ruled that there is no reasonable expectation of privacy for information
contained on the outside of a letter. Officials in both the Bush and Obama
administrations, in fact, have used the mail-cover court rulings to justify
the N.S.A.’s surveillance programs, saying the electronic monitoring
amounts to the same thing as a mail cover. Congress briefly conducted
hearings on mail cover programs in 1976, but has not revisited the issue.

The program has led to sporadic reports of abuse. In May 2012, Mary Rose
Wilcox, a Maricopa County supervisor in Arizona, was awarded nearly $1
million by a federal judge after winning a lawsuit against Sheriff Joe
Arpaio. The sheriff, known for his
immigration<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/subjects/i/immigration_and_refugees/index.html?inline=nyt-classifier>raids,
had obtained mail covers from the Postal Service to track her mail.
The judge called the investigation into Ms. Wilcox politically motivated
because she had been a frequent critic of Mr. Arpaio’s, objecting to what
she considered the targeting of Hispanics in his immigration sweeps. The
case is being appealed.

In the mid-1970s the Church Committee, a Senate panel that documented
C.I.A. abuses, faulted a program created in the 1950s in New York that used
mail covers to trace and sometimes open mail going to the Soviet Union from
the United States.

A suit brought in 1973 by a high school student in New Jersey, whose letter
to the Socialist Workers Party was traced by the F.B.I. as part of an
investigation into the group, led to a rebuke from a federal judge.

Postal officials refused to discuss either mail covers or the Mail
Isolation Control and Tracking program.

Mr. Pickering says he suspects that the F.B.I. requested the mail cover to
monitor his mail because a former associate said the bureau had called with
questions about him. Last month, he filed a lawsuit against the Postal
Service, the F.B.I. and other agencies, saying they were improperly
withholding information.

A spokeswoman for the F.B.I. in Buffalo declined to comment.

Mr. Pickering said that although he was arrested two dozen times for acts
of civil disobedience and convicted of a handful of misdemeanors, he was
never involved in the arson attacks the Earth Liberation Front carried out.
He said he became tired of focusing only on environmental activism and
moved back to Buffalo to finish college, open his bookstore, Burning Books,
and start a family.

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

Mr. Pickering has written books sympathetic to the liberation front, but he
said his political views and past association should not make him the
target of a federal investigation. “I’m just a guy who runs a bookstore and
has a wife and a kid,” he said.
-- 
Art Deco (Wayne A. Fox)
art.deco.studios at gmail.com
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