[Vision2020] Does This Piss You Off?

[Scott Dredge]

<Does This Piss You Off?>

Not yet.

Date: Thu, 4 Jul 2013 07:39:17 -0400
From: art.deco.studios at gmail.com
To: vision2020 at moscow.com
Subject: [Vision2020] Does This Piss You Off?




   
   


   
   


   


July 3, 2013

U.S. Postal Service Logging All Mail for Law Enforcement

By 

RON NIXON

 


 

    
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-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,
 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 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
 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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