Post Office Tracks Your Mail (Often Without Proper Authorization)

The National Security Agency’s
(NSA) snoopy ways with our phone calls is headed to
no less than three federal appeals courts, but long before mass
electronic surveillance was a glimmer in a bureaucratic voyeur’s
eye, the
Post Office was already skimming and scanning through our mail
to track our communications. Unshockingly, it turns out that the
folks who manage to lose your mail and deliver your lingerie
catalogs well-thumbed aren’t so good at respecting even the shaky
privacy protections intended to regulate when and how
correspondence is supposed to be monitored.

Little known by most Americans, the Post Office has been
tracking mail for a century. These days, it photographs and stores
images of the outside of every piece of mail sent as a
matter of course, and can target specific individuals for “mail
covers”—special scrutiny of the outside of their correspondence,
including recording names and return addresses of the people with
whom they exchange mail. But that scrutiny is supposed to
abide by certain rules.

Yeah…well. In a
May audit, the United States Postal Service Inspector General
revealed:

responsible personnel did not always handle and process mail
cover requests in a timely manner and documents relating to the
covers were not always returned to the program files as required.
Of the 196 external mail cover requests we reviewed, 21 percent
were approved without written authorization and 13 percent were not
adequately justified or reasonable grounds were not transcribed
accurately. Also, 15 percent of the inspectors who conducted
[redacted] mail covers did not have the required nondisclosure form
on file.

After examining three fiscal years worth of mail covers, with
49,000 conducted in 2013 alone, the inspector general cautioned
that, “Insufficient controls could hinder the Postal Inspection
Service’s ability to conduct effective investigations, lead to
public concerns over privacy of mail, and harm the Postal Service’s
brand.”

No doubt. The New York Times
points out that the Post Office has been sufficiently sloppy
about checking justifications for surveillance that it has been
sucked into political espionage.

Interviews and court records also show that the surveillance
program was used by a county attorney and sheriff to investigate a
political opponent in Arizona — the county attorney was later
disbarred in part because of the investigation — and to monitor
privileged communications between lawyers and their clients, a
practice not allowed under postal regulations.

That’s a reference to the
shenanigans of Sheriff Joe Arpaio and Andrew Thomas, who did
their best to turn Maricopa County into a banana republic (Arpaio
is still hard at it). They used information gleaned, in part, from
the mail surveillance to determine targets for police raids
intended to destroy a county supervisor who was a thorn in their
sides.

The tactic didn’t work, but not for lack of trying.

Defense attorneys’ snail mail communications with defendants
have also been targeted for scrutiny, in a way that potentially
stacks the deck in favor of prosecutors.

Basically, it’s all the concerns you have about intrusive NSA
snoopiness, applied to an older form of communications, by a
perhaps less competent bureaucracy.