Saturday, November 30, 2013


THE GOVERNMENT IS WATCHING YOU!




Posted by consumer activist on November 30, 2013 
On the Sunday 7/15/13 evening national news for NBC there was a 4 minute segment about a revamped U.S. Mail program that the government has now admitted captures images of both sides of any post card, letter or package which is put into the USPS system.
This covers ALL mail, domestic and international. At one time the post office was considered to be the largest intelligence service of the government and watching the mail goes as far back as the Civil War.
The 'new' aspects of this program may well prove to exceed the authorization for such intelligence gathering as provided by the Congress.
Governmental spokesmen admit that all these images are saved electronically in case any address or name draws future attention. When/if that happens, the various agencies can pull up information to determine what mail was sent by or received by a person, firm or address.
The relevant text is about the 'Automated Facer Canceller System' (AFCS) and reads in part: 'The AFCS incorporates a 'Mail Isolation Control and Tracking' (MICT) program which photographs and captures an image of every piece that is processed.'

 (Misc:  as of Oct 2018 over 6 Million have signed up for this Informed Delivery program)
I don't know of any simple 'fix' to safeguard privacy but a few common sense things come to mind:

1)  No longer use a return address on your mail. Such return addresses have long been a feature promoted by the post office so if your correspondent is gone or the address is incorrect you will get your mail back. You might want to omit any such return address in the future.

2)  Modify your name for incoming bank statements, bills etc. Rather than using Dr. John J. Smith, ask your bank, utility etc to just use J. Smith. Don't give out any extra information for the government to copy and file away.

3)  Avoid getting mail at a 'home' address. This won't help all that much as all mail will still be copied but using a private mail receiving service can't hurt.

Do you recall who wrote to you in 2013 or who you wrote too?
Don't worry, the government knows.

They know:
Where you and everyone at your address banks,
Who insures your car, home and life,
What credit cards you and your family have,
Where you shop and who you order from by mail,
What friends you and your family have.
If you use those cute return address labels or a rubber stamp with your address on it they also know who you write too.

The government isn't just watching/recording all your phone calls they are recording all business and personal mail and packages by photographing mail as It's processed, and storing forever, information on the outside of all mail sent in the country.

This particular cat got out of the bag earlier this year via disclosures about the program originating from a government error and a later FOIA request by Leslie Pickering a concerned citizen in Buffalo, NY and reported on the Sunday 7/15/13 evening national news for NBC where there was a 4 minute segment about a revamped U.S. Mail program that the government has now admitted captures images of both sides of any post card, letter or package which is put into the USPS system.

As I posted 7/15/13 and 11/13 /13 on this site, the 11 year old high tech computer system covers ALL mail, domestic and international. 160,000,000,000 pieces a year (that is 160 Billion!).

At one time the post office was considered to be the largest intelligence service of the government and watching the mail goes as far back as the Civil War.

The relevant text is about the 'Automated Facer Canceller System' (AFCS) and reads in part: 'The AFCS incorporates a 'Mail Isolation Control and Tracking' (MICT) program which photographs and captures an image of every piece that is processed.'

This program is no longer 'secret' but has been reported on by various media in addition to NBC under headlines reading: "USPS Logs Mail for FBI, and It's Legal" at http://blogs.findlaw.com/…/usps-logs-mail-for-fbi-and-its-l…

Unlike the phone monitoring program such mail monitoring activities have already been through various courts and it has been ruled that information found on the outside of mail and packages can readily be seen by anyone and recording of the information is legal.

Originally these 'mail covers' were used to obtain data on specific individuals activities, now the program has expanded to scoop up ALL information on everyone on the basis that at some future time the information might prove useful in an investigation.

As with the collected phone data there is no set expiration date for deleting the data.

Unfortunately there is no constitutional 'right to privacy', perhaps there should be.

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11/30/13
Here are 2 items for your consideration regarding U.S. Mail.

1)  Further down this blog site at 7/15/13 (Tracking Your Mail) you will find reporting on the government program to scan and retain indefinitely all information on the outside of letters and parcels. You put your return address on something and it goes into the government data banks where it will remain forever or until your name (or one similar to yours) comes up and they take a look at who you have been corresponding with.

You have a health plan via Wellstar or subscribe to Comcast, then they know it and it is just a very short step for them to get hold of your medical records and find out what you like to watch on TV!

Suggestion: DO NOT put any return address on outgoing mail! Do not put any info on any envelope or package that you don't want to have in those massive government computers in Utah.

2)  Just for your own satisfaction, those postage stamps having US Flags on them - affix them upside down. It is a very minor act of protest but what else is left for us to do to show we are concerned about where we are going as a country.
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Sunday, July 7, 2013

July 2013


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

By RON NIXON




Leslie James Pickering, the owner of a bookstore in Buffalo, was targeted by a tracking program from the United States Postal Service. Brendan Bannon for The New York Times

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.
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.
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Saturday, July 6, 2013

From 2013

USPS Logs Mail for FBI, and It's Legal

By Brett Snider, Esq. on July 6, 2013 8:37 AM

Link:  http://blogs.findlaw.com/law_and_life/2013/07/usps-logs-mail-for-fbi-and-its-legal.html

 Although it may surprise you, the U.S. Postal Service is logging your mail and sharing it with federal law enforcement. And the practice is completely legal.
Surprise might be an understatement for what New Yorker Leslie Pickering was feeling last September, when he opened his mail to find a handwritten card instructing postal workers to copy the exterior of his mail before it reached him, reports The New York Times.
The post office could be doing the same with your mail, and the law is on their side.

Photographing Mail as It's Processed
The USPS did confirm that they were tracking Pickering's mail, but declined to explain why. It could be because Pickering is the ex-spokesman for a radical environmental group that was deemed an "eco-terrorist" group by the FBI, reports The New York Times.  Though Pickering stepped away from that role more than a decade ago, it may help to explain why he and many others have their mail tracked and photographed, without a warrant, under the Mail Isolation Control and Tracking (MICT) program.
The secret government program was revealed in a federal criminal complaint, in which an FBI source expounded on MICT's ability to "photograph and capture an image of every mail piece," reports The Smoking Gun.


To be clear, MICT doesn't read the content of the letters, but it does make a photo and data record of the exteriors of thousands of letters, packages, and parcels that pass through USPS facilities, reports the Times.
MICT Is Legal and Isn't Going Away
Critics might compare this program to prior FBI or National Security Agency surveillance of phone and internet records -- warrantless searches which were justified under Patriot Act-era laws and a fairly loose standard of proof.
Because MICT only looks at the outside of letters, which are publicly viewable, there is no reasonable expectation of privacy that is being violated by MICT collecting a backlog of millions of letter exteriors.
The U.S. Supreme Court has used similar reasoning to explain why the police are free to go through your trash set out on the curb without a warrant or probable cause.
Despite fears about privacy or constitutional violations, the MICT program is by all accounts still in operation, and will continue to be until political or legal forces move against it.
Links to Related Resources:
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Thursday, July 4, 2013

July 2013

U.S. Postal Service logs all mail for law enforcement

July 4, 2013 at 3:00 AMComments
WASHINGTON, July 4 (UPI) -- 

 The U.S. Postal Service photographs all mail processed nationwide in a program similar to U.S. electronic surveillance, officials and security experts say.

"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," computer security expert Bruce Schneier told The New York Times.
The warrantless surveillance program for law enforcement is called Mail Isolation Control and Tracking. It's been in effect almost 11 years.
Last year alone Postal Service computers photographed the outside of about 160 billion letters and parcels, the Times said.
It is not known how long the government keeps the images, the newspaper said.
The images are kept as part of a law enforcement surveillance technique known as "mail covers."
Mail covers do not involve reading the mail itself, just the outside information, and are not considered by the Postal Service or Justice Department to be constitutional violations since the outside of envelopes and packages can readily be seen by anyone.
"It's a treasure trove of information," former FBI agent James Wedick told the 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," said Wedick, who spent 34 years at the FBI and used mail covers in a number of investigations.
But the program's sweeping nature disturbs some people.
"In the past, mail covers were used when you had a reason to suspect someone of a crime," Mark Rasch, who started a computer crimes unit in the fraud section of the Justice Department's criminal division, told the Times.
"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,'" he said. "Essentially you've added mail covers on millions of Americans."
The Mail Isolation Control and Tracking program was created after the anthrax attacks in late 2001 that killed five people, including two postal workers, and infected 17 others.
The program was secret, but the FBI cited it last month during its investigation into ricin-laced letters sent to President Barack Obama and New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg.
The FBI said in a criminal complaint June 7 a postal investigator tracing the ricin letters was able to narrow the search to New Boston, Texas, actress Shannon Guess Richardson by examining front and back images of 60 pieces of mail scanned just before and after the tainted letters were sent to Obama and Bloomberg.
The data showed return addresses near her home, the FBI said.
Richardson originally accused her husband, Nathan Richardson, of mailing the letters, but investigators determined he was at work when the letters were mailed.
Shannon Richardson was indicted and charged Friday in the mailing of the letters. She was also charged with sending a third ricin letter to Mark Glaze, the executive director of Mayors Against Illegal Guns.
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Direct Link to this article:
  https://www.upi.com/Top_News/US/2013/07/04/US-Postal-Service-logs-all-mail-for-law-enforcement/UPI-36491372921200/
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Ricin Suspect Was Tracked Via Mail Scanners

'The Smoking Gun':  Feds: Postal Service photographs every piece of mailJUNE 7, 2013 --A high-tech computer system that captures images of  “every mail piece that is processed” by the United State Postal Service was critical in helping federal agents track the Texas woman arrested today for allegedly sending ricin-tainted letters to President Barack Obama and New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg.

In a U.S. District Court complaint filed today against Shannon Guess Richardson, an FBI agent details how investigators traced the ricin letters back to New Boston, Texas, where the 35-year-old Richardson (seen below) lives with her husband.
The Bloomberg letter was opened at a municipal mail center in Manhattan on May 24, while the letter to Obama was intercepted May 30 at an off-site White House mail facility. A third ricin letter--sent to an anti-gun group funded by Bloomberg--was received at a Washington, D.C. office on May 26.
According to FBI Agent James Spiropoulos, investigators accessed a Postal Service computer system that “incorporates a Mail Isolation Control and Tracking (MICT) program which photographs and captures an image of every mail piece that is processed.” Agents were able to obtain front and back images of about 20 mail pieces that had been processed “immediately before the mail piece addressed to Mayor Bloomberg.”
A review of that mail revealed that each piece carried return addresses listing zip codes in the New Boston area.
A similar analysis of 40 mail pieces that were processed “immediately before and after the mail piece addressed to President Obama” showed that several of those letters listed addresses in two Texas cities near New Boston.
According to the felony complaint against Richardson, she confessed yesterday to “mailing the three letters--knowing that they contained ricin.” She repeated earlier claims that her husband Nathaniel, who has not been charged, was involved with the Obama and Bloomberg mailings. Richardson alleged that her spouse “typed the letters and made her print and mail them,” reported Agent Spiropoulos.
If convicted of the ricin mailings, Richardson, an aspiring actress, faces a maximum of 10 years in prison and fine of up to 250,000. 
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Direct Link to article:
http://www.thesmokinggun.com/documents/woman-arrested-for-obama-bloomberg-ricin-letters-687435
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