A couple of weeks back, we had quite the go-round regarding the revelations of the NSA snooping program that collected cell phone “metadata” – i.e., who you called and when, but not the contents of the call. (Set aside for now questions whether the NSA actually listened to the calls themselves.) I tried to raise a few questions, and was vigorously shouted down. In particular, I wondered whether it would be different if the postal service was tracking “metadata” of snail mail.
Ridiculous, I was told. The post office loves your privacy, and even if they didn’t, it wouldn’t be possible for them to log all the metadata that passes through every day. They just don’t do it.
Think again, folks.
Mr. Pickering [an environmental activist] was targeted by a longtime surveillance system called mail covers, but that is only 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 snail mail is subject to the same kind of scrutiny that the National Security Agency has given to telephone calls and e-mail….
The Mail Isolation Control and Tracking program was created after the anthrax attacks in late 2001 that killed five people, including two postal workers…. It enables the Postal Service to retroactively track mail correspondence 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, the former director of the Justice Department’s computer crime unit, who 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.”
Have at it.
After all, that information is on the front of the envelope for all to see. You should need a warrant to open any mail, however.
No, the “it is open for all to see ” is a bad rationale.
First, when I drop an envelope in a post box, the public doesn’t see it. The public doesn’t see it as it travels through the system, and the public doesn’t see it when it is put into my mail slot. So it’s not public.
But even if it was, it should be illegal for anyone to collect the movement of people en-masse.
Should a private corporation be able to park a device on private property, then photograph all the license plates that go by, create a massive database of the information, and then use it in various ways? Like by contacting the car owner and asking for a fee of $100 to “not publish” the information for everyone to see?
This is getting out of control and we have to act affirmatively to stop the surveillance.
In my complex we stick mail to be picked up behind a brick so it won’t blow away, but anyone who enters or exits the main door before pickup time can see it. Then the carrier takes it so he sees it. Then the postal workers who sort the mail or put it in the appropriate place to be autosorted sees it. Then the carrier to the destination sees it. I’m actually more suspicious of private corporations though I’m not quite sure what you mean by your last example. I presume no privacy when I am driving around on public streets.
because Christopher lives in circumstances in which something exists some way, that can be applied to everyone! Yay!
What about people who have PO Boxes specifically because they want some degree of privacy?
Or mail that goes directly into one’s house?
Or mailboxes that safely shut, many even lock?
None of those matter. Christopher lives in a complex where people see each others mail, so that means everyone is entitled to take a good look at every package anyone else gets.
Maybe we should just have the NSA post them on websites to make it easier?
You took just one point in a string and blow it out of all proportion. I was merely responding to one set of assumptions with another. When I lived in a house with its own mailbox or an apartment with a dropbox for outgoing mail the rest of it still applied and once it is with the rest of the mail from whatever source applies to all of it. The point stands and I would appreciate dropping the attitude.
It was a major part of your rationale behind your argument.
A circumstance exists for you and you’re okay with it, so everyone else should be, too. This is a pattern: you use a (usually personal) anedcote as an argument, pass it off as strong evidence, then get called out for it, then get annoyed at the criticism and complain. Then the cycle repeats — and gets worse every time.
When you avoid these arguments, you make incredibly great posts and I don’t get to be nearly as snarky. I vote for more of those.
As for mail carriers seeing your mail, it doesn’t matter. Doctors see our nakey bits, that doesn’t mean they get to store them in a machine forever. There’s a privacy expected when you get a checkup, speak with a lawyer or have therapy to talk over all the times people have said mean things to you on BMG. So it goes with the mail.
If a mail carrier were privately snapping photos of your mail before delivering them, they’d be fired. The government’s theft of our personal information needs to be ‘fired’ too.
Those are actually some good points for me to chew on. You could have made them the first time without the mockery. It seems you and I consistently have different expectations of this platform. Sometimes experiences are what I have though I know not everyone shares them. On the other hand, yes there are times that I am essentially asking what’s the big deal and there are ways to answer that respectfully. I figure I don’t have any special powers, skills, access, etc. that would make it that unreasonable that my experiences at least might be shared by some others.
…you have this habit of giving my comments way too much weight. I have never intended to pass this others that have prompted similar complaints as anything other than my experiences to show that things can happen another way, not that they necessarily should or imply universality.
I don’t see how email is different.
a warrant should be needed for anyone to look at including postal inspectors.
New technologies and such are red herrings in the basic search and seizure principals. What’s on a Facebook is public and warrants are not and should not be required.
The shopkeeper should be able to provide information to police when they come around asking to see his records about a certain customer because it maybe relevant to an investigation. Good citizenship.
The shopkeeper shouldn’t amd wouldn’t turn over each and every records about each customer without a compelling reason.
Our problem today is that the shopkeepers are Verizon and Google and Apple and AT@T and they are handing their records over to the government as soon as technology allows.
They are forced to because a secret federal court has issued a warrant. (BTW the court has never denied one – remind anyone of the FBI 150 for 150 in justifiable shootings? Not even a reprimand)
Heavy political pressure must be put upon federal legislators, and congressional, senate, and presidential candidates, to state their position on the federal governments’ collection and storage of information on all its citizens in clear and unequivocal language.
Anything on Facebook should require warrants if it’s not posted publicly.
That’s not to say a cop couldn’t scope out your friend list (if that’s public) and start asking them to dish out the posts without a warrant.
I actually post a number of things on Facebook on my wall, marked as private (just me), like articles I was thinking of posting or some private thoughts. Cops shouldn’t require a warrant to see that? (I know they probably don’t now — but they should.)
Not true, Ernie. In the decades of history of FISA, they have in fact denied one ask by the government… just one. Among tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands. Seriously F’d up enough that FISA should be disbanded and replaced with something far more transparent, and with representation required for every person the government targets in those courts.
in this exchange, I wrote,
So now I’m upset. Sorry, Aunt Maggie. But your smug tone seems a little misplaced here. The fact that our privacy is even more non-existent than some of us believed is more important than the fact that you were right about our privacy being even more non-existent than some of us believed.
I’ll also point out, in response to Christopher’s point, that there’s a large difference between having the information on the envelope for a postal worker to see and the feds keeping a potentially permanent scanned record of the envelope. The information’s been on the envelope since before the Bill of Rights; this program’s been in place only since the post-9/11 terrorism hysteria.
…and likewise for phone records, my attitude is that once the basic information is out there for someone to put two and two together really doesn’t bother me that much.
Government collecting informationon citizens because they can. That is what’s happening. That is what fueled the East german Stazi when they they hasd an agent for every 18 citizens. That is what we are heading towards.
Then when you don’t fall in line for whatever it is the government or some bad person within the government, like John Morris, the go look for something that would hurt someone. Then they threaten to expose of the person does not do what is asked. Like stop protesting or forget to lock the back door when leaving work one night. None of your business why.
Just remember they can ruin your family and everything you love if you don’t do it.
They also can use info to blackmail innocent loved ones who are compelled to protect a family member.
Sounds like fantasy doesn’t it. Well it’s not. Been done through out history over and over again including in this country. But before we were all in favor of exterminating it when we saw it. Now we want to nurture it.
Scary effin’ sheet people. Scary.
I am scaredier than scared.
I find it more than a little odd that “the left,” as it were, seems to be shocked and appalled that Verizon, Google, or Amazon– all of which are (gasp!) corporations– have access to all kinds of personal information about us, but are quite content for the government to have all that and more.
The view that, well, Google knows about my email, so no biggie if the US Attorney knows as well, is likewise baffling.
Why is this? Because mistrust of government power is the exlusive domain of Tea Party crazies, and we oppose them, and must therefore trust government power implicitly?
I am not compelled to buy products or services from any private corporation; I am compelled to be subject to the government. Neither Verizon nor Google nor Amazon has men (and women) with guns; the government does. Neither Verizon nor Google nor Amazon has the police power, and a phalanx of prosecutors to execute it; the government does.
Liberal mistrust of government should be just as deep. That is why the ACLU exists. Is that now perceived as a tea party group?
The rule must be that the government cannot get the information to put 2 and 2 together without “probable cause.” That is why those first amendments to the constitution exist in the first place.
Sheesh.
on a roll
the late 19th century, government has been needed to protect individuals from powerful private corporate interests. But the Bill of Rights also is needed to protect individuals from powerful government interests.
I think some folks forget, and some never learned, that today’s “left” was born from the antiwar protests of the 1960s and the civil rights era before then. In both of those movements, “the government” was the bad-guy.
The anti-war movement, in particular, involved left-leaning young people agitating against the government — a Democrat, LBJ, no less — and opposed by right-leaning forces. The reversal of roles is odd for some of us who came of age during that time.
The incredible reach of the government must be managed somehow. It must be managed in a way that both respects our individual rights and also the freedom (both commercial and artistic) that makes the internet valuable. It is, in my view, virtually impossible to effectively block the ability for the government to do things like PRISM without simultaneously destroying the economic engine that powers the net.
I think we perhaps need fundamentally rethink what our “rights” mean today. In particular, I think a different reading of the Second Amendment might be in order. It seems to me that one meaning of the Second Amendment was the assertion that individuals should have access to the same technology as government. At the time, guns were the technology in question. While I don’t think individuals should have access to nuclear weapons, I do wonder if the direction we might take is that individuals have access to whatever information the government has access to.
I wonder if, for example, a PRISM-like system might be helpful in understanding who actually does contribute to who in the hallowed halls of power. When some PAC spends a few millions dollars on an ad-buy, who gets it? Where does the money go from there? How much of the $98M that Sheldon Adelson spent on the 2012 campaign ended up in, for example, the advertising revenue of our local print and electronic media?
I am gravely concerned about the extreme overreach of government surveillance. I am even more concerned about how we correct that.
And probably quite right.
The opposite side of that coin is that today’s “left” did not spring from the working class, or the trade union movement that defined it prior to the emergence of the New Left. I guess that is an apt a description of the gap we discussed on the other threads as any.
Your thought on information rights is interesting. I am not so sure that restrictions on government data-gathering, especially when that gathering is done by force from private parties, are impractical given the generally successful history of the 4th Amendment. But maybe J. Edgar would have skipped the investigation of the NAACP if everyone knew what he was collecting.
is a lot of the people on the left who you’d expect would be terrified of this overreach and abuse of power… aren’t. They’re *defending* the government over this, all because we have a Democratic President.
Add that to the rightwing forces who have a fetish for the government knowing everything about everyone, since ‘good people have nothing to hide,’ and you have to wonder just who has the power and influence to scale these gross abuses of power and overreach back.
Would that these things have been revealed under Bush, we’d be ready to Occupy the White House by now.
Our government, and the corporate forces that own it, have used the incredible power of the government and the mass media to make and keep us terrified of “terrorists”.
Too many of us docilely submit to the wholesale shredding of our constitutional rights because all too many of us afraid, and because too many of us have bought the lie that this shredding will somehow make us “safe”.
Tomorrow’s fireworks display on the Esplanade will be watched over by heavily armed soldiers in uniform. Maybe some of us feel safer with 19 year old boys and girls walking around with automatic weapons — I don’t.
You’re absolutely right about this, Ryan. It is interesting to find you, me, CMD, and even EB3 on the same page on this issue.
And then saw yours.
And what happens when that government is all of a sudden not so friendly? It’s not just “two and two.” And yeah, you can use meta-data to find Paul Revere. [It’s actually a pretty good explanation of how meta-data works.] So, as I understand it, you’re relying on individuals being boring enough to the government for them to not care.
But what if individuals don’t want to be boring in the eyes of the government? What if they want to make some sort of a statement? Or what if they happen to belong to a group that all-of-a-sudden the government decides it doesn’t like?
Here’s where everybody I talk to says I’m totally paranoid. And I know they’re right. But this is where I’m at:
Anybody who looks around today can find plenty of instances of governments that are corrupt, governments that single-out particular issue groups, or governments that repress minority populations. But, here in America, we like to think that, whatever issues our government may have, we’re certainly not like those other governments. We, in America, are protected because we value liberty and freedom, we have a robust Constitution, etc. And there may even be a sense that our worst days of the McCarthy-era or Japanese internment — why those are pieces of history that surely we’ve learned from and progressed past.
But anybody who studies history can find a number of examples of governments and cultures that in one moment were bastions of personal liberty, high culture, economic freedom and social inclusiveness, and political superiority … that in a seeming instant switched to tyranny, evil, economic control and anti-semitism, racism, (and all the rest), and total political fascism. Frankly, it takes a lot less than what we might be comfortable admitting at polite dinner parties to turn a country into a truly fascist state — not just a fascist state like when the government tries to provide you with health care.
Frankly, I don’t think it takes all that much imagination to envision a situation when the country goes through another recession — made worse by an ideological opposition to stimulus / bailout, which turns a bad recession into a depression. That depression lets all the ideological nutbags loose, and, in a fluke election, a right-winger a la Bachmann/Palin/whoever takes control. Maybe this person is pretty charismatic. Maybe they talk a lot about freedom, but have no interest in it. And maybe they decide, and convince the country, that they don’t like a particular group, or that a particular group is to blame for their economic woes.
Now, do you want that person to have the power to monitor with the meta-data all your mail? All your email and phone conversations? Through security cameras on every block, they can see everywhere you go, you ok with that new government having that power?
Look, it’s one thing for a benign government to have this power. I get that, and I agree with it. It’s not like I’m deleting my Facebook account, cancelling my phone service, and deleting my gmail account anytime soon. I honestly don’t think Obama or even the GOP really cares about me — I’m pretty uninteresting.
But, particularly as a Jew with a keen recollection European history, I certainly don’t want that kind of power that the NSA and (apparenlty) the Post Office has in the wrong hands. Which means it shouldn’t be in anybody’s hands. And, more importantly, I remember that it takes a whole lot less than we would like to think to make formerly uninteresting citizens enemies-of-the-state.
(I just reread this post, and, if it were written by somebody else I’d think: DAMN that’s paranoid. I hear it, too.)
Of course, this is paranoid.
This could never happen here. You make it sound like the government, even under the control of an administration devoted to the advancement of civil rights, would gather data on civil rights advocates in order to disrupt their advocacy because those advocates were considered to be “enemies of the state”!
That could never happen, especially when Democrats are in power.
and adopts these powers.
It just has to be people *in* the government.
Snowden was one person among tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, with the clearance to get the data he got.
What happens when a few lone wolfs with a political bent decide they don’t like some dude running from Congress? In a few minutes time, they can gain access to every email that person wrote in the past 5 years. Ditto someone about to be appointed to some government agency who wants to ‘shake things up.’ Or some ex after a nasty breakup.
That’s to say nothing of the person who would sell government secrets for millions to foreign governments or the private sector. Some company wants a government contract? Here’s a couple hundred thousand dollars — go check out their emails to see what some director or other is *really* looking for in the contract, or go find out what some competitor is making.
I repeat: hundreds of thousands of people have security clearances in this country with that kind of access.
It takes one person to slip through the security clearance process to steal data, and most people who steal data probably won’t be like Bradley Manning or Edward Snowden and release that data publicly. They’re going to sell it for profits or use it to manipulate things to their end, or other selfish means.
And if they do, the chances of anyone finding out will be incredibly remote.
Just as yours (cf. Aunt Maggie) seemed a bit misplaced in the previous thread. Turnabout, and all that. 😉
At that time you were making an assertion, or something approximating an assertion, without evidence. A little snark was (almost) justified) Two weeks later evidence surfaces to show you were right and I came right on here to say I was mistaken on the facts.
But this new information is not cause for celebration. Learning that the government’s spy-on-everyone-in-America program is bigger than some of us thought, in my book, trumps your long-awaited comeuppance for little ol’ me!
n/t
I hope you meant this ironically or self-deprecatingly, because 99% of what you write is snark.
I know I’m doing my part.
BTW Mike, next Tuesday, after Judge Wapner, you and I are goona take a ride and play some blackjack.
And I should note that there WILL be a reading of the Declaration of Independence at Fanueil Hall at 10 AM starting a lively day intended to “take back the 4th of July” and that this initiative is national in scope. See a couple of links:
http://techpresident.com/news/24119/activists-plan-july-4-blitz-online-and-oppose-nsas-mass-surveillance
and
http://www.bostonglobe.com/business/2013/07/02/massachusetts-web-activists-take-aim-nsa/afsE8qyH9vd4SuM1JeiBBI/story.html
All this snooping didn’t exist in the 1960s and we were just as safe. You can’t say it makes us safer.
different times then,
How does the Batman and The Greenhornet protect national security exactly?
What social, cultural, economic and external factors affecting security is different now than the 1960s. I’m not saying there aren’t any, but It would be good to analyze them. If you are going to pull a Rudy Giuliani I have have this chart for your viewing pleasure.
not to be familiar with EBIII. There’s generally a heavy dose of sarcasm involved (here along the “Where have our heroes gone?” line).
everyone knows that max.
As for the GreenHornet? Well some have been wondering lately if Kato’s been carrying his load. Maybe time for a new side kick.
Come people, think! All these political people–hasn’t anyone ever worked on a mass mailing?
A lot of mail arrives at the carrier’s case presorted. That usually means that a bundle of mail arrives at the carrier’s case unopened. Some of it arrives in shrink wrapped bundles that do not get opened until the carrier opens it to deliver that day.
I agree that that article is disturbing. Automatic sorting machines do present an opportunity to photograph and perhaps record some of the mail that is delivered. But it is not true, as the article claims, the the post office photographs every piece of paper mail that is processed– all 160 billion.
that only first-class mail is being recorded? Should that make us feel better?
the article, or at least that quote, is not accurate. Feel however you want.
I’m so happy that corporate persons who fill my mailbox and recycle bins with their rubbish are accorded more privacy than real US citizens with a real right to privacy.
Surely each of those “shrink-wrapped bundles” is bulk mail sent from a single source, right?
Does that mean that those of us who actually seek to avoid the invasive data-gathering of the USPS should make a hundred copies of our letter and mail them at bulk rate in one of those shrink-wrapped bundles?
I fear you greatly underestimate the import of this program. In your last paragraph, you refer to “some of the mail that is delivered”. By some, I’m pretty David is correct that you mean “all first class”.
A permanent photographic record of every piece of first-class mail sent in this country is an enormous violation of public trust, and is an equally enormous moral hazard for all too many people in and out of government.
when I should have been addressing David’s feelings.
To the extent that the PO is archiving information on the mail I get I am very upset, whether it is just my mail, or just first class mail, or any combination.
But the claim in the NYT makes is that every piece of paper mail is photographed. I don’t find that credible. It makes me wonder if the reporter knows what he is talking about.
You and David are free to explain what the reporter really meant. I don’t have your mind reading skills; all I can do is read.
Completely unnecessary. A waste of money. An infringement on our civil rights.
We should stop spending so much time spying on every American (and in the NSA’s case, every person in the world), and instead narrow that down to… the bad guys.