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Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsMust Read: Meet Leslie James Pickering: U.S. Government target
U.S. Postal Service Logging All Mail for Law Enforcement
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. Pickerings 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. Pickerings mail but told him nothing else.
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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.
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http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/04/us/monitoring-of-snail-mail.html?pagewanted=all
Yep, those of us opposed to mass surveillance of American citizens are just "outrage junkies". We're in it to smear President Obama.
You know the rest.
If you're OK with this, there's something wrong.
Nuclear Unicorn
(19,497 posts)so incompetent as to mail the monitoring instructions to the target himself is a government too incompetent to be trusted with the results of any monitoring.
galileoreloaded
(2,571 posts)Pholus
(4,062 posts)to other databases...
cali
(114,904 posts)gee, wonder why the program has only led to sporadic reports of abuse.
tularetom
(23,664 posts)And if he's not doing anything wrong he has nothing to worry about.
And the stock market is way up and then there's health care reform and...
Oh yeah, and Bush was worse.
Did I miss anything?