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Old July 3, 2013, 01:52 PM   #1
Aguila Blanca
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Join Date: September 25, 2008
Location: CONUS
Posts: 18,414
Snail Mail Snooping

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/04/us...mail.html?_r=0

Hmmm ...

Quote:
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, 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 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. (Actually opening the mail requires a warrant.) The information is sent to whatever law enforcement agency asked for it. Tens of thousands of pieces of mail each year undergo this scrutiny.
It seems to me there is one HUGE difference between this snail mail snooping (not that I approve of it) and PRISM: The gummint can get a warrant and open someone's mail only before it has been delivered. If they analyze his/her mail pattern six months or two years down the road, they can't go back and retroactively open as many of the letters as they choose -- without a warrant, if they decide to play it that way. Once the letter is delivered, it may or may not be retained by the recipient. More than likely, an honest person might hang onto certain letters, but a conspirator would almost certainly shred and/or burn any potentially incriminating letters almost immediately upon receipt.

With PRISM, if I correctly understand what I've been reading, they copy and store ALL e-mail messages, but they don't actually read them unless they later get a warrant. ("No, really, we don't. Honest. Heck, would we lie to you?") So they have a copy, not just of the so-called (inaccurately) metadata, but the actual communications. That makes PRISM vastly different and far more insidious than either snail mail program.
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