Article – Suspicious packages spotlight vast postal surveillance system

Posted on by

The U.S. Postal Service regularly photographs the front and back of every piece of U.S. mail, or about 150 billion parcels, envelopes, and postcards every year. A longstanding practice known as the “mail cover” program enables law enforcement to obtain address information and images of the outsides of mail as part of an investigation without the need for a warrant through the Postal Inspection Service, the U.S. Postal Service’s policing arm.

Kinda makes you all warm and fuzzy, doesn’t it? They may(!) not be reading your mail, but they’re logging where it came from and where it went.

These clowns can scan over a billion packages a year but they can’t get my Priority Mail packages across town in three days. :::eyeroll:::

Whats really annoying is that The Powers That Be will point to the recent bombing suspect’s arrest and use that to validate what is, to any reasonable standard, a rather intrusive policy that  kicks the spirit of the right to privacy right in the sac.

10 thoughts on “Article – Suspicious packages spotlight vast postal surveillance system”

  1. Doesn’t give me a warm feeling the they may have photos of all the preps that have been mailed to my residence. Especially the big items in original packages.

  2. There was a TV show I watched called “The Hunted” lasted one season that I know of, the object is teams were given 1 hour notice to “disappear” and then they were tracked by ex- FBI, CIA and the rest of the alphabet soup. Whomever avoided capture won whatever amount of money. They did monitor the USPS looking for people that were “writing letters” to friends to get help trying to stay off the grid. Yeah they know all about who, what, where, when and why..

  3. It’s normal for wealthy individuals and major corporations to have their mail scanned by in-house security upon arrival. It was one of the jobs I did at Litton Systems every morning, and that’s how the bombs sent to George Soros and to CNN were found.

    Former presidents also have this level of security provided by the Secret Service who check incoming mail daily, this is how the bombs sent to Clinton and Obama were found. Once Security for Soros made the initial discovery and alerted the FBI, an alert was sent so all the mail going to high ranking politicians was scanned by security leading to the other bombs being found.

    The bomber was caught because he left prints on one of the envelops plus on several of the bombs he also left DNA. This was found by the forensics people at the FBI. Thanks to the bomber already having been in the system because of previous arrests, he was easy to catch.

    • or was he an easy patsy, because they had his fingerprints, DNA and he made threats 16 year ago. dudes i have met that were spooks could do that no problem.

      • “dudes i have met that were spooks” Of course you’ve met “spooks”, who hasn’t? LOL

  6. Anyone know if this is any different than Fedex or other private carriers? It’s creepy police state stuff either way, but maybe this is everyone’s standard practice in the information age.

  7. The USPS now touts this as a “benefit” to you, and if you sign up, they’ll send you email “heads up”s about your incoming mail.

    They put a friendly name on it, but it’s still the old ‘cover’ system.

    n

  8. The solution is simple enough.

    Treat every letter as a dead drop. Bogus return address, un-licked stamp (damp sponge or piece of moistened paper towel should be within the means of anyone possessed of a 70-point IQ score), deposited in a random mailbox.

    Let them collect useless data. When was the last time you received a returned letter?

Comments are closed.