With all the revelations about the NSA spying on American’s internet communications, email, etc., I was wondering: have the neglected “snail mail”? presumably, surveillance of paper mail is a lot harder, and identifying “patterns” that might identify suspicious use is difficult.
Does anybody know if the NSA has an active spying program on ordinary citizen’s mail? If so, is it legal?
The NSA itself doesn’t, but snail mail is certainly under some monitoring for law enforcement purposes.
Opening the mails might be a bit more rare, but they do scan images of each envelope as it passes through the system.
I’m guessing you missed this recent revelation?
For close to a decade every single piece of snailmail in the USA has been photographed digitally and logged. So yes they did not forget paper.
EDIT:Bah ninja’d.
Your inattention has been noted. An entry has been made in your file.
Not… <gasp> grude’s Permanent File!!!
Even 20 years ago, IIRC, there was a situation where someone went to court over this. The IRS was photographing mail (outside envelopes) from Switzerland. They also sent some letters to the banks there and noted the postage meter numbers. From that, they determined who was getting correspondence from Swiss banks. It did not take a big leap to figure out what they did with that information. IIRC, the banks stopped sending private correspondence from the same meters. I think the court case ended with the decision that reading your envelopes was fair game. Of course, the post office has to image them anyway to use optical character recognition on the zip codes.
I hope Great Antibob and grude are on their way to Hong Kong now that they’ve blown the whistle on the Post Office’s illegal spying.
Hong Kong pre-emptively shipped me to Moscow.
I wonder what the fine reporters at the NYTimes are going to do.
I encourage grude to change his username to Bah Ninja. That would be awesome.