When you send a letter it does not belong to the post office while in transit. Why are bits on a hard drive any different?
To elaborate: when using the US Postal Service, only domestic "First Class Mail" and "Priority Mail" (these are different and distinct from standard mail) is protected and requires a probable cause warrant to open and inspect. Other types of mail, as well as all packages shipped through private companies like UPS and FedEx, do not require warrants and can be opened and inspected whenever the post office or UPS/FedEx feel like it. There isn't an expectation of privacy for these packages, and certainly no constitutional protection of it.
"The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized."
Probably the same way civil asset forfeiture does, somehow precedent became the supreme law of the land as opposed to the constitution.
(3)Sealed mail is mail that under postal laws and regulations is included within a class of mail maintained by the Postal Service for the transmission of letters sealed against inspection...
and
(4)Unsealed mail is mail that under postal laws or regulations is not included within a class of mail maintained by the Postal Service for the transmission of letters sealed against inspection....
https://www.law.cornell.edu/cfr/text/39/233.3
I would guess the justification is that 1) the potential for mischief is much lower with a letter vs. an item and 2) the unsealed categories are usually cheaper (periodicals, etc) and the Post Office should be able to verify that the mailed item really qualifies for the lower rate.
>Sealed mail includes: First-Class Mail; Priority Mail; Priority Mail Express;
Shipped packages ("things") can be (but aren't always) sent as First Class or Priority Mail, and thus would fall under the "sealed" category as well.
OTOH, you can also send normal letters (not periodicals or marketing material) as "standard mail" which would make them unsealed (I don't know why you would do this as opposed to sending it as First Class or Priority, but you can).
Basically, USPS provides a service where, regardless of what you are sending in most cases, you can choose whether or not you want it protected by the 4th amendment. The origins of this "choice" (and why it isn't the standard to always being protected) is where I am more confused. And when talking about parallels to electronic media, I think this is an important point, because if this is the case for physical mail, it also stands to reason that electronic media for some reason might not default to being protected by the 4th amendment, either.
As the text says, those first categories are INTENDED for sealed letters. Things shipped in those ways therefore retain the privacy protections of letters. You can put a (small) rock or whatever in there instead--that's your business--and if you do, the Post Office will never know because they're applying the letter-privacy standard and not looking inside.
The other categories are NOT INTENDED for letters. As a result, they don't get the protection intended for letters. You can, of course, try to send something confidential that way, but if it's exposed, that's on you.
You can put whatever you want in a priority mail envelope, but the size and weight limits are much more suited to a big document than an engine block.
People are just too good at rationalizing and not questioning "the way things are" even in the face of the obvious evidence and become quite upset when the elephant in the room is pointed out.
You only have an expectation of privacy of the contents of the letter. You have no such expectation of anything on the envelope itself (e.g. sender/receiver address). The government contends that it only collects analogous metadata in transit, not the contents of the communication itself (although this is debatable).
Just for example, by combining several data points, Skynet can infer that those people are acquainted and add that fact to the corpus about you both. You would never give a retailer a full dump of everyone in your address book, but it's pretty much given they know it.
Despite what the constitution says, human rights are not self evident, they must in fact be legalized.
"The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people."