Law enforcement is spying on Americans' mail, records show | Hacker News Reader

Law enforcement is spying on Americans' mail, records show

washingtonpost.com

167 pointspseudolus55 comments

There’s a good Darknet Diaries podcast episode that interviews someone with hands on experience with this, and the efforts he went through to conceal his identity while shipping large volumes of illicit USPS packages: https://darknetdiaries.com/transcript/132/

Ultimately he was caught because he delegated the task to his cousin, who ignored his instructions and sent all the packages from the same post office.

That's why I think I'd make a great criminal: I don't have any friends or family to muck it all up.

The same person also gave a talk at Defcon: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=01oeaBb85Xc

I'll echo the top Youtube comment here because it fits perfectly:

> When the bald dude with a beard on stage introduces an even balder and more bearded dude to talk you know it's gonna be good.

They have been photographing every single package since anarchists were shipping bombs in the mail 100 years ago. Seems to be breaking news every few years.

What do they do? They take photos of the exterior of the package?

Or do they open it, check it, create another package and mail it ??

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mail_Isolation_Control_and_Tra...

Would be curious if the 30 day retention period is still accurate.

If the open-source community can read the carbon-based ink inside carbonized ancient scrolls, then there is likely no need to open normal mail to read what it says.

https://scrollprize.org/grandprize

Congratulations. You drastically increased my paranoia with one sentence.

"These scrolls were scanned at Diamond Light Source, a particle accelerator near Oxford, England. The facility produces a parallel beam of X-rays at high flux, allowing for fast, accurate, and high-resolution imaging. The X-ray photos are turned into a 3D volume of voxels using tomographic reconstruction algorithms, resulting in a stack of slice images."

That article is really cool BTW, amazing stuff. Give it a read.

I get an email from the USPS every day with pictures of all the mail coming to my mailbox. It’s a service they offer for free.

Informed delivery: https://www.usps.com/manage/informed-delivery.htm

My local hackerspace uses this service with some OCR to email members when they have mail waiting at the space.

I just did this and paired it with ChatGPT to send me a Discord message like "You received mail from Progressive."

Seems silly and lazy but it was a fun afternoon project

(boring aside: USPS seems to have bespoke anti-bot measures which uses WASM to sign requests, which means you have to use full browser automation to login. Of course, most people instead parse the daily emails they send you which is a totally reasonable approach as well.)

While a pain to automate on a server, Puppeteer/Playwright are both pretty straight forward to script against.

I had another one for a bit that would scan, open, and scan your mail also. Forward packages. Cheap and easy if you’re on the go.

https://www.postgrid.com/mail-scanning-service-companies/

Probably also sold to Facebook, Google, Microsoft, and others

Yep, came here to say this. I don't use it often, but it's pretty handy from time to time (e.g. checking to see if an important package requiring a signature is coming that day, so I can be home or arrange for someone else to be there).

They have been photographing every single letter for a while now.

And because of Moore's Law and cross-referencing databases now we can analysis it in depth.

This is networks of people they can watch. Like if your mum writes to your childhoods mate (who now you drug dealers) mum and tracking were you live and the same as any internet spying, working out if are you gay or a communist or a gay communist and cross-referencing handwriting.

They are also photographing your garbage. And can get your DNA from the sewers (although this might not have ever been used... publicly) License plate and phone tracking goes without saying.

There's no reason ShotSpotter (which can get some local voice audio) can't be matched to your podcast.

Meat world tracking is the new cool.... and it's nothing like 100 years ago.

What took them so long to catch the Unabomber?

Not sure why Aaron’s comment is dead, but he’s right - at least about taking photos of your trash.

Our local council has shown pictures of people putting styrene packaging in their green waste bin, and there was a case a while ago where an elderly woman was murdered and put into a bin for collection - the truck has footage of the bin being emptied, so they could narrow down where in landfill she might be.

Basically snail mail Metadata snooping - who sent and recieved, package size, and date.

Indeed [1] "Computer security and information privacy expert Bruce Schneier compared MICT to the mass surveillance of the National Security Agency (NSA), revealed in June 2013 by Edward Snowden. Schneier said, "Basically, [the USPS is] doing the same thing as the [NSA] programs, collecting the information on the outside of your mail, the metadata, if you will, of names, addresses, return addresses and postmark locations, which gives the government a pretty good map of your contacts, even if they aren't reading the contents."

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mail_Isolation_Control_and_Tra...

It's not snooping btw, this is information the sender provided. Would be hard to deliver the mail otherwise....

The information was provided to the USPS, not law enforcement. That's why law enforcement needs to request the info via USPS. USPS is not snooping, but since law enforcement is not in the business of delivering the mail, that information has not been provided to them by the sender and is snooping. Same thing either digital metadata - parties exchange data, provider needs basic info to send, government captures info eventhough they aren't involved in the business of providing those services.

USPS has its own law enforcement agency, USPIS

USPS' law enforcement division is absolutely doing active searches, and even investigations outside, above and beyond anything to do with mail. It's kind of wild.

Ok, but what about private carriers like FedEx, UPS, etc.? Is using them an effective end-run for the paranoid? Asking for a friend.

No, they can and will open your mail at will if they think something fishy is going on. USPS can’t open anything without a warrant.

My question was whether law enforcement typically requests the same data from private carriers that it does from USPS, not whether they open your mail.

I'm old enough to remember how companies all tripped over themselves trying to help the government spy on their customers after 9/11. I assume that every company that I do business with has an open pipeline to the government feeding in all the data it has about me.

Every single piece of US mail and packages is scanned and retained for every address.

As an aside, UPS occasionally opens package boxes, and they have no right.

> warrant before opening any sealed letter. “There is no reasonable expectation of privacy with respect to information contained on the outside of mail matter,” Barksdale wrote.

My goodness, this is madness.

...

> In 1978, a circuit court judge said the mail covers could expose someone’s personal life “in a manner unobtainable even through surveillance of his movements,” rendering “the subject’s life an open book.”

Nothing has changed on the postal front in this regard.

Just think what they're doing to your cloud data, and cloud-hosted medical/psychiatric data...

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