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Comment by saalweachter | Hacker News Reader

1. Use an email client with end-to-end encryption.

2. Buy a notebook. They sell ones that have a calendar in the front and an address book in the back.

3. Use a stamp and an envelope. The USPO does not keep a record of all sent or received packages. Public drop boxes are also widely available, PO boxes which mask your identity from the sender, and third party mailboxes to mask your identity from The Man. I mean, really, if you're going to send messages to your mistress, girlfriend, lover, or wife, at least have the class to send paper letters she can keep in a lockbox for her great-grandchildren to find after she's dead.

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The USPO does not keep a record of all sent or received packages.

I'm not sure that's true.

JUNE 7--A high-tech computer system that captures images of “every mail piece that is processed” by the United State Postal Service was critical in helping federal agents track the Texas woman arrested today for allegedly sending ricin-tainted letters to President Barack Obama and New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg.

http://www.thesmokinggun.com/documents/woman-arrested-for-ob...

Mail (i.e. the envelope) is scanned for address decoding. I believe the orange barcode is an index into the database of mail pieces and associated decoded address. Although this has a completely legitimate rationale in facilitating the delivery of the mail, it's easy to see that the scanned images and mailpiece database could be archived for much longer than is needed for mail delivery only.

Then I stand corrected! One of the memes floating around was that snail mail was less tracked. I wonder if I assumed this applied to the metadata and people were only ever referring to the contents.

Less tracked, sure: I don't think they have the ability to see inside your mail just yet.

Even as far back as WW2 (and probably earlier), mail was being routinely opened, inspected, resealed, and passed on its way.

The technology for doing this in a virtually undetectable fashion has been around for a long time, and I'm sure it's far more advanced now. I very much doubt that ordinary letters have to be opened to see their contents anymore. It can probably be easily done using any number of scanning technologies.

The main problem for them is that it takes more time, effort, and money to do this for snail mail than to just ask a company for a hard drive containing all the emails and tweets of a few hundred million people.

On the other hand, a lot fewer people are using snail mail to communicate these days. So total surveillance of the relatively small amount of snail mail might just be done as a matter of course anyway.

Of course, there are some pesky laws presumably protecting the sanctity of physical mail. But if you think spies have ever let the law stand in their way, you live in a much rosier and prettier world than I do.

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