Mysterious government spy cameras collecting data at post offices | Hacker News Reader

Mysterious government spy cameras collecting data at post offices

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131 pointselectic77 comments

Advice from Bruce Schneier's latest book:

Notice Surveillance. This is the first step. Lots of surveillance is hidden, but not completely invisible. The cameras might be small, but you can still see most of them if you look. There are sites online that identify surveillance cameras. The more you know, the more you'll understand what's going on.

This is the dumbest thing any news agency could ever do. What the camera was put there for was to gather evidence of people tampering or trying to steal mail.

Now if who ever was doing this saw the news they will stop and go un punished.

This happened at my local post office. Someone would drive up to the mail boxes with a vacuum cleaner and suck the mail out.

Eventually they caught the guy red handed with a cameras just like this.

Shame on the journalists for blowing this sting operation.

>What the camera was put there for was to gather evidence of people tampering or trying to steal mail.

That may be true but the camera was positioned to systematically capture information about anyone leaving the facility. There is no mention of it being positioned to monitor the mail drop boxes, which would make more sense if monitoring for mail theft was the only objective.

They need to hide their cameras better then. That thing is very obvious.

And if a random customer blows your sting operation, then I guess it's bad luck or bad planning. You can't expect people or journalists to know a camera is part of a sting operation.

And here is one of the many problems with government surveillance: prior to the Snowden papers, I would be completely open-minded about the legitimacy of these actions.

But knowing what we know now about the scope of extra-judicial surveillance, I am incredibly grateful that the journalists blew the whistle.

The US government and all of its actors have lost the presumption of good faith, and it's a useful thing to possess.

Serious question: Why? All we really know is that the US is dragnetting as much data as they possibly can. Have there been any solid exposures as far as actual misuse of the data? Not just hypotheticals (as realistically scary as they are), but real abuses which have already occurred?

Last year someone was fired by GCHQ for wrongful access of data.

http://stroudnewsandjournal.co.uk/news/11850150.MPs_to_repor...

> In a long-awaited report on privacy and security, the Intelligence and Security Committee (ISC) reveals MI5, MI6 and GCHQ have disciplined or in some cases dismissed staff for inappropriately accessing personal information obtained through bulk data collection.

Ah, very solid example. Thanks!

Wouldn't you rather someone not steal mail because they know (or believe) there are cameras than steal mail (possibly repeatedly) and get caught?

In Denver, rather I would bet that the most likely use is to monitor people mailing cannabis.

Assuming this to be the case, and assuming Fox31 aren't lying when they say they made FOI requests regarding this, shouldn't someone have approached Fox31 and said "Hey, this is a sensitive operation underway right now. Please keep quiet for a bit, we'll keep you updated."?

I'm not sure how the police / FBI usually handle press intervention, but I'm sure it must have happened before.

EDIT: Splelign

I don't think anyone would have an issue with this sort of theft-prevention if it (1) wasn't done in secret without any explanation about (2) how the data is stored and (3) where it's going. Pictures of your license plate, your face, time-stamped and geo-located, probably tied to any mail sent or accepted -- that's not information that should be winding up in a giant surveillance database.

It looks like it is pretty firmly positioned, enclosed and wired to be a temporary criminal investigation case. It looks like it is there to stay.

> "Employees of the Postal Inspection Service are sworn to uphold the United States Constitution, including protecting the privacy of the American public" phrase.

It is like the when I caught my kid sneaking a cookie, and asked them what are they doing, the reply was "I am not sneaking a cookie".

  It looks like it is there to stay.

The reporter claims they were ripped out hours after he asked the USPS LE arm about them.

Right but it was only after the reporters starting asking questions. The solid enclosure looked like it could be there permanently.

That doesn't look like a solid enclosure to me at all. Sure it's somewhat tamper-proof and meant to look like some phone/electric company component, but it really doesn't look permanent to me at all.

I suspect it was an investigative agency like the FBI or DEA or even DHS doing surveillance for a somewhat specific reason. It could be drug trade, it could be domestic militants, it could be threats against the president

could be. what else could it be?

A smarter news reporter would have put their own camera hidden (outside of the PO property) to watch the camera and THEN ask about. Imagine the horror to the PO of the video on youtube :-)

Most logical explanation: trying to find people mailing marijuana out of state.

Out of state license plate and visiting a post office in Colorado? I'd bet that whatever you mailed to your home address would have a great chance of being intercepted en route.

We can all create conspiracies here, but that wouldn't fly over the fourth admenment.

However the US post office uses an automatic scanner system to read packages. I cannot imagine the NSA, with its insane desire for meta data hasn't tapped into it yet.

They may have added the functionality by now, but when I worked on the system, it only encoded the destination address.

They don't take pictures of the mail for fun or for tracking, it's purely for sorting. You want all the mail in a letter carriers truck to go into the truck in the order it's going to be delivered in for efficiency.

So the system was in one of two modes, destination address coding or return address coding. Which mode it was in was determined by the mail processing plant itself.

Also, it only photographed letters that did not have a presorted barcode printed on them. If it already had a barcode it just got sorted immediately.

I'm not sure what there really is to tap into here.

What about this?

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/04/us/monitoring-of-snail-mai...

The stamp machines surreptitously took portraits of users in 2004, it's likely the self-service package kiosks do too.

https://epic.org/privacy/postal/

You must have worked on that system a LONG time ago.

Really? As if the post office guys would know what your plates are?

My first thought. It's almost certainly this. SFians could probably check for these as well, given that California has been a medical state for a while.

and mailing everything else as well. this alone might be enough to kill silkroad-style marketplaces - or at least significantly reduce the number of sellers.

the DEA has a country wide network of license plate scanners, tracks everyone on interstate highways to catch drug mules.

https://www.aclu.org/blog/technology-and-liberty-criminal-la...

So this seems very plausible. Giving you the Occam point on this one.

They should have put another camera to see who comes for it. Watching the watchers ;). Or just casually put a recycle bin before it.

Unless it's a clever ruse, and the real camera is somewhere else, to watch the watchers watching the watchers.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sousveillance

If they are not incompetent, it will not need service more than once in a couple of years.

Dumb question: why is this such a big deal? Is there something about a camera at a post office that is worse than e.g. the cameras my local police department has mounted on certain street corners?

Presumably it's to tie an individual to a piece of mail they sent. I assume people worry because its a way to bypass getting a warrant to directly open up mail.

So the problem is more about the subversion rather than the surveillance. I would agree.

I'd be 50/50 on this point if the camera didn't just up and disappear after an official journalistic entity inquired about their existence...

Then when you consider the (bullshit) form style response from a branch of our own government and the fact that managers at the post office we not alerted to the camera's existence...

As alluded to in the report when they brought up the recent congressional hearings where it was found out that address information on packages had been/is being recorded and stored.... I think the problem has much more to do with the quickly growing trend of extremely subversive surveillance than it has to do with this particular incident or surveillance in general. If its merits were being openly debated by the entities putting it in place then this would be an entirely different story. But when journalistic inquires are met with secrecy and form letters? Go and ask your local police about the cameras on certain corners and I'd bet you're more likely to get a more personable/human answer than was obtained here in this story. Just my take.

Also... I think most people can plainly see the merit in having cameras mounted on street corners if they have ever been involved in a he said/she said style accident at one of those street corners. Not saying it makes it right or wrong but I think it's easier for people to see the merit in something like that where it might actually protect them personally from someone doing something reckless. How often are people genuinely afraid of dangerous packages outside of ticking boxes in movies or ricin scares in the media? I think it's far more likely that the cameras you speak of at intersections would take a dangerous man off the streets (drunk drivers, criminals on the run) before a post office camera. Again, doesn't make it right or wrong in my mind, but it does make it a bigger deal.

Because of the way data can be cross-referenced in this case. You can create connections between a license plate, a photograph, a specific time and location, and possibly the package you send (image some system inside the postbox itself to tag the package as it is pushed in), including the destination and return addresses. This goes way beyond simply collecting surveillance videos, and if rolled out nationally, would make a major contribution to the total surveillance environment that the security agencies wish to create.

Because mail is one of the more anonymous physical ways to interact with someone. Try buying Bitcoin anonymously. Most suggestions have you walking into a bank (highly monitored), or meeting a stranger (easy to be monitored, perhaps even collect a DNA sample, plus could follow you around).

Whereas if you can buy stamps anonymously then discreetly drop a package of in an unmonitored mailbox, you're doing fairly well on the anonymity. (Assuming you're using untraceable cash, didn't leave fingerprints, hair, writing style, printer fingerprint, etc.) The best they get is a day + one point of physical presence.

Edit: Making it so severe is that the apparently preferred way to get stamps is the machines that print out uniquely marked stamps. Last time I tried all this, I had to go out of my way to find non-serialed stamps that I could pay for with cash.

Is there something about a camera at a post office that is worse than e.g. the cameras my local police department has mounted on certain street corners?

The Post Office is a federal agency. And this is Fox News.

> And this is Fox News.

Different Fox News than the one everyone loves to watch and hate. (Instead of ignore.)

That's true, but the local Fox affiliate in my area seems to be way more alarmist than the other stations. They talk about a couple inches of snow as the biggest winter storm this season. While true, it's a bit exaggerated in an area that gets that amount multiple times in a typical year.

> They talk about a couple inches of snow as the biggest winter storm this season

Every single news station does that, not just your local Fox. Every single one.

They LOVE disasters. The 3 R's they call it. Rapes, Robberies, Disasters/Wrecks/Riots.

It got too annoying for me - I don't watch news anymore, just read it.

Watching mailing activity has a chilling effect on your 1st Amendment rights to freedom of speech and freedom of association. As does the general trend to watch everything.

Poindexter called it TIA: Total Information Awareness. He was probably told to promote it because it was already being done. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Total_Information_Awareness

I've been to the post office twice this week to check a po box, and both times I didn't notice any security cameras in the lobby. I'm surprised there aren't any, and it'd be perfectly normal and natural to have them installed without people thinking anything suspicious. Most people would just assume they are there for security. To me that seems a lot better and less likely to arouse suspicion than some secret camera nonsense.

Maybe there's some obscure federal law prohibiting cameras inside the actual buildings? Who knows...

I agree, cameras are so commonplace that if they wanted to monitor people inside the post office, no one would blink an eye at a big fat camera pointing at the counter.

I experience paranoia as a result of my Bipolar-Type Schizoaffective Disorder; at times the paranoia is quiet severe, requiring that I admit myself to a psychiatric inpatient unit.

The prevalence of security cameras and other surveillance devices makes my paranoia worse. I must take more medicine as a result, but even so my medicine is not completely effective.

It is difficult for me - it really is - just to exist in modern society without going crazy.

IR leds show up as bright white lights on most cameras but are invisible to the naked eye. If you know a little about electronics you can make a battery powered cap with IR LEDS on the brim that will prevent cameras from seeing your face.

What you end up with is a better illuminated face. Those IR led anti-camera techniques are laughably bad.

That's not how that works.

To blind a security camera, you need to exceed its static range in the area of the CCD that your face occupies.

If camera optics were perfect, you would have to lighten or darken your entire face to the extent that your face either maxed out or minned out the CCD at its current exposure setting. (So having a "too well" illuminated face would actually help hide from a camera that didn't adjust to the brightest object in the frame, which includes most security cameras.) This can take a fair amount of light. However, security camera optics usually suck, and due to low-res CCDs and low-quality and dirty lenses, even a few small light sources near your face can help over-expose and obscure your whole face. The light incident on the camera from a small IR LED is often more than sufficient to do this, especially if the camera has an exposure optimized for dark or indoor conditions. The extra light reflected from your skin due to wearing IR LEDs is unlikely to compare to the light emitted directly from the LEDs.

If you have any cheap cameras, you can text this yourself. A single small IR LED on a low quality IR-unfiltered camera looks like the lens flare from a JJ Abrams movie.

I have tried it; it doesn't work.

Can you point me to any video or picture of it working?

Are you trying it with an IR security camera? If not, it's probably IR filtered.

Maybe strap one of these [1] to your head, and make sure it's always pointed at the CCD.

Otherwise, not enough power. As @DanBC says, try it with LEDs. It doesn't work.

[1]: http://www.wickedlasers.com/torch

I think you shouldn't point the leds at your face, but away from it, so that the light has a chance to shine directly into the camera sensor.

LEDs just aren't very bright. This is an idea that people think works until they try it.

I agree with you that a typical 3mm/5mm LED will not be effective. There are some very high power LEDs nowadays, and I've just tried a 2003-vintage IR spotlight, made from four large LEDs, against the cheap cameras around the house. All of those are completely washed out by it. A nicer camera, which has an IR filter, is unfazed.

No, this is a myth perpetrated by Kipkay's FAKE hack video. You would need tens of watts in IR leds to blind security camera.

Sorry to hear that. I don't know if it really helps, but you might want to try an internalize that as much surveillance as exists, they aren't interested in regular people not involved in crimes they or their superiors and corporate masters deem major.

Better act regular!

Sure hope the OP is in the correct location and has the correct religion, ethnicity and associations for this to be true.

I.e. if you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to worry about.

But even people who have nothing to hide have a lot to worry about, because merely coming to the attention of the government can be disastrous.

Say you're caught on camera at the post office or the corner gas station. There's an ongoing investigation, and the government observed that the subject of the investigation passed that camera yesterday. They decide to capture all other passers by within N hours of that event. You fall within that window.

The investigators do this with every other camera available to them.

Since you and the subject are going about your business at one location, there's a fair chance that you both have gone about your business in other nearby locations. Say you pass that filter.

There's a fair chance that you both were at some location at the same time, maybe even within eye sight of each other. Now you're a person of interest, and your name appears in the investigation.

Now remember that any law enforcement agency is fundamentally a bureaucracy. Almost no one actually knows how to manage; some are accidentally good managers, but most have been "Peter principled" up into management. Since we're enlightened enough to know by now that almost no one knows how to manage, we've tried to bring some fairness into the employee evaluation process, by using metrics.

"That which gets measured gets done." Any rational employee is going to pay attention to what he gets evaluated on. Number of tickets written. Number of suspects questioned. Number of arrests. Number of convictions resulting from arrests.

The investigation is going slowly. The investigator hasn't been out of the office for a week. His boss has been glaring at him lately. The investigator picks you to get himself out of the office. He visits you at work because you both work days and it's more intimidating to a subject to be embarrassed and nervous in view of co-workers. You've just suffered a minor injury to your reputation.

Surveillance shows that you both visit some location often, and often at the same time. Church. Store. Post Office. Or maybe you have an acquaintance in common, even if you don't know each other.

"We'd like you to wear a wire and contact the subject." Nah, I don't want to do that.

"It looks bad for you that you come into contact with this subject often. I'd hate for you to be investigated yourself." No really, this is not my thing.

"Remember that thing you thought was innocent and legal? It actually wasn't, and we're prepared to offer you a plea deal." Um ... OK

Totally made up but plausible scenario, and probably played out with different details daily. But at least the investigator is still in the running for an upgrade to his GS rating.

And the corruption; police who search your house randomly to find ot you use drugs which were placed there by police to fill their quotas, or your car. Or judges who were working with private jails. Or police officer who shoots you because you get out of your car. Or you were killed by police becouse your neigberhoods thought that you were Muslims making bomb, in fact you were watching Conan lights closed. Or you know that you are innocent but the hearing is once per 3 months and that makes your life suck. You are that taxi driver, you carry that killer, well fuck you, will question evry detail for 12 hours and we'll make you talk about him...

Yes, all that. Corruption is everywhere. It's one thing to be a victim of a corrupt gas station clerk, and quite another to be a victim of a corrupt law enforcement officer who is literally given benefit of the doubt in legal procedings. Or as the cops say, you may beat the rap, but you can't beat the ride.

Hate to inform you that anyone can be classified as "irregular" regardless of how innocent/harmless you are... Just ask all the black lives matters and occupy protesters who are currently getting harassed.

You're telling someone with a serious medical condition to think the conditions effects away. That's not how it works.

I actually don't have a problem with _humans_ knowing where I am and what I am doing. Consider that I use my real name here at HN as well as most other online communities, and that I am quite public about my mental illness.

What I find disturbing as that computers are able to correllate my activities in an automated way. I'm not so much worried about the NSA spying on me. What bothers me is that this is done for targeted advertising.

I am completely cool with certain kinds of targeted advertising. Say I visit slashdot and get an ad for a development tool; I'm fine with that.

What I'm not OK with, would be visiting at first slashdot, then after that, say, FaceBook, then getting an ad for a development tool because FB knows that I also hang out at /.

I've been heavily into sales and marketing for many years. I understand how it works rather more deeply than do most folks, for example, it is quite common for marketing people to have Psychology PhDs.

I expect that it's my understanding of marketing that makes me so upset about all this surveillance.

There are lots of things that I could legitimately worry about, but do not. For example I jaywalk across busy streets quite a lot, but don't worry about getting hurt. I also wander through bad neighborhoods late at night quite a lot, usually carrying my MacBook Pro, yet I do not worry about getting robbed.

It often seems to me that neurotypical humans are on the other extreme. They are always overly optimistic, sometimes almost to a pathological degree. Pathological—at least in the system we find ourselves in today (as opposed to ten-thousand years ago).

People take medications for paranoia not just because they want to stop being paranoid, but because they experience terrible anxiety, depression, or other bad feelings alongside/because of the paranoia.

You can be "paranoid" and healthy, if your paranoia doesn't affect your well-being or happiness, and/or if your paranoia is justified.

Well, I don't know the current case but in Turkey they were talking about a new law where shcizofrenic people would be under suvelliance by police (because some scizopfrenic people thouht that police were following them and they attacked the police). So the topic was "the law which will make schizofrenic people's dreams come true". I'm not joking!

I have more than one friend or loved one with a serious psychiatric diagnosis. They, and some other pretty smart folks I know, have sometimes remarked that they might have been perfectly happy, or at least accepted rather than stigmatized by their neighbors if only they had been born as hunter-gatherers or nomadic pastoralists where they could be shamans or something.

Anyway, I'm rooting for you bro.

Thank you for your kind words.

In fact, a Psychologist by the name of Joan Junqueira once told me "In more traditional societies, the Schizoaffectives are the Shamans."

Among the reasons I work as a coder, is that I can write good software despite being delusional.

Sorry to hear that mate. Is that just the cameras or allergy like feeling for EMF, something similar to character who acts as the brother of Mr.James MacGill in "Better call Saul" episodes? Thanks for sharing.

> allergy like feeling for EMF

No such thing.

I would hope so.. but I have no clue what people as the OP goes through with schirzophenia... are some of them scared of anything modern.. anything electric.. how does this fear manifest as.. is it just a mental or do they think they feel it physically too..

This is what it's like for me to be paranoid:

"My Deepest Fear" at http://www.warplife.com/mdc/books/vancouver-diaries/thought-...

God damn it.

I am SICK and TIRED of governments behaving badly, and even more so that we can't stop it. It pisses me off.

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