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Pretty much any federal agency you have heard of has an investigative dept that employs federal special agents. These are law enforcement roles with the same tr

Pretty much any federal agency you have heard of has an investigative dept that employs federal special agents. These are law enforcement roles with the same training, authority, and responsibilities as investigative agents in the FBI, etc. They were created to meet the specific law enforcement needs of each agency. Dept of Education agents investigate misuse of Dept of Education funds, for example. The Postal Inspectors investigate illegal use of, or threats to, the mail system. After 9/11 a lot of these depts got new infusions of resources, and instructions to do a lot more information sharing. There was a feeling that the attacks of 9/11 could have been prevented if existing disparate info had been better collected and collated. So it’s not that surprising that these agencies will seem to stray out of their lanes. If Postal is monitoring broadly for threats against their systems, but sees other concerning info, they are supposed to share it. This is all intended to be explanatory; I’m not saying that it’s how things should be. I will say that personally I have fewer concerns about programs to monitor public content on the Internet, than programs that seek to access, monitor, and store content that people intended to be privately communicated to other people.

threatofrain 6y ago
And these are their stories. Dun dun.
- tim-- 6y ago
  You joke, but they actually made a TV series. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Inspectors https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Inspectors
  - manigandham 6y ago
    > "...it was the only show on commercial television paid for by a U.S. government agency, with its funding coming from the United States Postal Service asset forfeiture..."
wombatmobile 6y ago
> I will say that personally I have fewer concerns about programs to monitor public content on the Internet, than programs that seek to access, monitor, and store content that people intended to be privately communicated to other people. You may have fewer concerns about public monitoring vs private spying, presumably because in the latter case privacy is being violated in a way that isn't the case for the former. But both cases are nefarious, and you don't have to choose between them. Both are examples of using public funds to abuse access to information from end users for political purposes.
- HenryBemis 6y ago
  Public vs Private: Public: I can think of an example. If the USPS finds out that in a certain area of a certain city, there is a big chance to have riots "tomorrow after 10am" (protests because of X-Y-Z resason), they can alert their local teams to e.g. deliver the post at 7am instead of 11am. Yes, some operations would be impacted (e.g. noon delivery won't happen), but this will protect the staff, protect the items (letters, parcels), the vehicles, etc. If they just hoard data to feed a bigger best (e.g. NSA) then, the data is still out there (my public blog, your public blog, HN comments, etc.) and they are up for the taking. In which case it doesn't matter if it is a federal agent carrying a NSA or a USPS badge.
  - ridaj 6y ago
    I'd be surprised if they could deliver anything ahead of schedule, but I imagine they can tell people to stop what they're doing at 9am if they're in a dangerous area
- mxcrossb 6y ago
  14 billion dollars was spent in the 2020 election [1]. If someone wants to “nefarious”ly analyze public information for political purposes, they can easily do it with private funds. [1] https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.cnbc.com/amp/2020/10/28/2020-election-spending-to-hit-nearly-14-billion-a-record.html?espv=1 https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.cnbc.com/amp/2020/10/28/202...
Scoundreller 6y ago
If they're disinterested in private comms, it's because they're very interested in public comms. If they're wondering what the public thinks and would make improvements, great, but if they're targeting the public because what they say is too true to handle, ugh.
dataflow 6y ago
> Pretty much any federal agency you have heard of has an investigative dept that employs federal special agents. These are law enforcement roles with the same training, authority, and responsibilities as investigative agents in the FBI, etc. Maybe worth noting that USPIS is older than the FBI. It's the oldest federal law enforcement agency.
- belval 6y ago
  That's a fantastic trivia fact, I guess threats to the postal service are a very old problem so it makes sense.
  - dataflow 6y ago
    Not merely threats to the postal service itself, but threats via the postal service. I imagine the best to get away with (say) fraud has always been to avoid physical presence, i.e. using mail.
    - TedDoesntTalk 6y ago
      > the best to get away with (say) fraud And letter/package bombs
    - banannaise 6y ago
      This is the territory where police departments and agencies get themselves into trouble - investigating crimes that aren't really their job to investigate. They technically have jurisdiction over a specific location or process, and that gives them an excuse. The most obvious parallel is pretext stops - state cops, sometimes local, coming up with an excuse to pull someone over on a highway, in order to check them for warrants or in hopes of discovering contraband they have no reason to suspect exists. A less obvious example is immigration enforcement fishing for excuses to deport someone.
  - dylan604 6y ago
    also, back then, the USPS did more than just deliver mail.
ryandrake 6y ago
> I will say that personally I have fewer concerns about programs to monitor public content on the Internet, than programs that seek to access, monitor, and store content that people intended to be privately communicated to other people. This distinction is disappearing quickly in the current Internet, where conversations are increasingly company-mediated and facilitated. There's no such thing as a "private" conversation on Facebook or similar hosted platforms. You might address a message to your friend, but you are sending it to Facebook, and they ultimately get to decide how private it is. It's likely a single "is_private" bit in a database! I'm more and more defaulting to a very strict rule: Never send anything to the Internet that I intend to be private. Whether it be a forum post, a message board, an E-mail, or a chat message. Keep my private pictures off of "secure, private" cloud storage. Don't do anything on a web site that I wouldn't want talked about in my local newspaper. Consider it all public knowledge because it's one leak or subpoena away from actually being public knowledge.
- Thorentis 6y ago
  Yes, but I think OP is saying that the law should protect intent. Just like with the physical mail system. It is illegal to open a letter addressed to somebody else (though, warrants can override this). But I am fine with the principle. On the other hand, if you stick a huge banner out the front of your house, that information is fair game. Just like posting on your Twitter profile or blog. The intent was never for it to be private.
  - ArnoVW 6y ago
    Not a correction, but I'd like to add a small precision to that because I've seen the same argument used in other contexts. For Twitter and Facebook I tend to agree, as there is an active intent (as you say) of publication. However, I've seen people reason in the same way with respect to licence plate or face recognition: "but the information is public". The fact that technology now allows us to treat licenceplates or faces information globally, in very cheap way, means that a fundamental new capacity is created.
    - 6y ago
irrational 6y ago
> So it’s not that surprising that these agencies will seem to stray out of their lanes. Like the secret service (Treasury agents) becoming the President’s bodyguards?
stevenicr 6y ago
I basically agree with "...fewer concerns about programs to monitor public content on the Internet, than programs that seek to access, monitor, and store content that people intended to be privately communicated to other people. " a few caveats though Scraping public data to see if some person / group / whatever is doing something the week of 4-20 is one thing, it's another to scrape the data and hold it for years or forever. How long should something be held on to after a poster has deleted it? I think transparency about data retention is very important - as this data can also become a tool used by others outside the scope of the original intention / need. What is private and what is thought to be private by the majority of Americans today? Most on HN may see differently and have a better understanding - but aside from the obvious "it's in the cloud is not your data, your data is their product to sell.. only self hosted, encrypted, one-time pad notes shared in person with no electronics around to listen in on is private" - sure.. But even beyond what many around this forum may think is common sense - I can think of many things where lines are blurred not just by ignorance but by design, and lack of awareness - a fbook pm / chat - is that private? what if I have posts set to friends only - and someone uses a cambridge alanytica type thing where friends who do something exposes what I thought of as private to third party scrapers? Is that scraping illegal if scraping public posts is? What about browser extensions? My private friends only photos - are they being used to train AI for fbook, clearview? are they being shared by some poll software a friend is using? an invite only group, is that data private? does text in a description create a type of protection? What about data that is hacked and published - it's become public data - how about an ex lover who publishes what was thought to be private DMs? I'm sure there are many more situations in which people think they are doing things privately that others could finger a reason why it's not. stories? disappearing snaps? If fbook keeps a log of things you've typed but then backspaced over - is that data public? is it yours? How many people think that data even exists? So in general I kind of agree - but I think we should include things people assume are private as off limits without warrants, while specifying what data is probed, what the retention is, and what the scope of sharing could be.
throwaway0a5e 6y ago
>They were created to meet the specific law enforcement needs of each agency. Dept of Education agents investigate misuse of Dept of Education funds, That's a really charitable way of saying "handle petty stuff that the FBI can't justify spending resources on". Every specialty police department exists for this reason and this reason only. Because the mission is often so petty they wouldn't get any resources if it was obvious that resource allocation to that task was resource allocation away from other policing. When you have real problems the real police have no problems allocating resources and whipping up dedicated teams. When you feel like using state violence to harass drunken college kids you create a campus PD. When you feel like using state violence to kick the homeless out of the train station you create transit cops. Etc. etc. Even if you're an investigative agency you will have no problem getting the local cops to provide muscle if your needs are legitimate. "Look at us working with the <pick three letters>" is the kind of photo op local departments love, so long as it reflects well on them.
- cryptoquick 6y ago
  This. This right here. Every word. I would even go so far as to say, there shouldn't be specific immigration cops, or alcohol, tobacco and firearms cops, since if there were actual crimes committed by immigrants or gun owners, the crimes themselves should be dealt with. To allow cops to go snooping around by widening jurisdictional responsibility, it has a very "pre-crime" aspect to it, which is often subject to prejudice and bias.
  - bscphil 6y ago
    > if there were actual crimes committed by immigrants or gun owners, the crimes themselves should be dealt with Maybe I'm missing your point, but isn't that exactly what the cops in question are supposedly doing? "Immigration cops" investigate illegal immigration. The ATF investigates the unlawful use or sale of firearms and drug trafficking. All of these things are crimes (regardless of whether they should be). So how is there a "pre-crime" aspect to specialization among police when it comes to things that actually are crimes?
    - 6y ago
salawat 6y ago
>I will say that personally I have fewer concerns about programs to monitor public content on the Internet, than programs that seek to access, monitor, and store content that people intended to be privately communicated to other people. You should be worried about both, they're honestly equivalent. See, this is the greatest bait and switch ever perpetrated on the citizens of the United States, and I'm not sure anyone was even actively trying to do it. Time was, communication between you and someone else was fundamentally expected to stay private. This was by definition prior to Third Party Doctrine, with which the Judiciary unilaterally decided the 4th Amendment was more of a suggestion than a hard line in the sand. Communication intermediaried through a service provider should never have been severed from personal effects and papers. If third-party metadata were treated bbased on the end; intended communication either point to point (private), multicast (confidential with expectation of privacy), or broadcast (implicitly public), we'd be in a much better place. When the Government starts vendoring out surveillance, or bakes it into departments, you know you've steered your society off the rails somewhere. The fact we're okay with businesses acting like a cabal of gossiping grannies only legitimizes the continued erosion of private space. How long until IoT connection strength logs make it possible to surveill anywhere with enough devices and computing power?
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
colechristensen 6y ago
Well... when you're posting things on social media you're publishing them to the world. That somebody is going to look at them... well I guess I don't have that much of a problem with it. If you don't want the minor details of your life recorded and put up to government scrutiny, stop making your existence a reality show.
morpheuskafka 6y ago
It does seem like they should centralize this stuff though... virtually every nationwide-jurisdiction agency will want to monitor social media posts so you would think they would centralize it in one department rather than duplicating effort. Also the argument can be made that spending too much time enforcing other agencies' laws is not spending the budget the way Congress intended.
stjohnswarts 6y ago
The IRS has a sizeable police force as well.
smsm42 6y ago
> If Postal is monitoring broadly for threats against their systems If, however, they are running a wide-net surveillance program under the guise of "anybody could be threatening our systems at any time, so we better monitor everyone just in case", thats a bit different sound. It's easy to say "well, we have to protect our systems" but so far there's zero evidence anything that USPS has been monitoring was threatening their system, and yet they keep the surveillance. With zero oversight or control from the people.
dredmorbius 6y ago
USPIS is actually the oldest federal law enforcement service. That said, its present utilisation seems to specifically address cases in which other agencies, both outward-facing (CIA, NSA) and inward (FBI) are limited. The USPIS's investigation, case, and conviction rations are quite impressive. Relatively low counts of cases, I believe, but conviction rates are extraordinarly high (~90% or so). Documented in the FY2019 USPIS annual report: https://www.uspis.gov/wp-content/uploads/2020/02/FY-2019-annual-report-508-web.pdf https://www.uspis.gov/wp-content/uploads/2020/02/FY-2019-ann...

threatofrain 6y ago

And these are their stories. Dun dun.

tim-- 6y ago
You joke, but they actually made a TV series. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Inspectors https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Inspectors
- manigandham 6y ago
  > "...it was the only show on commercial television paid for by a U.S. government agency, with its funding coming from the United States Postal Service asset forfeiture..."

wombatmobile 6y ago

> I will say that personally I have fewer concerns about programs to monitor public content on the Internet, than programs that seek to access, monitor, and store content that people intended to be privately communicated to other people. You may have fewer concerns about public monitoring vs private spying, presumably because in the latter case privacy is being violated in a way that isn't the case for the former. But both cases are nefarious, and you don't have to choose between them. Both are examples of using public funds to abuse access to information from end users for political purposes.

HenryBemis 6y ago
Public vs Private: Public: I can think of an example. If the USPS finds out that in a certain area of a certain city, there is a big chance to have riots "tomorrow after 10am" (protests because of X-Y-Z resason), they can alert their local teams to e.g. deliver the post at 7am instead of 11am. Yes, some operations would be impacted (e.g. noon delivery won't happen), but this will protect the staff, protect the items (letters, parcels), the vehicles, etc. If they just hoard data to feed a bigger best (e.g. NSA) then, the data is still out there (my public blog, your public blog, HN comments, etc.) and they are up for the taking. In which case it doesn't matter if it is a federal agent carrying a NSA or a USPS badge.
- ridaj 6y ago
  I'd be surprised if they could deliver anything ahead of schedule, but I imagine they can tell people to stop what they're doing at 9am if they're in a dangerous area
mxcrossb 6y ago
14 billion dollars was spent in the 2020 election [1]. If someone wants to “nefarious”ly analyze public information for political purposes, they can easily do it with private funds. [1] https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.cnbc.com/amp/2020/10/28/2020-election-spending-to-hit-nearly-14-billion-a-record.html?espv=1 https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.cnbc.com/amp/2020/10/28/202...

Scoundreller 6y ago

If they're disinterested in private comms, it's because they're very interested in public comms. If they're wondering what the public thinks and would make improvements, great, but if they're targeting the public because what they say is too true to handle, ugh.

dataflow 6y ago

> Pretty much any federal agency you have heard of has an investigative dept that employs federal special agents. These are law enforcement roles with the same training, authority, and responsibilities as investigative agents in the FBI, etc. Maybe worth noting that USPIS is older than the FBI. It's the oldest federal law enforcement agency.

belval 6y ago
That's a fantastic trivia fact, I guess threats to the postal service are a very old problem so it makes sense.
- dataflow 6y ago
  Not merely threats to the postal service itself, but threats via the postal service. I imagine the best to get away with (say) fraud has always been to avoid physical presence, i.e. using mail.
  - TedDoesntTalk 6y ago
    > the best to get away with (say) fraud And letter/package bombs
  - banannaise 6y ago
    This is the territory where police departments and agencies get themselves into trouble - investigating crimes that aren't really their job to investigate. They technically have jurisdiction over a specific location or process, and that gives them an excuse. The most obvious parallel is pretext stops - state cops, sometimes local, coming up with an excuse to pull someone over on a highway, in order to check them for warrants or in hopes of discovering contraband they have no reason to suspect exists. A less obvious example is immigration enforcement fishing for excuses to deport someone.
- dylan604 6y ago
  also, back then, the USPS did more than just deliver mail.

ryandrake 6y ago

> I will say that personally I have fewer concerns about programs to monitor public content on the Internet, than programs that seek to access, monitor, and store content that people intended to be privately communicated to other people. This distinction is disappearing quickly in the current Internet, where conversations are increasingly company-mediated and facilitated. There's no such thing as a "private" conversation on Facebook or similar hosted platforms. You might address a message to your friend, but you are sending it to Facebook, and they ultimately get to decide how private it is. It's likely a single "is_private" bit in a database! I'm more and more defaulting to a very strict rule: Never send anything to the Internet that I intend to be private. Whether it be a forum post, a message board, an E-mail, or a chat message. Keep my private pictures off of "secure, private" cloud storage. Don't do anything on a web site that I wouldn't want talked about in my local newspaper. Consider it all public knowledge because it's one leak or subpoena away from actually being public knowledge.

Thorentis 6y ago
Yes, but I think OP is saying that the law should protect intent. Just like with the physical mail system. It is illegal to open a letter addressed to somebody else (though, warrants can override this). But I am fine with the principle. On the other hand, if you stick a huge banner out the front of your house, that information is fair game. Just like posting on your Twitter profile or blog. The intent was never for it to be private.
- ArnoVW 6y ago
  Not a correction, but I'd like to add a small precision to that because I've seen the same argument used in other contexts. For Twitter and Facebook I tend to agree, as there is an active intent (as you say) of publication. However, I've seen people reason in the same way with respect to licence plate or face recognition: "but the information is public". The fact that technology now allows us to treat licenceplates or faces information globally, in very cheap way, means that a fundamental new capacity is created.
  - 6y ago

irrational 6y ago

> So it’s not that surprising that these agencies will seem to stray out of their lanes. Like the secret service (Treasury agents) becoming the President’s bodyguards?

stevenicr 6y ago

I basically agree with "...fewer concerns about programs to monitor public content on the Internet, than programs that seek to access, monitor, and store content that people intended to be privately communicated to other people. " a few caveats though Scraping public data to see if some person / group / whatever is doing something the week of 4-20 is one thing, it's another to scrape the data and hold it for years or forever. How long should something be held on to after a poster has deleted it? I think transparency about data retention is very important - as this data can also become a tool used by others outside the scope of the original intention / need. What is private and what is thought to be private by the majority of Americans today? Most on HN may see differently and have a better understanding - but aside from the obvious "it's in the cloud is not your data, your data is their product to sell.. only self hosted, encrypted, one-time pad notes shared in person with no electronics around to listen in on is private" - sure.. But even beyond what many around this forum may think is common sense - I can think of many things where lines are blurred not just by ignorance but by design, and lack of awareness - a fbook pm / chat - is that private? what if I have posts set to friends only - and someone uses a cambridge alanytica type thing where friends who do something exposes what I thought of as private to third party scrapers? Is that scraping illegal if scraping public posts is? What about browser extensions? My private friends only photos - are they being used to train AI for fbook, clearview? are they being shared by some poll software a friend is using? an invite only group, is that data private? does text in a description create a type of protection? What about data that is hacked and published - it's become public data - how about an ex lover who publishes what was thought to be private DMs? I'm sure there are many more situations in which people think they are doing things privately that others could finger a reason why it's not. stories? disappearing snaps? If fbook keeps a log of things you've typed but then backspaced over - is that data public? is it yours? How many people think that data even exists? So in general I kind of agree - but I think we should include things people assume are private as off limits without warrants, while specifying what data is probed, what the retention is, and what the scope of sharing could be.

throwaway0a5e 6y ago

>They were created to meet the specific law enforcement needs of each agency. Dept of Education agents investigate misuse of Dept of Education funds, That's a really charitable way of saying "handle petty stuff that the FBI can't justify spending resources on". Every specialty police department exists for this reason and this reason only. Because the mission is often so petty they wouldn't get any resources if it was obvious that resource allocation to that task was resource allocation away from other policing. When you have real problems the real police have no problems allocating resources and whipping up dedicated teams. When you feel like using state violence to harass drunken college kids you create a campus PD. When you feel like using state violence to kick the homeless out of the train station you create transit cops. Etc. etc. Even if you're an investigative agency you will have no problem getting the local cops to provide muscle if your needs are legitimate. "Look at us working with the <pick three letters>" is the kind of photo op local departments love, so long as it reflects well on them.

cryptoquick 6y ago
This. This right here. Every word. I would even go so far as to say, there shouldn't be specific immigration cops, or alcohol, tobacco and firearms cops, since if there were actual crimes committed by immigrants or gun owners, the crimes themselves should be dealt with. To allow cops to go snooping around by widening jurisdictional responsibility, it has a very "pre-crime" aspect to it, which is often subject to prejudice and bias.
- bscphil 6y ago
  > if there were actual crimes committed by immigrants or gun owners, the crimes themselves should be dealt with Maybe I'm missing your point, but isn't that exactly what the cops in question are supposedly doing? "Immigration cops" investigate illegal immigration. The ATF investigates the unlawful use or sale of firearms and drug trafficking. All of these things are crimes (regardless of whether they should be). So how is there a "pre-crime" aspect to specialization among police when it comes to things that actually are crimes?
  - 6y ago

salawat 6y ago

>I will say that personally I have fewer concerns about programs to monitor public content on the Internet, than programs that seek to access, monitor, and store content that people intended to be privately communicated to other people. You should be worried about both, they're honestly equivalent. See, this is the greatest bait and switch ever perpetrated on the citizens of the United States, and I'm not sure anyone was even actively trying to do it. Time was, communication between you and someone else was fundamentally expected to stay private. This was by definition prior to Third Party Doctrine, with which the Judiciary unilaterally decided the 4th Amendment was more of a suggestion than a hard line in the sand. Communication intermediaried through a service provider should never have been severed from personal effects and papers. If third-party metadata were treated bbased on the end; intended communication either point to point (private), multicast (confidential with expectation of privacy), or broadcast (implicitly public), we'd be in a much better place. When the Government starts vendoring out surveillance, or bakes it into departments, you know you've steered your society off the rails somewhere. The fact we're okay with businesses acting like a cabal of gossiping grannies only legitimizes the continued erosion of private space. How long until IoT connection strength logs make it possible to surveill anywhere with enough devices and computing power?

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

colechristensen 6y ago

Well... when you're posting things on social media you're publishing them to the world. That somebody is going to look at them... well I guess I don't have that much of a problem with it. If you don't want the minor details of your life recorded and put up to government scrutiny, stop making your existence a reality show.

morpheuskafka 6y ago

It does seem like they should centralize this stuff though... virtually every nationwide-jurisdiction agency will want to monitor social media posts so you would think they would centralize it in one department rather than duplicating effort. Also the argument can be made that spending too much time enforcing other agencies' laws is not spending the budget the way Congress intended.

stjohnswarts 6y ago

The IRS has a sizeable police force as well.

smsm42 6y ago

> If Postal is monitoring broadly for threats against their systems If, however, they are running a wide-net surveillance program under the guise of "anybody could be threatening our systems at any time, so we better monitor everyone just in case", thats a bit different sound. It's easy to say "well, we have to protect our systems" but so far there's zero evidence anything that USPS has been monitoring was threatening their system, and yet they keep the surveillance. With zero oversight or control from the people.

dredmorbius 6y ago

USPIS is actually the oldest federal law enforcement service. That said, its present utilisation seems to specifically address cases in which other agencies, both outward-facing (CIA, NSA) and inward (FBI) are limited. The USPIS's investigation, case, and conviction rations are quite impressive. Relatively low counts of cases, I believe, but conviction rates are extraordinarly high (~90% or so). Documented in the FY2019 USPIS annual report: https://www.uspis.gov/wp-content/uploads/2020/02/FY-2019-annual-report-508-web.pdf https://www.uspis.gov/wp-content/uploads/2020/02/FY-2019-ann...