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Law enforcement is spying on Americans' mail, records show
- pseudolus 2y agohttp://archive.today/1XvEx http://archive.today/1XvEx
- pbj1968 2y agoThey 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.
- dotcoma 2y agoWhat 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 ??
- greyface- 2y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mail_Isolation_Control_and_Tracking https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mail_Isolation_Control_and_Tra...
- toomuchtodo 2y agoWould be curious if the 30 day retention period is still accurate.
- odyssey7 2y agoIf 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 https://scrollprize.org/grandprize
- AnimalMuppet 2y agoCongratulations. You drastically increased my paranoia with one sentence.
- averynicepen 2y ago"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.
- browningstreet 2y agoI 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.
- pseudolus 2y agoInformed delivery: https://www.usps.com/manage/informed-delivery.htm https://www.usps.com/manage/informed-delivery.htm
- c22 2y agoMy local hackerspace uses this service with some OCR to email members when they have mail waiting at the space.
- RockRobotRock 2y agoI 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.)
- tracker1 2y agoWhile a pain to automate on a server, Puppeteer/Playwright are both pretty straight forward to script against.
- instagib 2y agoI 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/ https://www.postgrid.com/mail-scanning-service-companies/
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- aaron695 2y agoThey 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.
- Onavo 2y agoWhat took them so long to catch the Unabomber?
- alfiedotwtf 2y agoNot 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.
- beaeglebeachedd 2y ago[flagged]
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- _moof 2y ago> The wife had mega beef because she hated Ted (from docs she also seems a mega cunt) so she pushed hard to get him to narc Is this really the tone you want to take about someone insisting that a guy mailing literal bombs to people be arrested?
- beaeglebeachedd 2y agoI think she recklessly pushed it to get rid of Ted with disregard for how much it hurt her husband. It was the right outcome but done by an evil bitch for selfish purposes that hurt her husband with no genuine regard for innocents. It wasn't some act of valor done to help people.
- jhgvh 2y ago[flagged]
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- gnicholas 2y ago[flagged]
- callalex 2y ago[flagged]
- gnicholas 2y agoYeah, and it hardly ever comes via USPS, at least in my experience.
- aaomidi 2y agoCompletely depends on your location. For me it’s 95% USPS.
- Turing_Machine 2y agoDefinitely location dependent. I estimate mine is about 50% USPS, 25% UPS, and 25% Amazon's own delivery service. The proportion that's Amazon-delivered has been increasing noticeably over the past year or two.
- o11c 2y agoIf it's coming via somebody other than the USPS, that just means law enforcement doesn't have to bother with those pesky laws protecting real mail.
- gnicholas 2y agoIf it's coming from Amazon, they don't need to bother with inspecting the package at all. They just need to subpoena Amazon and get the purchase records. The impact of mail scanning only applies to mail whose contents are not already revealed in electronic systems that the feds can more easily access.
- pkaye 2y ago
- giantg2 2y agoBasically snail mail Metadata snooping - who sent and recieved, package size, and date.
- teepo 2y agoIndeed [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_Tracking https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mail_Isolation_Control_and_Tra...
- killingtime74 2y agoIt's not snooping btw, this is information the sender provided. Would be hard to deliver the mail otherwise....
- giantg2 2y agoThe 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.
- Citizen8396 2y agoUSPS has its own law enforcement agency, USPIS
- tracker1 2y agoUSPS' 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.
- macNchz 2y agoThere’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/ https://darknetdiaries.com/transcript/132/
- chatmasta 2y agoUltimately 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.
- throwup238 2y agoThat's why I think I'd make a great criminal: I don't have any friends or family to muck it all up.
- vunuxodo 2y agoThe same person also gave a talk at Defcon: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=01oeaBb85Xc 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.
- rustcleaner 2y agoJust think what they're doing to your cloud data, and cloud-hosted medical/psychiatric data...
- hi-v-rocknroll 2y agoEvery single piece of US mail and packages is scanned and retained for every address.
- OutOfHere 2y agoAs an aside, UPS occasionally opens package boxes, and they have no right.
- dev1ycan 2y ago[flagged]
- s5300 2y ago[dead]
- chii 2y agoThey dont care about your adult searches. Unless you suddenly stop and your behavioural pattern changes (to something alarming, like contacting known terrorists or spies, etc). I dont know how to feel about this sort of surveillance. On the one hand, the gov't shouldn't be able to know how you normally behave. That, to me is private information. It might be used against you. But on the other hand, this level of surveillance can be used to catch unsaviory types. But i think i will still stick to the mantra of 'giving up freedom for security means you get neither'.
- kmoser 2y agoOk, but what about private carriers like FedEx, UPS, etc.? Is using them an effective end-run for the paranoid? Asking for a friend.
- browserman 2y agoNo, 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.
- kmoser 2y agoMy question was whether law enforcement typically requests the same data from private carriers that it does from USPS, not whether they open your mail.
- kvonhorn 2y agoI'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.
- metadat 2y ago> 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.