Fair enough, and thanks for the thoughtful reply. I didn't mean to misrepresent your position -- I took "The obvious explanation here is that the USPS fucked up

Fair enough, and thanks for the thoughtful reply. I didn't mean to misrepresent your position -- I took "The obvious explanation here is that the USPS fucked up" to mean you belived it couldn't be otherwise, rather than when weighing the evidence the more obvious [simpler] explanation is that USPS screwed up. Like you, I'm also a big proponent of Occam's razor. (Having been a med student, you don't know how many times I heard that "think horses not zebras" analogy from attendings.) I guess it just comes down to the degree of faith each of us has in the NSA and their corporate partners. Some of us are more willing to doubt their actions and/or believe it's possible they could screw up this way. But at this point we can only wait and see if we learn anything more in the coming days -- though probably not. One would hope the NSA is competent enough to cover this up, even if it was their screw up. Added: BTW, there is another explanation that no one has mentioned. Leaving the Alexandria issue aside, the NSA interception program obviously relies on participation from one or more corporate partners. And just as we've seen at the telcos, it's reasonable to assume that there are staff at those partners who aren't particularly enthusiastic about the program. So it's possible someone decided to "accidentally" bypass/skip an important step that would have obscured this. It's not a huge leap to imagine a motivated techie realizing that this particular delivery would be an ideal opportunity to direct a lot of attention to the interception program -- if they felt compelled to take the risk. I'm definitely not saying this is the (or even a) likely possibility, but it's probably the only way we'll ever know if it was in fact the NSA.