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The outside of a letter is public information - when you give the letter to a postal worker you know that a series of people who you will never meet are going t

The outside of a letter is public information - when you give the letter to a postal worker you know that a series of people who you will never meet are going to have to look at that address in order to route it to the right place. It's not clear to me how you can have a reasonable expectation of privacy.

khuey 12y ago
Quantity has a quality all its own.
scrollaway 12y ago
It's not so much about expecting things to be private, but more of expecting things not to end up in databases, virtually forever. As programmers, we tend to view the world in a very "black and white" fashion, similar to our security model: If it's public, there is no expectation of privacy. But the world is not like this ... shouldn't be like this. While there should be both technical and legal mechanisms in place to prevent privacy abuses, it does not mean that, if they're not there, we should simply expect governments to do as they please, log everything, put us in all sorts of databases, make those databases accessible to all sorts of people, etc.
- Agnogenic 12y ago
  I have to agree. The issue is isn't about the USPS having access to the information on the outside of mail, but that they are cataloging it. When I send a letter, I am providing my information for a service to be fulfilled and not for it to be put in long-term storage. In some sense, I think this is comparable to email. If Google was giving out a record of the addresses I've sent email to and received email from, I would consider it an invasion of my privacy. Services need to be upfront about what is being done with our data--anything else is dishonest. When I know what is being done with my information, I can make an informed decision on what services to use.
  - nfoz 12y ago
    > If Google was giving out a record of the addresses I've sent email to and received email from, I would consider it an invasion of my privacy. Yet you're sending this in cleartext over the internet...
    - wavefunction 12y ago
      And yet they are doing that in full knowledge of what they are doing, which is not what is happening either with the post office or the expectation one has with Google. Different situations have different expectations and outcomes.
  - XorNot 12y ago
    We have had actual cases where someone mailed a bunch of anthrax through the US post. Given that the post can be used to send dangerous physical objects, it seems prudent to maintain medium-term records of what was sent and where to assist in the prevention of this type of terrorism. Because the alternative, is we wait till it happens, we have no record of where anything came from, and then we get to engage in a multi-month campaign of opening and inspecting mail arbitrarily considered "suspect" to try and prevent the next round.
    - wooter 12y ago
      "type of terrorism" what makes your example "terrorism" and not "crime"?
      - XorNot 12y ago
        Why is any terrorism not just "crime"? Call it what you want: if we have no records of where mail was sent from and where it got delivered too over a medium-scale timeframe, we are seriously limiting any ability to deal wit this type of activity effectively. The term "letter bomb" is a real thing that was and still is really done.
        12y ago
- baddox 12y ago
  I disagree, because simply having a government database of this ostensibly public information is still not a threat, if the government will not take any actions which would be unacceptable regardless of whether the database existed. To use an extreme example, say there is an advocacy organization which the government decides they don't like. I'll use the ACLU just as an arbitrary familiar example. They could use their postal database to find all the people that have written letters to the ACLU, and target them in some way. It could be something extreme, like throwing them all in jail, or something more subtle, like using the IRS to audit them. Now, I think we can agree that this action is unacceptable. But the thing is, this action would still be unacceptable even if they didn't have or use the database. If they simply sent a government official to your house, asked you if you were involved with the ACLU, and arrested you if you said yes, that would clearly not be a violation of privacy, but it would clearly be unacceptable. So I don't really see the scanning of the outside faces of letters to be a privacy issue. But I reserve the right to be appalled at the things the government might do and probably already does with this information, independent of how they acquired the information.
  - zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC 12y ago
    The whole concept of a threat is all about uncertainty, so it's somewhat incoherent to talk about it in connection with a supposed certain future. An argument of the same structure would be: Simply playing russian roulette is still not a threat, if the chamber will be empty. Well, yeah, _if_ - it's a threat precisely because you do not know whether that condition will hold, and there is a reasonable chance that it won't; if you knew, it wouldn't be a threat but either a boring game or a method of killing yourself. Also, why would your argument not apply to medical information, say? If they collected your medical information from your doctor's office to then blackmail you with it, that is not a privacy issue because they could also have come to your door and asked you about your medical history, and that would also be unacceptable, wouldn't it? If I understand your argument right, it is roughly "if 'they' can do something bad in more than one way, then either of the ways is not bad because it would still be bad if the other way was used"? I'm not quite sure how to make sense of that. Also, one anecdote from history: The nazis when they invaded the Netherlands used existing census information on religious affiliation that was easily available on hollerith punch cards to find and deport the jews. Would you say that that information collection was not a threat for the jews who probably got killed faster and in larger numbers than if the data had not been available in that form? edit: One more example to consider: A dictator is not a threat, if he doesn't do anything that would still be inacceptable if it was done by a democracy. Well, a dictator is a threat exactly because you don't know that, and we tend to prefer democracy in order to protect ourselves from that risk of having a dictator of the bad kind.
khuey 12y ago
Quantity has a quality all its own.
revelation 12y ago
The "reasonable expectation of privacy" standard does not work in a world where computers exist.
pmiller2 12y ago
The exact same can be said of the contents of an unencrypted email.
- GabrielF00 12y ago
  Actually, no it can't. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expectation_of_privacy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expectation_of_privacy
jonah 12y ago
Of course they have to look at it to sort, route, and deliver it. What I expect is its existence to be forgotten as soon as each step in the process is completed.
NotAtWork 12y ago
The expectation was generally that government services would not proactively record non-targeted information about services rendered, ie, that they'd have a specific cause they could articulate before they'd use their position to gather data about citizens for the purposes of tracking, profiling, etc. When the laws governing this were written, it was generally impossible to do what they're doing now, so it wasn't specifically addressed. Claiming that impossible to predict growths were not specifically covered does not mean that they shouldn't be covered, merely that the people who write our laws aren't oracles. It may not be illegal, but it's clearly against the intent with which the law was written, and should be addressed by a new law which reflects the growing power of technology in society.
zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC 12y ago
How do you get from "you should expect people to look at the envelope in order to deliver it to its destination" to "you should expect the postal service to archive the information about your letter"? Seriously, I just don't get it. Are you just saying that it's not surprising that it's possible for people to archive data they get to see? Well, yeah, obviously so, but that's just completely besides the point, as nobody is surprised it's possible (at least nobody here is, I suppose) - if anything, I'm surprised that people do such unethical things. This is about ethics, not about technical possibility. If the military of my own country tomorrow started bombing my neighbourhood, I also wouldn't be surprised about the technical possibility of dropping those bombs on my neighbourhood, I would be surprised why the heck they would do such an evil thing. I can have a reasonable expectation of not being bombed by my own military because I expect them to be ethical (well, let's forget the question of whether military is ethical at all for the moment), not because it's impossible for them to do so. It's the same reason why I expect not to be stabbed to death on the street even though I don't wear any armor, why I expect that nobody starts following me on the street as soon as I leave the house, making HD recordings of my every move for archival, and why I expect that nobody puts up telescopes and infrared cameras around my house to capture and archive all of the electromagnetic radiation that leaks from my personal life out into "the public". Your notion of "reasonable expectation of privacy" is just naive and completely misses the point that this behaviour by the postal service poses a serious risk to society, and that risk does not go away just because it's unsurprising that they are technically capable of abusing their position of being able to see all the letters in transit.
- GabrielF00 12y ago
  The term "reasonable expectation of privacy" has a very specific meaning. It is a test that courts use to determine whether a search violates the fourth amendment[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expectation_of_privacy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expectation_of_privacy]. If you choose to start shouting at someone on the street and the police listen in (without a warrant), then you can't claim that your fourth amendment rights were violated - you made the choice to communicate in such a way that any number of people could have heard you. Subjectively, you couldn't have reasonably expected your conversation to remain private and objectively, society does not generally regard shouted messages as private. On the other hand, if you have a conversation in your home then it would be a violation of the fourth amendment for the police to listen in without a warrant because a person does not expect to be overheard in one's home and society considers one's home to be a private space. The point isn't whether or not the police were technically capable of listening in. The point is that in order to claim that an act was private you actually have to take some steps to demonstrate that you want and expect it to be private and that society in general would expect it to be private. If you seal a letter in an envelope then you clearly want the contents of that letter to be private. On the other hand, if you write something on the outside of the envelope where any number of people can see it, you have a much more limited claim on how that information is used.
beedogs 12y ago
It sure does. For hundreds of years, letters were delivered without being added to a gigantic ledger of everyone's correspondence. There is no need for this.
pfortuny 12y ago
There is a big difference between something not being a secret and something being public. It is not a simple dual option.

khuey 12y ago

Quantity has a quality all its own.

scrollaway 12y ago

It's not so much about expecting things to be private, but more of expecting things not to end up in databases, virtually forever. As programmers, we tend to view the world in a very "black and white" fashion, similar to our security model: If it's public, there is no expectation of privacy. But the world is not like this ... shouldn't be like this. While there should be both technical and legal mechanisms in place to prevent privacy abuses, it does not mean that, if they're not there, we should simply expect governments to do as they please, log everything, put us in all sorts of databases, make those databases accessible to all sorts of people, etc.

Agnogenic 12y ago
I have to agree. The issue is isn't about the USPS having access to the information on the outside of mail, but that they are cataloging it. When I send a letter, I am providing my information for a service to be fulfilled and not for it to be put in long-term storage. In some sense, I think this is comparable to email. If Google was giving out a record of the addresses I've sent email to and received email from, I would consider it an invasion of my privacy. Services need to be upfront about what is being done with our data--anything else is dishonest. When I know what is being done with my information, I can make an informed decision on what services to use.
- nfoz 12y ago
  > If Google was giving out a record of the addresses I've sent email to and received email from, I would consider it an invasion of my privacy. Yet you're sending this in cleartext over the internet...
  - wavefunction 12y ago
    And yet they are doing that in full knowledge of what they are doing, which is not what is happening either with the post office or the expectation one has with Google. Different situations have different expectations and outcomes.
- XorNot 12y ago
  We have had actual cases where someone mailed a bunch of anthrax through the US post. Given that the post can be used to send dangerous physical objects, it seems prudent to maintain medium-term records of what was sent and where to assist in the prevention of this type of terrorism. Because the alternative, is we wait till it happens, we have no record of where anything came from, and then we get to engage in a multi-month campaign of opening and inspecting mail arbitrarily considered "suspect" to try and prevent the next round.
  - wooter 12y ago
    "type of terrorism" what makes your example "terrorism" and not "crime"?
    - XorNot 12y ago
      Why is any terrorism not just "crime"? Call it what you want: if we have no records of where mail was sent from and where it got delivered too over a medium-scale timeframe, we are seriously limiting any ability to deal wit this type of activity effectively. The term "letter bomb" is a real thing that was and still is really done.
      - 12y ago
baddox 12y ago
I disagree, because simply having a government database of this ostensibly public information is still not a threat, if the government will not take any actions which would be unacceptable regardless of whether the database existed. To use an extreme example, say there is an advocacy organization which the government decides they don't like. I'll use the ACLU just as an arbitrary familiar example. They could use their postal database to find all the people that have written letters to the ACLU, and target them in some way. It could be something extreme, like throwing them all in jail, or something more subtle, like using the IRS to audit them. Now, I think we can agree that this action is unacceptable. But the thing is, this action would still be unacceptable even if they didn't have or use the database. If they simply sent a government official to your house, asked you if you were involved with the ACLU, and arrested you if you said yes, that would clearly not be a violation of privacy, but it would clearly be unacceptable. So I don't really see the scanning of the outside faces of letters to be a privacy issue. But I reserve the right to be appalled at the things the government might do and probably already does with this information, independent of how they acquired the information.
- zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC 12y ago
  The whole concept of a threat is all about uncertainty, so it's somewhat incoherent to talk about it in connection with a supposed certain future. An argument of the same structure would be: Simply playing russian roulette is still not a threat, if the chamber will be empty. Well, yeah, _if_ - it's a threat precisely because you do not know whether that condition will hold, and there is a reasonable chance that it won't; if you knew, it wouldn't be a threat but either a boring game or a method of killing yourself. Also, why would your argument not apply to medical information, say? If they collected your medical information from your doctor's office to then blackmail you with it, that is not a privacy issue because they could also have come to your door and asked you about your medical history, and that would also be unacceptable, wouldn't it? If I understand your argument right, it is roughly "if 'they' can do something bad in more than one way, then either of the ways is not bad because it would still be bad if the other way was used"? I'm not quite sure how to make sense of that. Also, one anecdote from history: The nazis when they invaded the Netherlands used existing census information on religious affiliation that was easily available on hollerith punch cards to find and deport the jews. Would you say that that information collection was not a threat for the jews who probably got killed faster and in larger numbers than if the data had not been available in that form? edit: One more example to consider: A dictator is not a threat, if he doesn't do anything that would still be inacceptable if it was done by a democracy. Well, a dictator is a threat exactly because you don't know that, and we tend to prefer democracy in order to protect ourselves from that risk of having a dictator of the bad kind.

khuey 12y ago

Quantity has a quality all its own.

revelation 12y ago

The "reasonable expectation of privacy" standard does not work in a world where computers exist.

pmiller2 12y ago

The exact same can be said of the contents of an unencrypted email.

GabrielF00 12y ago
Actually, no it can't. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expectation_of_privacy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expectation_of_privacy

jonah 12y ago

Of course they have to look at it to sort, route, and deliver it. What I expect is its existence to be forgotten as soon as each step in the process is completed.

NotAtWork 12y ago

The expectation was generally that government services would not proactively record non-targeted information about services rendered, ie, that they'd have a specific cause they could articulate before they'd use their position to gather data about citizens for the purposes of tracking, profiling, etc. When the laws governing this were written, it was generally impossible to do what they're doing now, so it wasn't specifically addressed. Claiming that impossible to predict growths were not specifically covered does not mean that they shouldn't be covered, merely that the people who write our laws aren't oracles. It may not be illegal, but it's clearly against the intent with which the law was written, and should be addressed by a new law which reflects the growing power of technology in society.

zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC 12y ago

How do you get from "you should expect people to look at the envelope in order to deliver it to its destination" to "you should expect the postal service to archive the information about your letter"? Seriously, I just don't get it. Are you just saying that it's not surprising that it's possible for people to archive data they get to see? Well, yeah, obviously so, but that's just completely besides the point, as nobody is surprised it's possible (at least nobody here is, I suppose) - if anything, I'm surprised that people do such unethical things. This is about ethics, not about technical possibility. If the military of my own country tomorrow started bombing my neighbourhood, I also wouldn't be surprised about the technical possibility of dropping those bombs on my neighbourhood, I would be surprised why the heck they would do such an evil thing. I can have a reasonable expectation of not being bombed by my own military because I expect them to be ethical (well, let's forget the question of whether military is ethical at all for the moment), not because it's impossible for them to do so. It's the same reason why I expect not to be stabbed to death on the street even though I don't wear any armor, why I expect that nobody starts following me on the street as soon as I leave the house, making HD recordings of my every move for archival, and why I expect that nobody puts up telescopes and infrared cameras around my house to capture and archive all of the electromagnetic radiation that leaks from my personal life out into "the public". Your notion of "reasonable expectation of privacy" is just naive and completely misses the point that this behaviour by the postal service poses a serious risk to society, and that risk does not go away just because it's unsurprising that they are technically capable of abusing their position of being able to see all the letters in transit.

GabrielF00 12y ago
The term "reasonable expectation of privacy" has a very specific meaning. It is a test that courts use to determine whether a search violates the fourth amendment[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expectation_of_privacy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expectation_of_privacy]. If you choose to start shouting at someone on the street and the police listen in (without a warrant), then you can't claim that your fourth amendment rights were violated - you made the choice to communicate in such a way that any number of people could have heard you. Subjectively, you couldn't have reasonably expected your conversation to remain private and objectively, society does not generally regard shouted messages as private. On the other hand, if you have a conversation in your home then it would be a violation of the fourth amendment for the police to listen in without a warrant because a person does not expect to be overheard in one's home and society considers one's home to be a private space. The point isn't whether or not the police were technically capable of listening in. The point is that in order to claim that an act was private you actually have to take some steps to demonstrate that you want and expect it to be private and that society in general would expect it to be private. If you seal a letter in an envelope then you clearly want the contents of that letter to be private. On the other hand, if you write something on the outside of the envelope where any number of people can see it, you have a much more limited claim on how that information is used.

beedogs 12y ago

It sure does. For hundreds of years, letters were delivered without being added to a gigantic ledger of everyone's correspondence. There is no need for this.

pfortuny 12y ago

There is a big difference between something not being a secret and something being public. It is not a simple dual option.