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Mysterious government spy cameras collecting data at post offices
- themoogle 12y agoThis 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.
- Renaud 12y ago>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.
- FLUX-YOU 12y agoThey 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.
- appleflaxen 12y agoAnd 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.
- ethanbond 12y agoSerious 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?
- DanBC 12y agoLast year someone was fired by GCHQ for wrongful access of data. http://stroudnewsandjournal.co.uk/news/11850150.MPs_to_report_on__snooping__laws/ 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.
- ethanbond 12y agoAh, very solid example. Thanks!
- pcthrowaway 12y agoWouldn't you rather someone not steal mail because they know (or believe) there are cameras than steal mail (possibly repeatedly) and get caught?
- code_duck 12y agoIn Denver, rather I would bet that the most likely use is to monitor people mailing cannabis.
- Intermernet 12y agoAssuming 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
- strgrd 12y agoI 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.
- rdtsc 12y agoIt 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".
- Estragon 12y agoIt looks like it is there to stay. The reporter claims they were ripped out hours after he asked the USPS LE arm about them.
- rdtsc 12y agoRight but it was only after the reporters starting asking questions. The solid enclosure looked like it could be there permanently.
- wahsd 12y agoThat 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
- sitkack 12y agocould be. what else could it be?
- jolan 12y agoMost logical explanation: trying to find people mailing marijuana out of state.
- GigabyteCoin 12y agoOut 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.
- tomjen3 12y agoWe 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.
- akira2501 12y agoThey 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.
- adtruth 12y agoIs there any hope for the future of freedom, privacy or government accountability in America? I'm not trying to make an overdramatic statement. I am genuinely curious what people believe. I am having a lot of trouble having any kind of faith in the future here. I was extremely down about the future of the U.S. until the Obama candidacy. When I saw him promise to reduce the NSA warantless wiretapping programs, I believed there was hope. I donated time and money that I could not afford because I believed that this was the one chance we had to change. It is clear now that was a complete lie, and Obama either endorses or is helpless to stop the NSA, CIA, the militarization of police and the utter vaporization of privacy and personal rights in the U.S. in the name of protecting us from terrorism. As a result, I have given up on the ability of the U.S. political system to protect or even stand for personal rights. I can never believe the words of another 'change' candidate, and I believe it to be totally impossible for a candidate who actually supports the dismantling or reigining in of the NSA to be elected, since the NSA actively spies on potential candidates and would use their power to stop a candidate working against them from being elected. The U.S. government's trajectory is towards more repression and more privacy erosion. Once these kinds of laws and programs are in place, it is nearly impossible to repeal. This is the nature of power. Many other governments have noticed how easily the U.S., supposedly the bastion of world freedom, is able to pass these laws and are following suit. As each year passes, I grow more depressed, more paranoid and more angry with the government. I battle with the idea of starting a family and bringing a child into this world who will likely be subjucated to an even more repressive society. How could I tell that child to trust the police or the government when I cannot myself? What are my options here? How do you repress your anger? Do I cut myself off from society? Try to gain citizenship to a Nordic country and pray their government isn't poisoned as the U.S. has become over the next 50 years? Comfort myself with the fact that at least the U.S. isn't North Korea? Kill myself?
- 4sdt6pie6hgl5ip 12y agoAdvice 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.
- spyder 12y agoThey should have put another camera to see who comes for it. Watching the watchers ;). Or just casually put a recycle bin before it.
- krapp 12y agoUnless it's a clever ruse, and the real camera is somewhere else, to watch the watchers watching the watchers.
- mjklin 12y agohttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sousveillance http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sousveillance
- beagle3 12y agoIf they are not incompetent, it will not need service more than once in a couple of years.
- MichaelCrawford 12y agoI 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.
- therealwill 12y agoIR 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.
- DanBC 12y agoWhat you end up with is a better illuminated face. Those IR led anti-camera techniques are laughably bad.
- wyager 12y agoThat'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.
- coldcode 12y agoA 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 :-)
- eli 12y agoDumb 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?
- ZanyProgrammer 12y agoPresumably 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.
- tacotime 12y agoSo the problem is more about the subversion rather than the surveillance. I would agree.
- tacotime 12y agoI'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.
- ZanyProgrammer 12y agoI'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.
- m3talridl3y 12y agoMaybe there's some obscure federal law prohibiting cameras inside the actual buildings? Who knows...
- code_duck 12y agoI 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.
- curiously 12y agoGod 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.