NYTimes | Leslie James Pickering noticed something odd
in his mail last September: a handwritten card, apparently delivered by
mistake, with instructions for postal workers to pay special attention
to the letters and packages sent to his home.
“Show all mail to supv” — supervisor — “for copying prior to going out
on the street,” read the card. It included Mr. Pickering’s name, address
and the type of mail that needed to be monitored. The word
“confidential” was highlighted in green.
“It was a bit of a shock to see it,” said Mr. Pickering, who with his
wife owns a small bookstore in Buffalo. More than a decade ago, he was a
spokesman for the Earth Liberation Front, a radical environmental group
labeled eco-terrorists by the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Postal
officials subsequently confirmed they were indeed tracking Mr.
Pickering’s mail but told him nothing else.
As the world focuses on the high-tech spying of the National Security
Agency, the misplaced card offers a rare glimpse inside the seemingly
low-tech but prevalent snooping of the United States Postal Service.
Mr. Pickering was targeted by a longtime surveillance system called mail
covers, a forerunner of a vastly more expansive effort, the Mail
Isolation Control and Tracking program, in which Postal Service
computers photograph the exterior of every piece of paper mail that is
processed in the United States — about 160 billion pieces last year. It
is not known how long the government saves the images.
Together, the two programs show that postal mail is subject to the same
kind of scrutiny that the National Security Agency has given to
telephone calls and e-mail. Fist tap Arnach.
