They were created to meet the specific law enforcement needs of each agency. Dept of Education agents investigate misuse of Dept of Education funds, for example. The Postal Inspectors investigate illegal use of, or threats to, the mail system.
After 9/11 a lot of these depts got new infusions of resources, and instructions to do a lot more information sharing. There was a feeling that the attacks of 9/11 could have been prevented if existing disparate info had been better collected and collated.
So it’s not that surprising that these agencies will seem to stray out of their lanes. If Postal is monitoring broadly for threats against their systems, but sees other concerning info, they are supposed to share it.
This is all intended to be explanatory; I’m not saying that it’s how things should be.
I will say that personally I have fewer concerns about programs to monitor public content on the Internet, than programs that seek to access, monitor, and store content that people intended to be privately communicated to other people.
That's a really charitable way of saying "handle petty stuff that the FBI can't justify spending resources on".
Every specialty police department exists for this reason and this reason only. Because the mission is often so petty they wouldn't get any resources if it was obvious that resource allocation to that task was resource allocation away from other policing.
When you have real problems the real police have no problems allocating resources and whipping up dedicated teams. When you feel like using state violence to harass drunken college kids you create a campus PD. When you feel like using state violence to kick the homeless out of the train station you create transit cops. Etc. etc. Even if you're an investigative agency you will have no problem getting the local cops to provide muscle if your needs are legitimate. "Look at us working with the <pick three letters>" is the kind of photo op local departments love, so long as it reflects well on them.
Specialization is a thing within policing as much as it is within the rest of life. It's not like the same person who knows how to investigate a murder scene is equally capable of investigating complicated financial crimes on Wall St.
----------
In terms of aligning incentives, there are various situations where there would otherwise there would be a mismatch of "who pays for this/who's responsibility this is" vs "who this is meant to serve".
On your examples:
Campus PD - College has equal/larger population than town. Town-college relations are often tense at best. Voters in town have no interest in spending their tax money on adequate policing for the college, college has no interest in donating a bunch of money to the PD to maybe get better services that they still have no say in. Students often heavily distrust the local PD and are unlikely to report crimes to them. It's still a problematic structure, but the premise that it would be better without is questionable.
Transit Cops - No individual town or city is going to patrol the system coherently otherwise, and areas which utilize the service less are unlikely to spend significant resources policing it. Services which cross state lines also have jurisdictional issues even with just using normal state-level police.
About a decade ago I was living in a major southern US city in the more modestly priced part of an upscale area of town. I came back to the area from work fairly early in the afternoon, rounded the bend, and saw both sides of the street littered with unmarked police cars and vans, with many, many extremely large men in suits and sunglasses running around, directing the hapless local cops to do this and that. I'm talking the whole American militarized authority jamboree and then some: dogs, rifles, lights flashing, citizens being shooed away. A big SWAT-looking van poking out of a driveway. Maybe 3 dozen official looking people all told. US law enforcement is nothing if not histrionic and self-important in how it occupies physical space, but this presence was more than just the usual overreaction to a cat stuck in a tree. I remember thinking "uh-oh" and really meaning it.
Of course I couldn't get into my parking lot -- I lived across the street a few doors down, and the cops weren't letting anyone through -- so I parked nearby and walked back over and began to chat up some neighbors, exchanging speculation on what the hell it could be. Obviously they were FBI, we all agreed - that's the cyborg-looking guys in suits, surely all grown in the same vat near Quantico? And the crime? Terrorism was the consensus, though one guy was sure it was counterfeiting money. (I remember that because he insisted that he knew someone "who used to do that".) The vibe standing there was equal parts morbid curiousity and real nerves -- what if someone was making bombs in our quiet residential neighborhood?
After a while someone got up the nerve to ask one of the bewildered local cops what the heck was going on. "That's not the FBI," he says, "that's the US Postal Police." Apparently someone was "sending marijuana in the mail".
This effing country, right?
I would even go so far as to say, there shouldn't be specific immigration cops, or alcohol, tobacco and firearms cops, since if there were actual crimes committed by immigrants or gun owners, the crimes themselves should be dealt with. To allow cops to go snooping around by widening jurisdictional responsibility, it has a very "pre-crime" aspect to it, which is often subject to prejudice and bias.
One centralized Federal Police Department would be a single point of failure and bureaucratic nightmare.
Imagine if there were not State and local police departments. Just the FBI managing every shoplifting arrest in the country.
Someone's never been mugged on campus before... Campus PD exist to give special protection to the children of wealthy upper-middle class families that thw surrounding community is usually deprived of.
Maybe worth noting that USPIS is older than the FBI. It's the oldest federal law enforcement agency.
[0] https://www.npr.org/2020/09/02/908836752/the-postal-service
[1] https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/311582/how-the-post...
The wikipedia page for USPIS claims that. But the wikipedia page of the US Marshalls claims that same honor. I wonder which is correct.
This distinction is disappearing quickly in the current Internet, where conversations are increasingly company-mediated and facilitated. There's no such thing as a "private" conversation on Facebook or similar hosted platforms. You might address a message to your friend, but you are sending it to Facebook, and they ultimately get to decide how private it is. It's likely a single "is_private" bit in a database!
I'm more and more defaulting to a very strict rule: Never send anything to the Internet that I intend to be private. Whether it be a forum post, a message board, an E-mail, or a chat message. Keep my private pictures off of "secure, private" cloud storage. Don't do anything on a web site that I wouldn't want talked about in my local newspaper. Consider it all public knowledge because it's one leak or subpoena away from actually being public knowledge.
On the other hand, if you stick a huge banner out the front of your house, that information is fair game. Just like posting on your Twitter profile or blog. The intent was never for it to be private.
(I say that as one who shares the general sentiments.)
Facebook has started efforts to roll out end-to-end encryption for its Messenger as well, using the same protocol as WhatsApp, which Signal blogged about: https://signal.org/blog/facebook-messenger/#:~:text=Facebook....
Posts and other content on your "wall" or "timeline" are intended to be relatively public, according to whatever privacy settings you have set up on your account, and won't be similarly encrypted; but the content will only be available to the people that you allow to see your account and post. That's more of a permission set described by a database like you describe. But you can share different posts with different groups of people you define; or participate in public or private/secret/invite only groups where content is only accessibly by those people.
Yes, that content would be accessible as plaintext by certain FB employees, just like your Gmail account's contents could be accessed by certain employees at Google. However, there are very strict policies around not accessing user content at FB by employees unless required for the function of the employee's job (e.g. investigating spamming, child pornography, and other abuse like that I would imagine; or assisting law enforcement with subpoenas or court orders for the content).
Notably WhatsApp has no ability to hand over message contents between individuals whose conversations are protected by end-to-end encryption even if it receives a court order to do so, because the encryption keys protecting that content truly live only on the user's devices, and the plaintext content never touches WhatsApp servers today. As long as you don't back up your message history outside your device in plaintext (and what WhatsApp stores on the device might be encrypted now too; I'm not sure), the only way for anyone to obtain the message history is to get their hands on your phone and the encryption keys & message history it contains. So if your phone is protected by a strong passcode and a security vendor hasn't found a way to bypass iPhone login security, as long as your iPhone is locked even the US government won't be able to get at your data.
I believe their was a court ruling that passwords to your phone are protected by the 5th Amendment against testifying against yourself, so I don't believe a court can compel you to reveal the phone password, but I'm not up to speed on the current case law. So if you lock your phone before an attacker seizes it, they can't get the contents even if the attacker is a government (unless they're willing to use physical coercion as in XKCD 538 [1], or indirect physical coercion such as ordering revelation of the password under threat of contempt of court, if that's permissible).
WhatsApp is also allowing businesses onto the platform, to use it to communicate with those customers, and some of those conversations may be regularly encrypted, not end-to-end encrypted. Those conversations are displayed differently in the UX of WhatsApp when the conversation begins, to clarify that they're not protected by E2EE. (It's arguably impractical to have real E2EE between a customer and a large business with, e.g., many customer service agents. What would that really mean? I personally think E2EE is most meaningful between individual people who personally know each other, not between people and businesses which are anonymously-defined, constantly-changing groups of people.)
I'm not a spokesperson for any company and these are my own opinions based on what I've read from public news sources.
You may have fewer concerns about public monitoring vs private spying, presumably because in the latter case privacy is being violated in a way that isn't the case for the former.
But both cases are nefarious, and you don't have to choose between them.
Both are examples of using public funds to abuse access to information from end users for political purposes.
Public: I can think of an example. If the USPS finds out that in a certain area of a certain city, there is a big chance to have riots "tomorrow after 10am" (protests because of X-Y-Z resason), they can alert their local teams to e.g. deliver the post at 7am instead of 11am. Yes, some operations would be impacted (e.g. noon delivery won't happen), but this will protect the staff, protect the items (letters, parcels), the vehicles, etc.
If they just hoard data to feed a bigger best (e.g. NSA) then, the data is still out there (my public blog, your public blog, HN comments, etc.) and they are up for the taking. In which case it doesn't matter if it is a federal agent carrying a NSA or a USPS badge.
[1] https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.cnbc.com/amp/2020/10/28/202...
You should be worried about both, they're honestly equivalent.
See, this is the greatest bait and switch ever perpetrated on the citizens of the United States, and I'm not sure anyone was even actively trying to do it. Time was, communication between you and someone else was fundamentally expected to stay private. This was by definition prior to Third Party Doctrine, with which the Judiciary unilaterally decided the 4th Amendment was more of a suggestion than a hard line in the sand.
Communication intermediaried through a service provider should never have been severed from personal effects and papers. If third-party metadata were treated bbased on the end; intended communication either point to point (private), multicast (confidential with expectation of privacy), or broadcast (implicitly public), we'd be in a much better place. When the Government starts vendoring out surveillance, or bakes it into departments, you know you've steered your society off the rails somewhere.
The fact we're okay with businesses acting like a cabal of gossiping grannies only legitimizes the continued erosion of private space. How long until IoT connection strength logs make it possible to surveill anywhere with enough devices and computing power?
Like the secret service (Treasury agents) becoming the President’s bodyguards?
That said, its present utilisation seems to specifically address cases in which other agencies, both outward-facing (CIA, NSA) and inward (FBI) are limited.
The USPIS's investigation, case, and conviction rations are quite impressive. Relatively low counts of cases, I believe, but conviction rates are extraordinarly high (~90% or so).
Documented in the FY2019 USPIS annual report: https://www.uspis.gov/wp-content/uploads/2020/02/FY-2019-ann...
If, however, they are running a wide-net surveillance program under the guise of "anybody could be threatening our systems at any time, so we better monitor everyone just in case", thats a bit different sound. It's easy to say "well, we have to protect our systems" but so far there's zero evidence anything that USPS has been monitoring was threatening their system, and yet they keep the surveillance. With zero oversight or control from the people.
a few caveats though
Scraping public data to see if some person / group / whatever is doing something the week of 4-20 is one thing, it's another to scrape the data and hold it for years or forever.
How long should something be held on to after a poster has deleted it?
I think transparency about data retention is very important - as this data can also become a tool used by others outside the scope of the original intention / need.
What is private and what is thought to be private by the majority of Americans today?
Most on HN may see differently and have a better understanding - but aside from the obvious "it's in the cloud is not your data, your data is their product to sell.. only self hosted, encrypted, one-time pad notes shared in person with no electronics around to listen in on is private" - sure..
But even beyond what many around this forum may think is common sense - I can think of many things where lines are blurred not just by ignorance but by design, and lack of awareness -
a fbook pm / chat - is that private? what if I have posts set to friends only - and someone uses a cambridge alanytica type thing where friends who do something exposes what I thought of as private to third party scrapers? Is that scraping illegal if scraping public posts is? What about browser extensions?
My private friends only photos - are they being used to train AI for fbook, clearview? are they being shared by some poll software a friend is using?
an invite only group, is that data private? does text in a description create a type of protection? What about data that is hacked and published - it's become public data - how about an ex lover who publishes what was thought to be private DMs?
I'm sure there are many more situations in which people think they are doing things privately that others could finger a reason why it's not.
stories? disappearing snaps?
If fbook keeps a log of things you've typed but then backspaced over - is that data public? is it yours? How many people think that data even exists?
So in general I kind of agree - but I think we should include things people assume are private as off limits without warrants, while specifying what data is probed, what the retention is, and what the scope of sharing could be.
But it's worth noting that the USPS has had its own legion of postal inspectors going back to the 19th century, when they were a (comparatively) huge part of the U.S. government, and the FBI, etc. did not exist.
Some 1,200 postal inspectors are still around, and they play important roles on federal prosecutions related to mail fraud, drug shipments, etc. There's a good Wikipedia entry on it all: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Postal_Inspectio...
https://www.military.com/off-duty/2020/08/25/intense-rules-u...
The mail is serious business.
> Q. Suppose the thief was apparently unarmed but was running away?
> A. Call halt twice at the top of your voice, and if he does not halt, fire one warning shot; and if he does not obey this, shoot to hit him.
There was no chill during the great depression:
> Q. If I hear the command 'Hands Up,' am I justified in obeying this order?
> A. No; fall to the ground and start shooting.
18th, even. From the same Wikipedia article you shared:
> The Postal Inspection Service has the oldest origins of any federal law enforcement agency in the United States. It traces its roots back to 1772 when colonial Postmaster General Benjamin Franklin first appointed a "surveyor" to regulate and audit the mails. Thus, the Service's origins—in part—predate the Declaration of Independence, and therefore the United States itself.
https://pasttenseblog.wordpress.com/2019/09/03/today-in-lond...
> The Post office was of central importance to this surveillance. The ‘Secret Office’ – an arm of what was basically a secret service, dedicated to opening post to discover plots against the government – was formed around 1653 under Cromwell’s post-Civil War republican Protectorate; but it proved so handy, the Office was continued after the restoration of the monarchy.
[...]
> Morland also recorded what he saw as the basic function of his devices and of surveillance in general: “a skilful prince ought to make a watch tower of his general post office… and there place such careful sentinels as that, by their care and diligence, he may have a constant view of all that passes.”
Samuel Morland was interesting and has some early computing devices.
https://history-computer.com/samuel-morland/
https://history-computer.com/samuel-morland-biography-histor...
https://www.headstuff.org/culture/history/terrible-people-fr...
One of the links talks about letters sealed in the Spanish manner.
https://regencyredingote.wordpress.com/2012/11/16/sealing-wa...
> It was then that the superior qualities of the new "Spanish" wax came to be highly valued. The basic formula of this new sealing compound was a blend of shellac, mastic, turpentine, chalk or gypsum, and a coloring agent, to which essential oils and/or fragrant balsams might be added to facilitate melting and impart a pleasant fragrance. This "sealing wax" could be melted to a thick viscous fluid which would readily and firmly adhere to the parchment or paper on which it was placed. While warm, it would take a clear impression of any seal that was pressed in to it. It would remain solid, even in the heat of summer, and was flexible enough to remain intact while affixed to the document on which it had been placed. However, it was extremely difficult to remove a seal made of this material and replace it after the contents of the sealed document had been read. This compound was more brittle than beeswax so it could be easily broken, thus providing clear evidence of tampering. Even if the seal could be removed unbroken, any attempt to re-affix a seal was nearly impossible, since, with such a low melting point, the image which had been impressed into it would loose its crispness, if not melt completely, if additional hot wax was used to re-attach it, yet another sign of tampering.
I can't tell if this is corruption or genuine work.
How about having the FBI monitoring the security instead and them notifying USPS.
[1]https://about.usps.com/newsroom/national-releases/2020/1113-....
As an aside, I genuinely dislike seeing misinformation from the Trump/Russia era on HN.
On my FB feed I have seen friends and friends of friends call for armed revolt many times over the past few years. Most all of them are blowing steam and many are in their 60s or older and couldn't run a block in gym shorts, and much less if they were carrying any kind of real military gear, but they like to think they can. We all grew up with "Rambo" movies.
But some of those who's comments I've seen I don't know at all.
The ordeal at our Capital proves there's a problem that needs to be monitored. Most of those who went there were not armed or dangerous, but there were enough kooks to cause some real damage and lives were lost. And last year we had the guy who blew himself and his motorhome up on a Downtown street.
If we had another "Timothy McVeigh" event people would be howling, and if we had several they'd be freaking out and demanding something be done.
We all have good reason to be wary of "Big Brother" type surveillance but we also have to acknowledge that we have a problem with people getting crazy and shooting into crowds and blowing things up.
There's not always a good solution to a shitty situation.
0. https://www.politifact.com/article/2021/apr/20/update-capito...
Also, don't call them "protestors". The nicest term I can think of for them would be rebels since they were in open rebellion to the United States. Some people at the capital that day were protestors, but the people who stormed the capital went far beyond protest.
Unlike, say, nightly riots in Portland, that require neither monitoring nor federal response of any kind?
It would be one thing if posts like the one above honestly argued for some necessary level of general surveillance in good faith. It's entirely different story, however, when they sneakily imply a certain set of hyper-partisan assumptions.
If you can't demonstrate to me that surveillance of social media is politically neutral and aims at preventing harm, rather than suppressing speech through harassment, I'd rather have no surveillance of that kind at all.
Edit:
It's bizarre that despite all these "concerns" about social media there is no investigation (that I know of) into the origins of the whole QAnon degeneracy.
They were monitored. To the extent that the lead of the Proud Boys was actually supplying intel to the feds and the Status Coup youtube channel (which I think was taken off line for some Kafkaesque reason) was recording various pro-Trump people in public calling for such actions.
More monitoring is not needed. Monitoring did nothing to stop the 9-11 Saudi allies from carrying out their mission. The only thing monitoring does is to make people fear to express their thoughts online in case they get into trouble.
I don't know how to deescalate it, but its beginning to feel like the most sensible solution is transferring significantly more resources and power to the States (which is precisely how our country was founded). Many states do, internally, have division, but broadly speaking California would be happier to run itself more independently of Donald Trump, as much as Mississippi would be happier to run itself more independently of Joe Biden.
It doesn't feel like this is optional; some amount of fractionalization will happen, possibly in four years, possibly in fifty, but it is inevitable. The choice in front of us is to either, ease ourselves into it using the democratic framework we have in place by significantly reducing the power of the executive branch and transferring more tax-originating resources from the federal to state & country levels, or; some form of civil war.
And, I beg you, don't form this idea of "civil war" in your mind to resemble the first one; it won't. For all the ugliness of our first Civil War, our second will be far uglier. One possibility may take the form of a second Trump-like presidency destroying the Federal faith of left-leaning states, causing the west coast to secede. Another; domestic terrorism, cyber warfare, untraceable and unstoppable flash attacks on critical infrastructure such as electricity and water, splinter military groups.
As left-leaning as I may be, we can't come out of the Trump presidency and Biden election thinking all of this is over. We can't ban Parler from AWS then wash our hands clean and say its a job well done. This rage is real, its everywhere, and there are four hundred million guns owned by civilians in America [1]. Gun control? A fairy tale. Suppression of dissenting speech? Someone didn't read 1984, or the Constitution. The only solution is to fractionalize; if people feel anger at the President, the solution isn't to install a new President, it's to make the position of the President one that isn't worthy of Anger.
The scariest part about our future as a country lies in the reality that this will never happen. We are driving full speed toward a civil war, or worse, and the immutable system we've built won't allow us to do what is necessary to avoid it.
[1] https://wamu.org/story/20/09/18/how-many-people-in-the-u-s-o...
I used "monitored" as verb to point out we need to be aware of who is plotting extreme violent events like the one Timothy McVeigh planned and executed and prevent them whenever possible in order to deescalate a trend towards others carrying out similar events.
"Q" is a thing, and we've seen quite a few citizens fall for it. That's a problem that any government could come up against and it is the government's duty to protect it's citizens.
I mostly agree. Especially that the speed with which progressive policies have been adapted has alienated a lot of people. The same has happened with conservatives trying to roll back some of these policies alienating the progressives. This has weakened faith in democracy, which is rather bad.
My conclusion is that broad consensus and middle ground needs to be found. This requires having debate that has some good-faith. And requires some amount of empathy for the opposing side. How America could get back to that is hard.
I am not sure whether more state-authority would help that much. These fundamental disagreements also exists within states, and both sides care a lot about people outside their state. Democrats in California would not accept banning abortion in Arkansas. Nor would republicans in Texas be happy if Oregon bans firearm ownership. In fact, I fear that either case happening would only drive the polarization.
It would let either party vilify and generalize their opponents based on the in their view horrible things done by those parties in their states.
example: https://jobs.rtx.com/job/-/-/4679/4267185376?codes=INDEED
Nationwide logistics aren't simple. They have to evolve with the times to modernize/automate their operations and adapt to new, unknown cyber threats.
The mail is quite important.
recent NVIDIA conference talks will detail some use cases.
are you interested in federal contract jobs tho? hmu
Yes, that's the burning question I took away from this article.
Last year or maybe it was 2019 a delivery worker was murdered. Agg robberies of delivery workers has been going up. Breaking into mail boxes and mail theft has been going up. Using mail service to conduct fraud and other criminal transactions is going up. I'm on mobile so it's hard to get the links but just google it, not hard to find.
I hope their inspectors continue to investigate mail theft, mail fraud, and other things related to the physical delivery of mail. But I don't want them shifting into digital snooping that is totally unrelated to mail.
I mean, the primary method for delivery of goods purchased on the Silk Road was through the USPS. And I imagine the tor sites that replaced the Silk Road have similar delivery needs.
So if the USPS isn’t going to “digitally snoop” for the illegal delivery of handguns and heroin, who will?
Look: https://www.uspis.gov
Matter of fact their website news section shows you some of the crazy crime they investigate. Theft of postal vehicle happened few days ago apparently.
Your workers are under threat from poorly made postal bombs that could easily blow up during processing, killing your workers. Due to the vast volume of post you process, the threat is real and non-trivial.
Do you do nothing?
I think you obviously have to do something, whether you go as far as they did is what's up for debate.
More of them are endangered by their shitbox LLV trucks catching on fire.
(Also, echoing the sibling: where are all these poorly made postal bombs you're talking about? I can't remember anything in recent and not-so-recent memory.)
Granted, that's a long time ago, and it doesn't happen habitually. But if you're going to have a workforce safety team (good idea), they will likely want to either actually do something to stop the threats, or at least signal to management that they aren't totally clueless
How does that threat compare to threats the post office accepts for it's workers such as being killed in traffic accidents?
Should every government agency have a department to investigate threats towards their employees? Why limit it to just the USPS? Why not give investigative powers to the Agency for Global Media or the Administration for Community Living? Should those employees have to risk the very "real and non-trivial" threats they face?
If this was just some sort of way of detecting bombs or anthrax or something I think most of us could get behind it. This is turning the post office into an investigative crime solving agency and not even strictly for the thing they do (mail delivery).
No, you coordinate with the CIA or FBI to investigate threats against the government.
The Postal Inspection Service traces its lineage to 1772; the FBI to 1908. USPIS being separate from the FBI is one of those quirks of American enforcement, like how the Secret Service is responsible for physical security of the President and other political figures... And financial services.
The constitution says: "The Congress shall have Power [...] To establish Post Offices and post Roads;"
This is not a constitutional mandate. It is constitutional authorization. The federal government is not obligated to fully exercise every power it is granted.
Feels weird to give them law enforcement powers while still putting them up against private industry as competition, couldn't they just arrest all the UPS workers or something (gross oversimplification but still)?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Post_Office_Depa...
There is Constitutional authority empowering Congress "To establish post offices and post roads" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Postal_Clause)
We also used to have a limited form of postal banking here:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Postal_Savings_S...
What exactly constitutes "monitoring"? This sounds like some agents spent a few hours using Twitter's built in search to look for certain keywords...
https://time.com/4501670/bombings-of-america-burrough/
Edited to add a reference and correct a detail
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Postmaster_Gener...
PmG is a very powerful position.
https://www.uspis.gov/wp-content/uploads/2020/02/FY-2019-ann... (p. 35)
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/answer-sheet/wp/2013/01/...
Mail fraud and mail theft is a crime as old as mail.
> The U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives lost track of most of the guns, including two found at the scene where a U.S. Border Patrol Agent was fatally shot in the Arizona desert. The operation sparked a political backlash against the Obama administration.
> Attkisson left CBS in 2014 and is now the host of “Full Measure with Sharyl Attkisson,” a weekly Sunday news program broadcast by the conservative Sinclair Broadcast Group.
> In her lawsuit, Attkisson says that two computer forensics teams identified an unauthorized communications channel opened into her laptop was connected to an IP address belonging to the U.S. Postal Service, “indicating unauthorized surveillance.”
> Government lawyers argue that Attkisson’s lawsuit does not include any evidence that Holder and Donahoe had direct involvement in spying on her.
> “At best, plaintiffs’ complaint suggests a mere possibility that Holder and Donahoe could have participated in developing or enforcing policies concerning electronic surveillance generally; there are no allegations that they conducted or ordered the particular incursions about which plaintiffs complain,” Justice Department lawyers argue in a legal brief filed in the 4th Circuit.
The Obama administration used USPS to spy on journalists investigating Fast and Furious. It sounded ridiculous at the time -- "The USPS is spying on journalists, and not the NSA, and not the FBI, and not the CIA? Suuure."
Not so ridiculous anymore.
I'm tired of being angry about this, I've been asking for change for most of my adult life. Our constitution isn't worth anything anymore. The federal government needs to shrink. Asking nicely to not be spied on does not work.
On a more silly note, this whole scenario reminds me of this Seinfeld clip. https://youtu.be/On3cQ0sPvSY?t=46
Most human constructs of that size have espionage going on between them (for example, that's more than the population of Germany and Russia combined, and those nations are definitely spying on each other). The fact that they have a thick border drawn on the map between them and the US has thin borders drawn on its map probably implies the US should spy on itself less... But how much less?
Internal espionage has been key at several points in the history of the US for preventing internal power structures from overriding law and order (the Chicago mafia, for example). It has, obviously, also been leveraged against the rights of law-abiding citizens.
The USPS was breaking even regularly (phenomenal considering what they do) until they were forced to save up funding for 75 years of pensions within a 10 year span. Not only that, but they have to exclusively rely on the US Treasuries to fund the retiree medial fund, so it's more expensive out of the gate.
So they're doing more for their employees, paying more for it, and are required to do so in a shorter amount of time than just about any private company out there.
I'd be surprised if this covert program cost more than 1% of what the pension fund does.
It most likely tries to tie a social media profile to a physical address and provides a pen register of all the mail sent and received by that citizen along with a collection of the "inflammatory opinions".
It is unconstitutional and folks at the USPS and organizations they shared the data with should go to jail.
Haven't they been de-facto participating for decades?
But maybe I can kind of see it. Here's a protest. Let's say it's Proud Boys, and Antifa shows up. And here's a mail carrier out trying to deliver the mail, who drives (or worse, walks) right into the middle of it. The Post Office might have a legitimate reason for wanting to know, so they can keep their on-duty employees from harm.
Is that what's going on? Is that all that's going on? I don't know.
Doesn't sound like it. Maybe they are trying to shift money to surveillance with all the packages going around because of Covid (I.E: USPS trying to get rid of that "surplus")? Either way, it sounds crazy.
> A number of groups were expected to gather in cities around the globe on March 20 as part of a World Wide Rally for Freedom and Democracy, to protest everything from lockdown measures to 5G. “Parler users have commented about their intent to use the rallies to engage in violence. Image 3 on the right is a screenshot from Parler indicating two users discussing the event as an opportunity to engage in a ‘fight’ and to ‘do serious damage,’” says the bulletin.
> “No intelligence is available to suggest the legitimacy of these threats,” it adds.
Oh, that doesn't seem like an asymmetric allocation of resources at all. It's totally not trivially exploitable like the ticket presales in Tulsa or anything.
This "we have to respond to all potential threats, no matter how trivial" doctrine is a ridiculous waste of time and resources even in the best case. In the worst case, it overcommits to an impossible task.
I think it's reasonable to rate their competence level at "the cybers" around the same level as their ability to keep a "covert" operation off of Yahoo News.
One doesn't have to imagine.
https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2015/03/cisco_shippin...
Your data (we could debate whether "data about you" is actually "your data" but that is a tangent discussion) is valuable. FedEx can collect then sell it.
Of course it is. Why wouldn't it? Crazy people put all kinds of crazy things in the mail. Have we so quickly forgotten the Unabomber? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ted_Kaczynski
The next time anthrax or ricin shows up in a politician's mailbox, the same people gritting their teeth about this will bark about why more wasn't done to detect and prevent it.
The story starts off saying that the work's being done by analysts:
> The work involves having analysts trawl through social media sites to look for what the document describes as “inflammatory” postings and then sharing that information across government agencies.
, so it sounds more like they've got some folks browsing social-media.
Granted, a lot of the post-scanning would seem better done by bots, and stuff like sentiment-analysis could help classify posts for human inspection, so they'd probably want to hire a few engineers, but why hundreds? And why 250-500 kUSD/yr for such mundane work?
"> The work involves having analysts trawl through social media sites to look for what the document describes as “inflammatory” postings and then sharing that information across government agencies."
This is useless and nobody should fear it. You should fear a set of teams of highly trained technologists. Thats not what we have here
