Extensive U.S. Mail Monitoring Revealed
October 28th, 2014Via: Dallas Morning News:
The U.S. Postal Service reported that it approved nearly 50,000 requests last year from law enforcement agencies and its own internal inspection unit to secretly monitor the mail of ordinary Americans for use in criminal and national security investigations. The findings serve as a rare public accounting of the Postal Service’s mass surveillance program.
The number of requests are contained in a little-noticed 2014 audit of the surveillance program by the Postal Service’s inspector general. They show that the surveillance program is more extensive than previously disclosed and that oversight protecting Americans from potential abuses is lax.
The audit, along with interviews and documents obtained by The New York Times under the Freedom of Information Act, offers one of the first detailed looks at the scope of the program, which has played an important role in the nation’s vast surveillance effort since the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.
The audit found that in many cases the Postal Service approved requests to monitor an individual’s mail without adequately describing the reason or having proper written authorization.
