U.S. Postal Service Logging All Mail for Law Enforcement • Hacker News Board

Re: U.S. Postal Service Logging All Mail for Law Enforcement

#41

Post by tokenadult » Wed, Jul 03, 2013, 4:40 PM UTC

I have lived in a country (Taiwan under its previous dictatorial regime in the early 1980s) where I assumed that all my postal mail, domestic or foreign, was read by the ruling party's secret police as part of the delivery process. The postal service in Taiwan was always awesomely efficient when I lived there, with residential mail delivery twice a day all days of the week, year-round except for a brief set of holidays for Chinese New Year. Because I assumed that all my mail would be read, I set up procedures to check whether any of it was seized. My dad and I would write weekly letters to each other, numbered consecutively. The course of post between Taiwan and Minnesota in those days was a week or less, so after a while each weekly letter would take the form of including a phrase like "This is letter number 12, replying to your letter number 10, which I received on [date]" and so on. As far as I can ascertain, all the letters I wrote and all the letters addressed to me were delivered, but I assumed that they were read by the secret police.

Foreign magazines and newspapers were sometimes seized and not delivered to subscribers, usually when they included articles about domestic politics in Taiwan. (I learned to respect The Economist as a news source by observing how often it was seized in delivery, either in entirety, or with blacking out of particular articles.) Local people who could read English could pay their hard-earned money to subscribe to (rather expensive, in those days) publications like The Economist or the Asian edition of the Wall Street Journal, but they couldn't count on receiving all of what they paid for.

The dictatorship in Taiwan eventually fell, after a largely peaceful people power revolution that forced a transformation to an open political system. Along the way, people I know, including the father of one my children's godparents, were imprisoned for leading peaceful protests urging free and fair elections and a stop to censorship. Most people don't have the courage to go to prison--especially prisons like those in Taiwan at the time. But courage is what it takes to undermine a dictatorship. A successful movement for greater freedom requires great courage, and a degree of social trust among the movement participants that is not easy to find. Allow me to repeat advice I have shared here on Hacker News before. If you really want to be an idealistic but hard-headed freedom-fighter, mobilizing an effective popular movement for more freedom wherever you live, I suggest you read deeply in the publications of the Albert Einstein Institution,

http://www.aeinstein.org/organizationsde07.html

remembering that the transition from dictatorship to democracy described in those publications is an actual historical process with recent examples around the world that we can all learn from. Practice courage and practice collective action.

Re: U.S. Postal Service Logging All Mail for Law Enforcement

#42

Post by malandrew » Wed, Jul 03, 2013, 4:40 PM UTC

enraged_camel wrote: post #35

javajosh wrote: post #5

Goddamnit this is NOT OK. This is the dark side of the technological improvements to "productivity": we have enabled a level of productivity that allows the few to track the many. It's time we technologists all sat down and though about ways to turn the tide - they are using technology to track us, how can we use technology to thwart them? My best answer is: data flak. We should all start building system that include…

They will simply allocate more resources to it and you as the taxpayer will end up paying for it. The only real solution is to have end-to-end encryption that is easy to understand and use.

You really need both. Creating noise reduces the perceived ROI on the current programs, making them harder to justify.

Re: U.S. Postal Service Logging All Mail for Law Enforcement

#43

Post by eli » Wed, Jul 03, 2013, 4:41 PM UTC

chime wrote: post #40

About seven years ago, I was at a sushi bar and struck up a conversation with an older gentleman sitting next to me. He told me he was a developer and created systems for USPS. I am always fascinated by the technology used in large scale systems so I picked his brain for a good hour. From what I recall, he said at the key distribution centers, USPS scans every single mail (in standard envelop sizes) and in under a se…

Better OCR (and, cynically, perhaps a higher tolerance of error to cut costs) is making the human handwriting readers obsolete.

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/04/us/where-mail-with-illegib...

Re: U.S. Postal Service Logging All Mail for Law Enforcement

#44

Post by eli » Wed, Jul 03, 2013, 4:43 PM UTC

rayiner wrote: post #4

Couldn't they pick a more sympathetic guy to talk about: "Mr. Pickering said that although he was arrested two dozen times for acts of civil disobedience and convicted of a handful of misdemeanors, he was never involved in the arson attacks the Earth Liberation Front carried out." Gee, this guy was a member of a group that conducted arson attacks and the government is keeping track of the mail he gives to the governm…

Who is "they"? He's the one who, somewhat hilariously, got a note about snooping his messages in his mailbox.

Re: U.S. Postal Service Logging All Mail for Law Enforcement

#45

Post by kintamanimatt » Wed, Jul 03, 2013, 4:44 PM UTC

btbuildem wrote: post #16

javajosh wrote: post #5

Goddamnit this is NOT OK. This is the dark side of the technological improvements to "productivity": we have enabled a level of productivity that allows the few to track the many. It's time we technologists all sat down and though about ways to turn the tide - they are using technology to track us, how can we use technology to thwart them? My best answer is: data flak. We should all start building system that include…

Not sure, they'll just throw more resources at the problem. I think the problem is in "the few". If they snoop on us, we should be able to snoop on them -- especially since it's our tax dollars that pay their salaries and (although yes it's a joke of a broken system) we elect these officials more or less directly. Just to level the field a little bit. For example, London is full of CCTV cameras -- why is it that only…

I've known one of those people that watch those cameras and I'd struggle to call him a pervert. He's was just normal guy who paid his bills by doing an incredibly dull job. All it came down to was making sure that when petty shit happens in the street (drunken fights, etc), the police and so on are called to the scene.

I'm usually someone that's very fond of privacy, but I'm not entirely sure I have any qualms with CCTV in public places and in fact I'd love to hear arguments against them.

Re: U.S. Postal Service Logging All Mail for Law Enforcement

#46

Post by scrabble » Wed, Jul 03, 2013, 4:45 PM UTC

Could you not just refrain from writing a return address on your mail? Or instead, put down a false return address?

In that case there'd be no tracking of who is mailing whom, but instead just how many letters someone is receiving.

Re: U.S. Postal Service Logging All Mail for Law Enforcement

#47

Post by eli » Wed, Jul 03, 2013, 4:45 PM UTC

enko wrote: post #36

oinksoft wrote: post #8

Ah, I see I've arrived at Hacker/USA Government Abuses News. And I say that as somebody deeply interested in these stories.

I think it's OK for now. This is big news; very very big. I am a fan of trying to keep HN on topic but for now I am very interested in what everyone here has to say. I have to say, I thought I was very up to date on US spying - I know people who have worked with Echelon and would not say certain words on the phone - but I have still been blown away with the revelations. They're game-changing. They're relevant to HN.…

This particular linked story really isn't very big news.

Re: U.S. Postal Service Logging All Mail for Law Enforcement

#48

Post by mxttr0 » Wed, Jul 03, 2013, 4:45 PM UTC

rcavezza wrote: post #38

javajosh wrote: post #5

Goddamnit this is NOT OK. This is the dark side of the technological improvements to "productivity": we have enabled a level of productivity that allows the few to track the many. It's time we technologists all sat down and though about ways to turn the tide - they are using technology to track us, how can we use technology to thwart them? My best answer is: data flak. We should all start building system that include…

I agree with the notion that this is "NOT OK". I generally feel that about most things that have surfaced in the past few weeks. My problem is that I really have no idea what I can do to help or show my disapproval. I think we really need to go back to a checks and balances type of government instead of a top heavy executive branch. This lack of checks and balances is the root cause of the issues but I really don't k…

Wrt suggestions: I recently became a contributing member of the EFF. This looked like the best move given the recent events.

Re: U.S. Postal Service Logging All Mail for Law Enforcement

#49

Post by malandrew » Wed, Jul 03, 2013, 4:46 PM UTC

mistercow wrote: post #31

javajosh wrote: post #5

Goddamnit this is NOT OK. This is the dark side of the technological improvements to "productivity": we have enabled a level of productivity that allows the few to track the many. It's time we technologists all sat down and though about ways to turn the tide - they are using technology to track us, how can we use technology to thwart them? My best answer is: data flak. We should all start building system that include…

Essentially what you're proposing is a DoS of the tracking system. The problem with that (at least with physical mail) is that it takes far more resources to generate physical mail than to scan it. A DoS shaped like that will never work unless you have some way of massively amplifying the effect you are having. Postage on a post card is currently 33 cents. How many postcards do you reckon you'd have to send before th…

I would imagine the DoS is half of the benefit. The other half is manufactured reasonable doubt.

If a person were to send periodic letters with real and fake cryptographic messages to random individuals of importance, barring a warrant to read the contents of each letter, that would constitute reasonable doubt as to whether or not that person was legitimately communicating with another person of interest.

Re: U.S. Postal Service Logging All Mail for Law Enforcement

#50

Post by ippisl » Wed, Jul 03, 2013, 4:49 PM UTC

enraged_camel wrote: post #35

javajosh wrote: post #5

Goddamnit this is NOT OK. This is the dark side of the technological improvements to "productivity": we have enabled a level of productivity that allows the few to track the many. It's time we technologists all sat down and though about ways to turn the tide - they are using technology to track us, how can we use technology to thwart them? My best answer is: data flak. We should all start building system that include…

They will simply allocate more resources to it and you as the taxpayer will end up paying for it. The only real solution is to have end-to-end encryption that is easy to understand and use.

This is not an ease of use problem. Using something like textSecure or redPhone is relatively easy and helps greatly with creating a private channel[1]. But there's still a huge marketing problem.

[1]There's still the problems of metadata and backdoors and of legislation around encryption.