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

nytimes.com

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

#111

Post by IsThisObvious »

bentcorner wrote: post #94
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…

A mail proxy is what is needed (I have no idea if these exist today). Put your letter inside an envelope to a mailing proxy. Mailing proxy opens your letter, and sends your recipient a letter from them. There are more opportunities for misdirection - the mailing proxy service can internally shuffle letters around and add mailing delays to discourage external analysis. Although, even with all that, I'm unsure of the e…

More interesting if you could make a mechanical one that would remove one envelope and forward the letter.

Then each data facility could reasonably process a few thousand letters a day, batching them for the postal service. After a few rounds of mixing, if there was significant facility-to-facility traffic, it would become impractical to find any specific letter's path.

Time for real world implementations of our high-latency packet routing algorithms?

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

#112

Post by anigbrowl »

bentcorner wrote: post #94
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…

A mail proxy is what is needed (I have no idea if these exist today). Put your letter inside an envelope to a mailing proxy. Mailing proxy opens your letter, and sends your recipient a letter from them. There are more opportunities for misdirection - the mailing proxy service can internally shuffle letters around and add mailing delays to discourage external analysis. Although, even with all that, I'm unsure of the e…

Does the gov't need a second warrant to open a letter-in-a-letter?

Interesting question; I'm guessing no, unless the interior letter contained obviously privileged material (eg 'Dear Father, I hope you are well; enclosed is a letter I received from your lawyer after you departed, which I forward to you unopened. Your Loving Son.'), in which case a warrant would probably not issue for the contents.

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

#113

Post by eli »

enko wrote: post #84
enko wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well maybe not for you, but for me it's another piece of a jigsaw which is beginning to show a very ugly picture indeed. You're a US citizen I see. Well, maybe you don't understand or give a shit, but from the outside, the opinion of your country is being revised dramatically downwards. Very dramatically. All of this human rights, freedom of speech, fourth amendment stuff is being exposed for the bullshit that it is.…

> Maybe you view the scanning of the outside of people's letters differently now... but it's not a new story and the article says as much. I guess it's the context of an all-pervasive spying culture that lends it a new relevance. And who cares if it's "new". We might only realise the relevance of an old story years later. We might only realise a whistleblower was telling the truth after years of dismissing their tall…

No need to attack my character. I deleted the comment immediately after writing it because I decided it contributes to the thing I'm complaining about, which is many front page stories full of repetitive comment threads that are only tangentially related to the linked story and contain little new information or insight.

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

#114

Post by unreal37 »

anigbrowl wrote: post #57
enraged_camel wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

How are you going to encrypt your snail mail destination data?

You could send mail to the wrong address intentionally. Like you want to send mail to 3 Main Street, but you write "5 Main Street" instead. The person who receives it will say "Ah, this is for Joe. He lives next door!" and hand deliver it.

That's mostly sarcasm. There's no getting around the tracking if you want to use regular USPS mail or Google Gmail. Just go meet in person, and leave your cell phones at home.

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

#115

Post by malandrew »

finnw wrote: post #104
malandrew wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

True, but given the facts of the past few weeks, it's completely reasonable to set up such a system like this now for yourself as a hedge for what the political landscape may look like in the future. I know what is illegal today, but I have no idea what may be made illegal tomorrow or 10 years from now. Implementing such a system is a hedge/insurance against dystopian futures that are becoming reality. As long as suc…

> I know what is illegal today That is impressive, even if you are a lawyer.

Hehe. Yeah, I know. :)

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

#116

Post by mcphilip »

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…

In 2006, during my senior year of college, I worked nights at the Postal Encoding Center in Beaumont, Texas. The starting pay was $15/hr and encoding is a 24/7 operation, making it a highly pursued job by college students.

It's true that every piece of mail goes through OCR. If that fails, it's sent off to one of the encoding centers as you described. There wasn't a 10 second limit to encode an address, but all encoder's performance was continually monitored and those that didn't perform quickly would not get as many hours per week. There were random audits done of a sample of 10 responses; over time your accuracy was expected to be 99%.

In addition to encoding scans of envelopes, there were more sophisticated systems for encoding packages and magazines. Since there is no standard place to put an address on a box or a magazine, encoders were provided with images from all sides of an item, making the encoding process have two steps: finding the address, encoding the address.

As OCR improved, the number of Postal Encoding Centers was reduced. The last I heard was that the Beaumont center shut down and there are only 5 left nationwide.

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

#117

Post by gojomo »

nostromo wrote: post #59

If you need to send an anonymous letter - hopefully for good (say, whistle blowing) and not evil - you can still do so. Use a fake return address (duh). Drive to a mailbox far away from your work or home. Pick a mailbox that has no security cameras. Don't go into a Post Office, where there will be security cameras. Turn off your phone before going anywhere near the drop location. (This is all coming from a PBS docume…

Also:

Buy the envelope, stamp, and any mailed material (eg paper) far from your home.

Exclusively handle all the materials to be sent in a clean environment far from your normal haunts. You may want to wear a hair net, breathing mask, and gloves. Do not lick the stamp or envelope.

Be careful about handwriting anything, if authorities may have any samples of your handwriting — as for example on prior letters addressed, or archived forms filed. Also, do not use a computer laser/inkjet printer, which may add unique invisible tracking codes.

After leaving behind your own phone, be sure not to use a vehicle with its own phone (OnStar etc) or any RFID transponders (eg tolltags, which can be read for traffic jam analysis even on non-toll motorways). Similarly, put aside any personal ID or payment cards (passports, some driver's licenses, mass-transit stored-value cards, etc) which may have remotely-readable RFID transponders.

Try to arrange for your phone, computer, or residence to continue giving off its usual signals of your presence – so that the period of the letter mailing doesn't show up as a suspiciously idle time for you.

Avoid all private and public surveillance cameras, or disguise yourself (and your car's license plate from automated readers).

Still:

Even with all these steps, it's likely the individual's capability to opt out, with effort, from being tracked will soon be obsolete. It will be too cheap and appealing to video-record all public spaces, or even regularly dust all public spaces with unique molecular tags so that when examining an artifact later (a letter, vehicle, article of clothing, etc), all other places it has recently been are evident to careful analysis.

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

#118

Post by IsThisObvious »

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…

> I'm open to suggestions for specific action items. I'm extremely unsure of what I can do to help cause change.

I'd argue that everything we're seeing is largely a symptom of the poor government structure in general, which has let two large parties entrench themselves and rig the electoral process, to make themselves virtually immune to any consequence to their actions.

The solution is changing voting policy in two ways: changing it to something besides the winner-takes-all system we have now; forcing voting districts to be concave polygons (with some algorithmic properties about minimizing area/edge length relative to certain other properties).

These two changes would a) break up the two parties by making it possible for others to compete and then essential to form coalitions and b) break up gerrymandering allowing the vote to actually reflect how the public felt.

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

#119

Post by taeric »

dchichkov wrote: post #63
eli wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

I wouldn't be surprised if modern domain specific OCR can give you an error rate that beats that of a time-constrained human reader.

While I agree with you at the general level, it sounds like these trained individuals are ridiculously good at what they do. Even seven years ago, to be able to take a crack at an envelope in just 10 seconds and type out the result is impressive.

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

#120

Post by anigbrowl »

nthj wrote: post #95
anigbrowl wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How are you going to encrypt your snail mail destination data?

Interesting. From a strictly technical perspective (this is impractical), we could set up a warehouse somewhere in the country which accepted incoming mail (tagged with an ID number), dumped the entire package into a plain manilla envelope, then sent it on to the final address. The final address would be set up via an encrypted web service, so only you and the warehouse know who sent the mail & where the final destin…

You know, you're not obliged to put a return address on regular mail as long as it has sufficient postage. It's required for various kinds of commercial mail, or mail requiring special handling eg delivery confirmation).
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