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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

#171

Post by anigbrowl »

nitrogen wrote: post #166
anigbrowl wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

Apparently ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5986011 ) the letter can still be tracked by looking up the return addresses and point of origin of letters with neighboring unique IDs.

Well, if you're anxious for privacy to the point of omitting your return address, you should probably not rely on the nearest mailbox to your home.

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

#172

Post by sneak »

rayiner wrote: post #154
betterunix wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"For most of American history, "privacy" meant that what happened in the walls of your home or in the confines of some other private place remained private" The problem is that today there are very few private places, and it is very hard to get to a private place unnoticed. Private, secluded places are becoming rare as security cameras are installed. Even if you can find such a place, your trip to it might be recorde…

I don't disagree that many people aren't making an informed decision about this, especially all the kids and young teenagers who use Facebook and Google, etc. But my point is about the technology, not the people. The technology isn't designed to keep information private. SMTP sends plain-text e-mails through intermediate servers. Anybody can inspect the packets flying by on their network, which mostly have plain-text…

> I bet there would be a way to store e-mail accounts encrypted so only the inbox/outbox would be stored in plain text on Google's servers.

What makes you think that's not being done now?

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

#173

Post by adventured »

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…

You could never create enough flak to keep up with the hyper expansion of capacity and processing power. Snail mail data and things like voice calls are not getting larger or more complex and will not; ditto the text in email or on facebook and twitter.

Run a 30 second calculation on any of the power laws working on bandwidth, processing power, or storage, and you should realize very quickly it's impossible to flak the system to death (and that's assuming a lot of people participated).

There are only two practical approaches to what's going on. 1) fix the political system 2) encryption

Adding flak is convoluted and ineffective compared to the elegance and efficiency of encryption (not to mention flak doesn't necessarily conceal anything, whereas encryption can).

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

#174

Post by javajosh »

specialist wrote: post #170
javajosh wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> ...courage is what it takes to undermine a dictatorship Yes, and thanks for a great comment. I'm going to read that link, http://www.aeinstein.org/organizationsde07.html . Anger and hatred after 9/11 is what led us down this spiral, and more anger and hatred would only change the names, not the system.

Anger and hatred after 9/11 is what led us down this spiral 9/11 merely silenced the critics, allowing the power elite to bum rush the Constitution, aka the Shock Doctrine. Panopticon has always been the plan. There's always a plan, waiting for the opportunity.

It inspired people who knew better to compromise on their beliefs about freedom and torture and rule of law, and we've been paying for it ever since.

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

#175

Post by run4yourlives »

kirubakaran wrote: post #109
run4yourlives wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed, although the top comment here was actually quite interesting. HN has made an exception for all things US gov't spying related. I even lost my flagging rights for flagging all the snowden stuff (which I thought was exactly what you were supposed to do when you thought something was off topic... not my fault it was the entire front page!) It's an important topic, but like you I preferred when HN was an oasis of…

How did you find out that you lost your flagging rights? Did the 'flag' link disappear?

Pretty much, yup.

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

#176

Post by specialist »

discardorama wrote: post #141
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…

(Using a throwaway account) I worked on the OCR systems. Fun fact: at one time, the USPS was the world's biggest user of Linux in a production setting. Their OCR boxes ran on Linux (until they were replace with SGI O2 boxes at a massive cost... but I digress). Here's the path the mail takes: it is picked up by carriers from the mail boxes. Then dump trucks bring it to the P&DCs (Processing and Distribution Centers).…

Great info, thanks.

How reliable is the mail delivery? Do you know how much mail is lost? One percent, more, less? (I believe one kind of failure is called UAA - undeliverable as addressed.)

I'd love to learn more, but don't know where to start.

Some of us election integrity activists are deeply concerned with the transition to vote by mail (all postal ballots, no more poll sites). One practical complaint is our assumption that 1% of all mail is lost. In a big county like mine, that's 12,000 ballots.

My FOIA requests were rebuffed. Apparently the data gathering is done by third parties, so is considered proprietary. (A nice dodge, illustrating how privatization reduces government transparency and accountability.)

The best information I found was looking at court cases, where USPS' customers (eg bulk mailers) dispute the UAA, and don't want to pay extra.

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

#177

Post by jlgreco »

conroe64 wrote: post #86
anigbrowl wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

By putting another letter inside that may or may not contain another letter ad infinitum, where each letter is sent to a random address except the most inner letter which is sent to the actual address. In each outer letter you put a five dollar bill and the words "Mail this or else, I know where you live!"

> "Mail this or else, I know where you live!"

That is a great way to get your letter not mailed. A simple "Please" would work much better.

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

#178

Post by javajosh »

adventured wrote: post #173
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…

You could never create enough flak to keep up with the hyper expansion of capacity and processing power. Snail mail data and things like voice calls are not getting larger or more complex and will not; ditto the text in email or on facebook and twitter. Run a 30 second calculation on any of the power laws working on bandwidth, processing power, or storage, and you should realize very quickly it's impossible to flak t…

> You could never create enough flak to keep up with the hyper expansion of capacity and processing power.

I can create enough flak to confuse a casual, or even somewhat interested observer. If the flak is smart enough (smart flak, heh) then it would be hard to differentiate between actual and fake traffic.

More to the point, not all flak is equal. You can create noise around services that you appreciate and admire, even if you don't use them yourself, creating what essentially amounts to a mild, benevolent DOS attack (mild because it would have to generate messages at human scale).

Data flak is perfect for web-browsing, but messaging is more problematic. Perhaps encryption is the key (no pun intended) but key distribution is still a problem. What you know, what you have, who you are.

A combination of the two could be killer: send 10 encrypted messages to people; 9 of them don't have the right key, so they get thrown out. The 10th can read it. And the meta-data is noisy as hell.

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

#179

Post by graycat »

From a secure, undisclosed location from some secret intercepts via advanced technological means from an interview in a secure vault inside a Faraday cage with multi-sensor shielding in bedrock deep under the Senate chamber:

Interviewer: Chairman Feinstein, what can you tell us about the USPS data collection just reported by the NYT?

Chairman Feinstein: Our committee received highly confidential, double secret, triple national command authority top secret, quadruple crypto secret, eyes only, not to be remembered (as in the movie Men in Black -- it wasn't just a movie) on the main threats to US national security.

Interviewer: And?

Chairman Feinstein: We got the best of the best of the best.

Interviewer: And?

Chairman Feinstein: Well, we learned about the main threats to US national security, in descending order of seriousness, (1) invisible squads of ETs corrupting our precious bodily fluids, (2) marauding giant herds of 100 ton, angry, rabid mastodons destroying our cities, and (3) progress in the genetics of intelligence that produced a strain of giant rats with intelligence and cunning far above that of humans. Yes, the rats have escaped and are now breeding rapidly in the sewers of our major East Coast cities and spreading quickly west. They have been stowaways on airlines and now are colonizing San Francisco and spreading rapidly on the West Coast.

Interviewer: And why have we not heard of these massive dangers before?

Chairman Feinstein: Isn't it obvious? The intense work of our committee, yes, with that of the House, and our national security command authority has been successful.

Interviewer: But what about the Boston bombers?

Chairman Feinstein: Well, nearly successful. But that was a small gap compared with invisible squads of ETs, marauding mastodons, and super genius intelligent giant rats.

Interviewer: But what did all of that work cost?

Chairman Feinstein: The budget is classified, so high that no one can see it, not even God.

Interviewer: Ms. Chairman, thank you for your interview, and I'm sure all US citizens will be intensely interested in the work of you and your committee.

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