111–120 of 261 posts
This is a tough issue for a government. We do have crazies out there and we do need to investigate potential dangerous groups and individuals and reel them in before they do something crazy. 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…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
That has nothing to do with this issue. The article is about USPS investigating online threats. Do you really think people who are going to beat USPS workers are going to post about it online and that the USPS would be better equipped than agencies whose sole purpose is to deal with these kind of things? If you think every postal worker should have some sort of security / police going with them on their routes that i…
>That has nothing to do with this issue It addresses the comment that essentially boiled down to "why would they want this, letter bombs almost never happen", and I simply have shown other reasons for why they might want it. I wasn't addressing the article, I was addressing a specific comment. >Do you really think people who are going to beat USPS workers are going to post about it online [...] Yes, it does happen. P…
The FBI has more resources for investigating, finding, and assessing crimes. They also have additional intelligence that the USPS is not privy to. Why have an agency which has less resources and intelligence handle it? If it is a real threat the FBI can relay that information the USPS (and other agencies who operate in the area) to re-route their drivers or lock down their offices.
The USPS does not do anything so unique that it needs to a specialized investigative unit.
One thing I haven't really seen discussed (or maybe I'm just blind) is the fact that the USPS isn't a government organization quite like the others. It's supposed to be a more-private entity that competes in a market. 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…
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...
Pretty much any federal agency you have heard of has an investigative dept that employs federal special agents. These are law enforcement roles with the same training, authority, and responsibilities as investigative agents in the FBI, etc. 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 Inspec…
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.
Pretty much any federal agency you have heard of has an investigative dept that employs federal special agents. These are law enforcement roles with the same training, authority, and responsibilities as investigative agents in the FBI, etc. 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 Inspec…
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 " is the kind of photo op local departments love, so long as it reflects well on them.
This is a tough issue for a government. We do have crazies out there and we do need to investigate potential dangerous groups and individuals and reel them in before they do something crazy. 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…
FWIW, the protestors at the capitol didn't kill anyone.
0. https://www.politifact.com/article/2021/apr/20/update-capito...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
If only some other kind of mail had become popular to replace the lost letter volume...
Can you imagine if USPS ran an email service and all of the legal protections afforded to our mailboxes and the contents of our postal communications applied just the same? The internet would be a completely different place. In a good way, I think.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Pretty much any federal agency you have heard of has an investigative dept that employs federal special agents. These are law enforcement roles with the same training, authority, and responsibilities as investigative agents in the FBI, etc. Maybe worth noting that USPIS is older than the FBI. It's the oldest federal law enforcement agency.
That's a fantastic trivia fact, I guess threats to the postal service are a very old problem so it makes sense.
> The work involves having analysts trawl through social media sites to look for what the document describes as “inflammatory” postings What exactly constitutes "monitoring"? This sounds like some agents spent a few hours using Twitter's built in search to look for certain keywords...
I'm surprised by the comments here. People seem clueless to real threats the USPS faces and are puzzled why they have inspectors. 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…