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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

#211

Post by rayiner »

GigabyteCoin wrote: post #195
rayiner wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is it "spying" for the government to remember information that he voluntary told to the government?

Did you even read the article? The government is actively sifting through his mail, more than 10 years after he was considered to be a threat... and a hippy environmentalist threat at that...

There are environmentalists and there are arsonists. His organization was the latter.

And guess what: the government has to "sift through your mail" to deliver it. All they're doing with him is remembering what they saw. Because he belonged to an organization that burned shit down.

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

#212

Post by thrownaway2424 »

nitrogen wrote: post #208
thrownaway2424 wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That logic isn't obviously correct. People do not have a right to go about in public, to and from notorious places, in a 2-ton death monster that requires licensure and indemnification to operate, anonymously. People requiring a higher degree of privacy than that offered by cars would be better served taking their bicycles.

I would argue that a de facto right to privacy is created by the nature of the destination. It doesn't matter if someone can see you or your car, the fact that it's a medical destination should create a right to privacy of that trip.

I would argue that your moon-man jurisprudence is weird.

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

#213

Post by ceol »

nitrogen wrote: post #167
thrownaway2424 wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes. What is your point? Nobody has any expectation of a right to drive anonymously.

But they do have a right to privacy in their medical history. Recording license plate numbers at a hospital, abortion clinic, etc. is a violation of that right, even if it might otherwise be legal.

It's not legally possible for a random citizen to get personal information from a license plate, so having someone's license plate number available isn't a violation of their right to privacy.

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

#214

Post by ceol »

betterunix wrote: post #185
reustle wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And if you see a hit and run, good luck helping the other guy out by "grabbing his plate number"

I'm not sure that would be so hard to solve. You can record the ciphertext plate and give that to the police. Really the question is, "How important is this problem? Do we care about license plate privacy?"

A license plate is already essentially encrypted. It's a random sequence of letters and numbers that correspond with a unique individual's information. It contains no personal information in itself.

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

#215

Post by ceol »

sneak wrote: post #12
EliAndrewC wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Couldn't they pick a more sympathetic guy to talk about "The trouble with fighting for human freedom is that one spends most of one's time defending scoundrels. For it is against scoundrels that oppressive laws are first aimed, and oppression must be stopped at the beginning if it is to be stopped at all." - H.L. Mencken

This is way better than all the explanations I've been able to come up with for people about why it's important to defend weev.

That might be telling you that there isn't a good reason to do so.

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

#217

Post by ceol »

rayiner wrote: post #211
GigabyteCoin wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did you even read the article? The government is actively sifting through his mail, more than 10 years after he was considered to be a threat... and a hippy environmentalist threat at that...

There are environmentalists and there are arsonists. His organization was the latter. And guess what: the government has to "sift through your mail" to deliver it. All they're doing with him is remembering what they saw. Because he belonged to an organization that burned shit down.

I feel this is what a lot of people forget -- or ignore -- when they come on HN to proselytize for this week's armchair activist crusade. 99% of the time, this shit is used to stop legitimately dangerous people. It's manned by people who aren't out to ruin your life; they just want to live theirs with as little shit to worry about as possible.

Reddit, HN, and the like are collectively patting themselves on the back and talking about revolution as though they're going to do anything other than click those little arrow icons next to posts. The third top comment here is talking about DDoSing the post office -- with absolutely no hint of irony. It's ridiculous.

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

#218

Post by dredmorbius »

mistercow wrote: post #61
malandrew wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It would also likely be taken as suspicious in its own right.

Which means you could undertake the activity on behalf of those you wished to implicated.

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

#219

Post by jasonkolb »

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've been thinking about the fact that a data-generation machine would be incredibly destructive to the current intelligence system. Spend a little bit of resources on a system that will manage and nurture online personas and you could render the algorithms watching things useless.

Misdirection: it's been used in magic for a long, long time.

So what happens when a piece of software can be used as a terrorist device? We're going to run into that. Soon.

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

#220

Post by atdepth »

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, don't use a laser printer that applies tracking dots.

https://www.eff.org/issues/printers

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