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I bet FedEx could operate a domestic intelligence agency for like a quarter of their budget.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
To be fair, look at it from totally the opposite direction to see their point of view. Your workers are under threat from poorly made postal bombs that could easily blow up during processing, killing your workers. Due to the vast volume of post you process, the threat is real and non-trivial. Do you do nothing? I think you obviously have to do something, whether you go as far as they did is what's up for debate.
A couple postal workers died about 20 years ago when someone used the U.S. mails as an anthrax-delivery mechanism. Details are here: https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/mm5239a2.htm Note that's there's also a deeper CDC analysis looking at whether mail sorting is a job with higher than usual mortality rates. (Answer: probably not). Granted, that's a long time ago, and it doesn't happen habitually. But if you're…
I work in cyber security ML engineering (open for interviews, hmu) and frequently see federal contractor firms hiring for cyber data/engineer positions for USPS. Always puzzled me. example: https://jobs.rtx.com/job/-/-/4679/4267185376?codes=INDEED
Nationwide logistics aren't simple. They have to evolve with the times to modernize/automate their operations and adapt to new, unknown cyber threats.
The mail is quite important.
It seems like this should be the job of the FBI, DHS or some other agency like that. The Post Office should deliver mail and packages not investigate material on the internet.
To be fair, look at it from totally the opposite direction to see their point of view. Your workers are under threat from poorly made postal bombs that could easily blow up during processing, killing your workers. Due to the vast volume of post you process, the threat is real and non-trivial. Do you do nothing? I think you obviously have to do something, whether you go as far as they did is what's up for debate.
Should every government agency have a department to investigate threats towards their employees? Why limit it to just the USPS? Why not give investigative powers to the Agency for Global Media or the Administration for Community Living? Should those employees have to risk the very "real and non-trivial" threats they face?
If this was just some sort of way of detecting bombs or anthrax or something I think most of us could get behind it. This is turning the post office into an investigative crime solving agency and not even strictly for the thing they do (mail delivery).
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 Inspectors investigate illegal use of, or threats to, the mail system.
After 9/11 a lot of these depts got new infusions of resources, and instructions to do a lot more information sharing. There was a feeling that the attacks of 9/11 could have been prevented if existing disparate info had been better collected and collated.
So it’s not that surprising that these agencies will seem to stray out of their lanes. If Postal is monitoring broadly for threats against their systems, but sees other concerning info, they are supposed to share it.
This is all intended to be explanatory; I’m not saying that it’s how things should be.
I will say that personally I have fewer concerns about programs to monitor public content on the Internet, than programs that seek to access, monitor, and store content that people intended to be privately communicated to other people.
It seems like this should be the job of the FBI, DHS or some other agency like that. The Post Office should deliver mail and packages not investigate material on the internet.
To be fair, look at it from totally the opposite direction to see their point of view. Your workers are under threat from poorly made postal bombs that could easily blow up during processing, killing your workers. Due to the vast volume of post you process, the threat is real and non-trivial. Do you do nothing? I think you obviously have to do something, whether you go as far as they did is what's up for debate.
How does that threat compare to threats the post office accepts for it's workers such as being killed in traffic accidents?
But it's worth noting that the USPS has had its own legion of postal inspectors going back to the 19th century, when they were a (comparatively) huge part of the U.S. government, and the FBI, etc. did not exist.
Some 1,200 postal inspectors are still around, and they play important roles on federal prosecutions related to mail fraud, drug shipments, etc. There's a good Wikipedia entry on it all: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Postal_Inspectio...
It seems like this should be the job of the FBI, DHS or some other agency like that. The Post Office should deliver mail and packages not investigate material on the internet.
The Postal Inspection Service traces its lineage to 1772; the FBI to 1908. USPIS being separate from the FBI is one of those quirks of American enforcement, like how the Secret Service is responsible for physical security of the President and other political figures... And financial services.
Everyone has their tin foil hat with stuff on like this, but unless they are paying a 100 - 1000 engineers 250k-500k a year, I doubt theyve built anything useful with uptime. Maybe they could just scan a massive dataset of everyones posts, with some string searching, but still. I just dont see any entity like this being able to accomplish this task effectively.
The story starts off saying that the work's being done by analysts:
> The work involves having analysts trawl through social media sites to look for what the document describes as “inflammatory” postings and then sharing that information across government agencies.
, so it sounds more like they've got some folks browsing social-media.
Granted, a lot of the post-scanning would seem better done by bots, and stuff like sentiment-analysis could help classify posts for human inspection, so they'd probably want to hire a few engineers, but why hundreds? And why 250-500 kUSD/yr for such mundane work?
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…