An Update on Mail Monitoring

​Last year, we reported on “mail covers” – the practice of the U.S. Postal Service producing for other government agencies images of the exterior portions of envelopes to track communications between Americans. Now an exclusive in The Washington Post puts some meat on those bones.
 
Since 2015, postal inspectors have approved over 60,000 requests from federal agents and police officers to monitor snail mail. The Post Office approves these surveillance requests, issued without a court order, 97 percent of the time.
 
Most of the requests come from the FBI, the IRS, and the Department of Homeland Security. Things could be worse: at one time, the Church Committee investigations of the 1970s found that the CIA had photographed the exterior portions of 2 million letters, and opened hundreds of thousands of them. In the early days of the Republic, Thomas Jefferson had so little trust in the post office that he devised an encryption scheme, which was used to share early drafts of the Bill of Rights with James Madison.
 
The government stoutly defends this program today as legal. An 1879 U.S. Supreme Court ruling held that a warrant is needed to open an envelope, leaving open the inference that what is written on the surface of an envelope itself is fair game.

This ongoing practice underscores a critical gap in privacy protections, where even the exteriors of our letters and packages can reveal much about our personal lives. Eight senators wrote the inspector general of the postal service last year objecting to this practice. “While mail covers do not reveal the contents of correspondence, they can reveal deeply personal information about Americans’ political leanings, religious beliefs, or causes they support,” the senators wrote.
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Senators ranging from Ron Wyden (D-OR) to Rand Paul (R-KY) are pushing for judicial oversight for these operations, aligning mail surveillance with the safeguards already required for monitoring digital communications. PPSA will track and report on their progress.