The United States Postal Service (USPS) shared Americans’ mailing information with law enforcement without appropriate court approval. Names, addresses, and other identifying factors were given to officials throughout the last decade.
Postal Service officials revealed to The Washington Post that USPS received more than 60,000 requests from federal agents and police since 2015. Ninety-seven percent of the requests were approved.
As each request can include weeks’ worth of mail, agencies surveilled more than 312,000 letters and packages, The Post learned.
This strategy of obtaining information, called the “mail covers program” has been used by postal inspectors to “track down suspects or evidence.”
According to a 2015 audit, the Internal Revenue Service (IRS), the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) were the leading agencies requesting Americans’ postal information.
The audit also revealed that USPS has declined to state how it grants the requests. Officials with the Postal Inspection Service argued in the audit that they “did not report mail cover statistics because this could decrease the effectiveness of the program by alerting criminals to techniques used in law enforcement investigations.”
Last year, a bipartisan group of senators, including Sens. Ron Wyden (D-OR), Rand Paul (R-KY), and Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) sent a letter to Chief Postal Inspector Gary Barksdale, urging the USPS to “reform its policies to require a federal judge to approve any surveillance of Americans’ mail, in order to protect Americans from unchecked government monitoring that threatens both our privacy and First Amendment rights.”
The letter noted that “no court order is required” for requesting mail covers. “In contrast, government agencies may only monitor Americans’ metadata associated with electronic communications, such as email or instant messaging, with a court order,” the letter explains, adding that the United States Postal Inspection Service (USPIS) is “neither required by law to conduct mail cover monitoring for other agencies, nor to keep it secret from the targets. USPIS is choosing to provide this surveillance service and to keep postal customers in the dark about the fact they have been subjected to monitoring.”
“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,” it added. “Consequently, surveillance of this information does not just threaten Americans’ privacy, but their First Amendment rights to freely associate with political or religious organizations or peacefully assemble without the government watching.”
Senators called for the USPIS to “reform its regulations for mail covers to protect Americans’ privacy.”
“USPS and USPIS should, except in emergencies, only conduct mail covers when a federal judge has approved this surveillance— a policy that USPIS already has in place for searches of the contents of mail — and it should also notify the targets of surveillance after the fact, unless a judge requires that such notice be delayed,” they wrote.
