From Open Watch: For a very long time, the public has placed a tremendous amount of trust in the United States Postal Service. Even in 2013, the public voted USPS to be the most trusted Federal agency, and the fourth most-trusted company for privacy in the world. Because of their perceived respect for privacy, USPS is the go-to shipper of drugs used by Silk Road suppliers and customers, and even whistle-blowing organizations like Wikileaks have advised that “postal networks offer the strongest form of anonymity and are good for bulk truth-telling.”
However, recently obtained documents show that mail is absolutely not anonymous. There is blanket surveillance of all mail which is processed by the USPS, and that this surveillance information has been used over 75,000 times by local law enforcement and other federal agencies since 2005. Not only that, but it has been used to target activists and other non-criminal individuals who caused problems for local governments. To tell us the rest of the story, however, the government is asking for $451,875.00.
Visit Open Watch for more. Also, please see an article from The New York Times.
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