[Left] Leslie James Pickering, the owner of a bookstore in Buffalo,
was targeted by a tracking program from the United States Postal Service.
WASHINGTON — Leslie James Pickering noticed something odd in
his mail last September: A handwritten card, apparently delivered by mistake,
with instructions for postal workers to pay special attention to the letters
and packages sent to his home.
“Show all mail to supv” — supervisor — “for copying prior to
going out on the street,” read the card. It included Mr. Pickering’s name,
address and the type of mail that needed to be monitored. The word
“confidential” was highlighted in green.
“It was a bit of a shock to see it,” said Mr. Pickering, who
owns a small bookstore in Buffalo. More than a decade ago, he was a spokesman
for the Earth Liberation Front, a radical environmental group labeled
eco-terrorists by the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Postal officials
subsequently confirmed they were indeed tracking Mr. Pickering’s mail but told
him nothing else.
As the world focuses on the high-tech spying of the National
Security Agency, the misplaced card offers a rare glimpse inside the seemingly
low-tech but prevalent snooping of the United States Postal Service.
Mr. Pickering was targeted by a longtime surveillance system
called mail covers, but that is only a forerunner of a vastly more expansive
effort, the Mail Isolation Control and Tracking program, in which Postal
Service computers photograph the exterior of every piece of paper mail that is
processed in the United States — about 160 billion pieces last year. It is not
known how long the government saves the images.
Together, the two programs show that snail mail is subject
to the same kind of scrutiny that the National Security Agency has given to
telephone calls and e-mail.
The mail covers program, used to monitor Mr. Pickering, is
more than a century old but is still considered a powerful tool. At the request
of law enforcement officials, postal workers record information from the
outside of letters and parcels before they are delivered. (Actually opening the
mail requires a warrant.) The information is sent to whatever law enforcement
agency asked for it. Tens of thousands of pieces of mail each year undergo this
scrutiny.
The Mail Isolation Control and Tracking program was created
after the anthrax attacks in late 2001 that killed five people, including two
postal workers. Highly secret, it seeped into public view last month when the
F.B.I. cited it in its investigation of ricin-laced letters sent to
President Obama and Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg. It enables the Postal Service
to retroactively track mail correspondence at the request of law enforcement.
No one disputes that it is sweeping.
“In the past, mail covers were used when you had a reason to
suspect someone of a crime,” said Mark D. Rasch, the former director of the
Justice Department’s computer crime unit, who worked on several fraud cases
using mail covers. “Now it seems to be ‘Let’s record everyone’s mail so in the
future we might go back and see who you were communicating with.’ Essentially
you’ve added mail covers on millions of Americans.”
Bruce Schneier, a computer security expert and an author,
said whether it was a postal worker taking down information or a computer
taking images, the program was still an invasion of privacy.
“Basically they are doing the same thing as the other
programs, collecting the information on the outside of your mail, the metadata,
if you will, of names, addresses, return addresses and postmark locations,
which gives the government a pretty good map of your contacts, even if they
aren’t reading the contents,” he said.
But law enforcement officials said mail covers and the
automatic mail tracking program are invaluable, even in an era of smartphones
and e-mail.
In a criminal complaint filed June 7 in Federal District
Court in Eastern Texas, the F.B.I. said a postal investigator tracing the ricin
letters was able to narrow the search to Shannon Guess Richardson, an
actress in New Boston, Tex., by examining information from the front and back
images of 60 pieces of mail scanned immediately before and after the tainted
letters sent to Mr. Obama and Mr. Bloomberg showing return addresses near her
home. Ms. Richardson had originally accused her husband of mailing the letters,
but investigators determined that he was at work during the time they were
mailed.
In 2007, the F.B.I., the Internal Revenue Service and the
local police in Charlotte, N.C., used information gleaned from the mail cover
program to arrest Sallie Wamsley-Saxon and her husband, Donald, charging both
with running a prostitution ring that took in $3 million over six years.
Prosecutors said it was one of the largest and most successful such operations
in the country. Investigators also used mail covers to help track banking
activity and other businesses the couple operated under different names.
Other agencies, including the Drug Enforcement
Administration and the Department of Health and Human Services, have used mail
covers to track drug smugglers and Medicare fraud.
“It’s a treasure trove of information,” said James J.
Wedick, a former F.B.I. agent who spent 34 years at the agency and who said he
used mail covers in a number of investigations, including one that led to the
prosecution of several elected officials in California on corruption charges.
“Looking at just the outside of letters and other mail, I can see who you bank
with, who you communicate with — all kinds of useful information that gives
investigators leads that they can then follow up on with a subpoena.”
But, he said: “It can be easily abused because it’s so easy
to use and you don’t have to go through a judge to get the information. You
just fill out a form.”
For mail cover requests, law enforcement agencies simply
submit a letter to the Postal Service, which can grant or deny a request
without judicial review. Law enforcement officials say the Postal Service
rarely denies a request. In other government surveillance program, such as
wiretaps, a federal judge must sign off on the requests.
The mail cover surveillance requests are granted for about
30 days, and can be extended for up to 120 days. There are two kinds of mail
covers: those related to criminal activity and those requested to protect
national security. The criminal activity requests average 15,000 to 20,000 per
year, said law enforcement officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity
because they are prohibited by law from discussing the requests. The number of
requests for antiterrorism mail covers has not been made public.
Law enforcement officials need warrants to open the mail,
although President George W. Bush asserted in a signing statement in 2007 that
the federal government had the authority to open mail without warrants in
emergencies or foreign intelligence cases.
Court challenges to mail covers have generally failed
because judges have ruled that there is no reasonable expectation of privacy
for information contained on the outside of a letter. Officials in both the
George W. Bush and Obama administrations, in fact, have used the mail-cover
court rulings to justify the N.S.A.’s surveillance programs, saying the
electronic monitoring amounts to the same thing as a mail cover. Congress
briefly conducted hearings on mail cover programs in 1976, but has not
revisited the issue.
The program has led to sporadic reports of abuse. In May
2012, Mary Rose Wilcox, a Maricopa County supervisor, was awarded nearly $1
million by a federal judge after winning a lawsuit against Sheriff Joe Arpaio,
known for his immigration raids in Arizona, who, among other things,
obtained mail covers from the Postal Service to track her mail. The judge
called the investigation into Ms. Wilcox politically motivated because she had
been a frequent critic of Mr. Arpaio, objecting to what she considered the
targeting of Hispanics in his immigration sweeps. The case is being appealed.
In the mid-1970s the Church Committee, a Senate panel that
documented C.I.A. abuses, faulted a program created in the 1950s in New York
that used mail covers to trace and sometimes open mail going to the Soviet
Union from the United States.
A suit brought in 1973 by a high school student in New
Jersey, whose letter to the Socialist Workers Party was traced by the F.B.I. as
part of an investigation into the group, led to a rebuke from a federal judge.
Postal officials refused to discuss either mail covers or
the Mail Isolation Control and Tracking program.
Mr. Pickering says he suspects that the F.B.I. requested the
mail cover to monitor his mail because a former associate said the bureau had
called with questions about him. Last month, he filed a lawsuit against the
Postal Service, the F.B.I. and other agencies, saying they were improperly
withholding information.
A spokeswoman for the F.B.I. in Buffalo declined to comment.
Mr. Pickering said that although he was arrested two dozen
times for acts of civil disobedience and convicted of a handful of
misdemeanors, he was never involved in the arson attacks the Earth Liberation
Front carried out. He said he became tired of focusing only on environmental
activism and moved back to Buffalo to finish college, open his bookstore,
Burning Books, and start a family.
“I’m no terrorist,” he said. “I’m an activist.”
NBC Nightly News Features Leslie James Pickering &
Burning Books on Post Office Surveillance