Brendan Bannon for The New York Times
Leslie James Pickering, the
owner of a bookstore in Buffalo, was targeted by a tracking program from
the United States Postal Service.
By RON NIXON
Published: July 3, 2013
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.
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“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.”
Mr. Pickering has written books sympathetic to the liberation front, but
he said his political views and past association should not make him
the target of a federal investigation. “I’m just a guy who runs a
bookstore and has a wife and a kid,” he said.
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