The USPS is running a 'covert' program to monitor Americans' social media posts
news.yahoo.comPretty much any federal agency you have heard of has an investigative dept that employs federal special agents. These are law enforcement roles with the same training, authority, and responsibilities as investigative agents in the FBI, etc.
They were created to meet the specific law enforcement needs of each agency. Dept of Education agents investigate misuse of Dept of Education funds, for example. The Postal Inspectors investigate illegal use of, or threats to, the mail system.
After 9/11 a lot of these depts got new infusions of resources, and instructions to do a lot more information sharing. There was a feeling that the attacks of 9/11 could have been prevented if existing disparate info had been better collected and collated.
So it’s not that surprising that these agencies will seem to stray out of their lanes. If Postal is monitoring broadly for threats against their systems, but sees other concerning info, they are supposed to share it.
This is all intended to be explanatory; I’m not saying that it’s how things should be.
I will say that personally I have fewer concerns about programs to monitor public content on the Internet, than programs that seek to access, monitor, and store content that people intended to be privately communicated to other people.
>They were created to meet the specific law enforcement needs of each agency. Dept of Education agents investigate misuse of Dept of Education funds,
That's a really charitable way of saying "handle petty stuff that the FBI can't justify spending resources on".
Every specialty police department exists for this reason and this reason only. Because the mission is often so petty they wouldn't get any resources if it was obvious that resource allocation to that task was resource allocation away from other policing.
When you have real problems the real police have no problems allocating resources and whipping up dedicated teams. When you feel like using state violence to harass drunken college kids you create a campus PD. When you feel like using state violence to kick the homeless out of the train station you create transit cops. Etc. etc. Even if you're an investigative agency you will have no problem getting the local cops to provide muscle if your needs are legitimate. "Look at us working with the <pick three letters>" is the kind of photo op local departments love, so long as it reflects well on them.
You can either have separate agencies or you can have a pile of specialized sub-agencies within some umbrella organization.....but working out how to align funding with who it's serving is going to be harder with the umbrella organization in many cases.
Specialization is a thing within policing as much as it is within the rest of life. It's not like the same person who knows how to investigate a murder scene is equally capable of investigating complicated financial crimes on Wall St.
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In terms of aligning incentives, there are various situations where there would otherwise there would be a mismatch of "who pays for this/who's responsibility this is" vs "who this is meant to serve".
On your examples:
Campus PD - College has equal/larger population than town. Town-college relations are often tense at best. Voters in town have no interest in spending their tax money on adequate policing for the college, college has no interest in donating a bunch of money to the PD to maybe get better services that they still have no say in. Students often heavily distrust the local PD and are unlikely to report crimes to them. It's still a problematic structure, but the premise that it would be better without is questionable.
Transit Cops - No individual town or city is going to patrol the system coherently otherwise, and areas which utilize the service less are unlikely to spend significant resources policing it. Services which cross state lines also have jurisdictional issues even with just using normal state-level police.
Funny thing is, it works in pretty much any other western country. Now speaking about Germany there's essentially two police arms. The state police and the federal police.
I don't see why every government department needs a police. Yes there are specific crimes that you might want to investigate, but you don't have to have police for that. Look for example to IRS they can have investigators, but they don't need police powers. If they need those they can go to the police.
It's not only that every government department has a police now, it's also that (nearly) every one of them has swat teams, I mean for heavens sake the department of forestry has a swat team!
I hear you, though, even in Germany there are other separate police forces under different ministries, like the Zoll (customs and immigration), the Feldjaeger (military police), and Justizvollzug (correctional officers and prisoner transport) - and each one of them has SWAT-like teams in addition to the forces of state and federal police.
There are also a lot of other public officers with limited police powers and different reporting, just like in the US - officers of the courts, public health inspectors, the Ordnungsamt (public order office), forest rangers, officers of the bureau of standards etc.
Until a few decades ago, it was even more splintered, and the border police and railway police were only integrated into the federal police in the 1990s if I am not mistaken...
Some cities like Frankfurt also started to rename the „Ordnungsamt“ to „Stadtpolizei“ (City Police). Also, we should not forget that we have quite some presence of US military police around US bases like Ramstein, Kaiserslautern and NATO Headquaters.
In the Netherlands, we have national police, local police, military police, railroad police, forest police, border police, and so on. They are all fairly independent of each other and have separate jurisdictions.
The Dutch railroad police (as well as the water, traffic, and aviation police) was sadly disbanded in 2013 [1]. In the same year, all 25 local police forces were disbanded and replaced by one national police force [2].
[1] https://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dienst_Spoorwegpolitie#Opgehev...
[2] https://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Politie_in_Nederland#Vorming_v...
In Sweden, there was until just recently, 21 regional indendepent police, plus a national investigative unit. (And the secret police and the military police.)
Now the 21 regional police have been merged into one national police.
I have a story that captures what you're saying fairly well.
About a decade ago I was living in a major southern US city in the more modestly priced part of an upscale area of town. I came back to the area from work fairly early in the afternoon, rounded the bend, and saw both sides of the street littered with unmarked police cars and vans, with many, many extremely large men in suits and sunglasses running around, directing the hapless local cops to do this and that. I'm talking the whole American militarized authority jamboree and then some: dogs, rifles, lights flashing, citizens being shooed away. A big SWAT-looking van poking out of a driveway. Maybe 3 dozen official looking people all told. US law enforcement is nothing if not histrionic and self-important in how it occupies physical space, but this presence was more than just the usual overreaction to a cat stuck in a tree. I remember thinking "uh-oh" and really meaning it.
Of course I couldn't get into my parking lot -- I lived across the street a few doors down, and the cops weren't letting anyone through -- so I parked nearby and walked back over and began to chat up some neighbors, exchanging speculation on what the hell it could be. Obviously they were FBI, we all agreed - that's the cyborg-looking guys in suits, surely all grown in the same vat near Quantico? And the crime? Terrorism was the consensus, though one guy was sure it was counterfeiting money. (I remember that because he insisted that he knew someone "who used to do that".) The vibe standing there was equal parts morbid curiousity and real nerves -- what if someone was making bombs in our quiet residential neighborhood?
After a while someone got up the nerve to ask one of the bewildered local cops what the heck was going on. "That's not the FBI," he says, "that's the US Postal Police." Apparently someone was "sending marijuana in the mail".
This effing country, right?
This. This right here. Every word.
I would even go so far as to say, there shouldn't be specific immigration cops, or alcohol, tobacco and firearms cops, since if there were actual crimes committed by immigrants or gun owners, the crimes themselves should be dealt with. To allow cops to go snooping around by widening jurisdictional responsibility, it has a very "pre-crime" aspect to it, which is often subject to prejudice and bias.
> if there were actual crimes committed by immigrants or gun owners, the crimes themselves should be dealt with
Maybe I'm missing your point, but isn't that exactly what the cops in question are supposedly doing? "Immigration cops" investigate illegal immigration. The ATF investigates the unlawful use or sale of firearms and drug trafficking. All of these things are crimes (regardless of whether they should be).
So how is there a "pre-crime" aspect to specialization among police when it comes to things that actually are crimes?
I guess I'm asking a question of crime priority, and whether some crimes are more likely to be punished because a disproportionate amount of policing is put in place towards that sort of crime.
If the same resources that were dedicated to the numerous policing agencies in the US were given to a smaller number of more generalized agencies, those agencies would be allowed to prioritize where their time and resources are best spent protecting the public.
I would rather the public collectively decide (assuming an effective representative government) how much we should prioritize X vs Y rather than just giving a giant pile of money and saying to the cops “do with this money whatever you think is best”.
These people have a monopoly on legally sanctioned violence. If you think there is any merit in anti-trust for businesses or that big tech should be broken up, I hope you’d think it even more strongly for policing.
We don’t have a perfectly functional representative process, but we sure do have a way to get influence over the system. Imagine how much resources could have been devoted to the war on drugs if the police could have stopped all other policing. That would be terrible IMO.
It would also be bad (though perhaps less so) if the Dept of Education had no resources to examine its operations for fraud and waste.
Agree. What is the point of all these laws on the books if they aren't enforced? That will just encourage people to break them when word gets out.
If the counterargument is that these "crimes" shouldn't actually be crimes, then the solution is to remove the laws, no?
But I suppose that whether removing the laws is feasible is another can of worms.
> those agencies would be allowed to prioritize where their time and resources are best spent protecting the public.
If you trust the police to decide how to distribute their resources, I have some pretty bad news for you.
They can also provide specialized knowledge. Ex. the DOE OIG is going to have nuclear scientists, the HHS OIG or TIGTA is going to have tons of forensic accountants, etc. In the case of Inspector Generals specifically, they also have the mission of investigating internal misconduct within the agency, and they have a relationship where they are independently authorized to act but under ideal circumstances work closely with agency heads to root out corruption and improve efficiency. A lot of what they do is accounting and effectiveness audits that do not fall under law enforcement.
As it was, so it is. The Cuckoo's Egg, Cliff Stoll; from the wikipedia article "a general reluctance to share information; the FBI in particular was uninterested as no large sum of money was involved and no classified information host was accessed" Cliff of course gives a very entertaining description of getting investigators interest. Should be required reading for anyone doing/interested in security.
Indeed, and excellent book that should be required reading for any computer professional, even outside of security.
No relationship other than being impressed with the work.
https://www.amazon.com/Cuckoos-Egg-Tracking-Computer-Espiona...
Makes a lot of sense to me that each department handles their own law enforcement, and can set the priorities they prefer.
One centralized Federal Police Department would be a single point of failure and bureaucratic nightmare.
Imagine if there were not State and local police departments. Just the FBI managing every shoplifting arrest in the country.
On the flip side, there are plenty of countries that do just have a national police force, or a handful of regional departments, and don't have tens of thousands of independent police forces like America does. They tend to do just fine.
Any with a population and land spread comparable to the US? I imagine that would make more sense in a small country with low diversity of terrain/population/etc.
Plus a national police force is basically illegal and unconstitutional in the US.
Gosh, who's going to notify the feds in Portland of this?
Lots of countries do just that though, without the crazy specific separation and specialisation that America does.
Which ones and how big are they?
Pretty much every western country. Sweden, France, Germany to give three examples.
There are only a handful of western countries that use this approach. As counterexamples, Switzerland, the UK, Spain, and many other countries tend to have local municipal police departments, and Germany has state/Bundesland-level police departments as well as the random auxiliary departments that a sibling comment mentioned.
France and Sweden are both far more centralized and less federalized. There's a reason more federal countries such as Switzerland or Germany have more decentralized policing. I think it would be beyond unacceptable to most Americans, myself included, for the US to have a single police department with its bureaucracy in Washington. If anything, I think far too power in the US is already centralized in DC which contributes to bad governance due to the vastly increased distance (in many senses) between politicians and their constituents.
I would be fine with 50+6 state/district/territorial police departments, which is sort of the Germany or Canada (with Ontario and Quebec) approach.
None of these have a police per government agency, that's what we are mainly talking about. That there are local police departments or state police departments is not the main issue I think.
Germany has a federal police force, mostly tasked with border protection and transport security, and 16 state-level police forces.
Funny to note that cops in Bavaria drove BMW's and the ones in Lower Saxony drove VW's.
Right, so countries the size of a single US state.
The US divides it's police by town, not by state.
And France and Germany are each twice as populous as the most populous US state.
So you're not really correct.
There's absolutely no reason why having a single bureaucracy wouldn't work well.
It actually seems like it would be much easier to have a single bureaucracy.
Also, counties often have their own sheriffs with a separate set of powers and responsibilities. Sometimes court systems have their own enforcement arms, separate from other agencies.
The US often seems to have more layers of administration and law-making than some other places. Making individual officers work through which set of powers and laws they're dealing with in a given moment seems like it might at times be a daunting prospect. You could in theory organize them into a single bureau, but I suspect you'd inevitably wind up with specialized sections to deal with the particular laws in given cities.
Sheriffs and State Troopers ???.
Russia
Wait till you hear about privately-owned company and railroad police departments...
Do these private police have more authority than the private security hired by other businesses?
Yes, although I don't know if all states have them. In NC they are called Company Police which are considered Special Police Officers commissioned by the Attorney General. It started in the 1800s with the textile mills and company towns. They may only exercise jurisdiction on their employers property, or they may be employees of a security company that is hired and granted jurisdiction by other businesses. Most companies that do it have both security (Private Protective Services) and police (Company Police) services available. The only authority they have outside real property owned by their employer/client is when in hot pursuit.
Private universities, same as public, may have Campus Police instead of Company Police, and those officers also have jurisdiction on public ways passing through the campus. In some cases they also have one mile extraterritorial jurisdiction; moreover, they can receive broader jurisdiction through agreements with the city/county law enforcement.
Railroad police are to be certified in their home state and have nationwide jurisdiction by federal law, on the property and rights-of-way of their employer as well as in connection with its services (conceivably quite a wide scope as railroads run right through virtually all major cities--the CPD "bait truck" incident that cause controversy a few years ago involved NSRR Police). With the exception of Amtrak, these are all private companies.
I'm not sure to what extend qualified immunity does or does not apply to them, however.
PA definitely has something like this too.. just like in NC, it originated from company towns, in their case mining.
Yes. They're actually police, with attendant legal status and powers.
> When you feel like using state violence to harass drunken college kids you create a campus PD.
Someone's never been mugged on campus before... Campus PD exist to give special protection to the children of wealthy upper-middle class families that thw surrounding community is usually deprived of.
> Pretty much any federal agency you have heard of has an investigative dept that employs federal special agents. These are law enforcement roles with the same training, authority, and responsibilities as investigative agents in the FBI, etc.
Maybe worth noting that USPIS is older than the FBI. It's the oldest federal law enforcement agency.
There's a sense in which is predates the US! Throughline from NPR had an episode about it, referring to a book called 'How the Post Office Created America' [1]
[0] https://www.npr.org/2020/09/02/908836752/the-postal-service
[1] https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/311582/how-the-post...
That's a fantastic trivia fact, I guess threats to the postal service are a very old problem so it makes sense.
It's hard to understate just how important the postal service was to the country: beyond driving so much commerce (and hence making mail deliveries a valuable target) it was used for all kinds of official documents and financial documents (money orders were introduced to reduce the risk further). Travel being expensive and hard, no alternatives like phone or email, etc. means that you send letters a LOT and things like postmarks or registered mail signatures have a substantial legal weight. Making a highly trusted service with special status to deter thieves available to everyone at a modest fee was a really smart move.
Not merely threats to the postal service itself, but threats via the postal service. I imagine the best to get away with (say) fraud has always been to avoid physical presence, i.e. using mail.
This is the territory where police departments and agencies get themselves into trouble - investigating crimes that aren't really their job to investigate. They technically have jurisdiction over a specific location or process, and that gives them an excuse.
The most obvious parallel is pretext stops - state cops, sometimes local, coming up with an excuse to pull someone over on a highway, in order to check them for warrants or in hopes of discovering contraband they have no reason to suspect exists.
A less obvious example is immigration enforcement fishing for excuses to deport someone.
> the best to get away with (say) fraud
And letter/package bombs
I'm sure that the recent shooting of their FedEx colleagues in Indianapolis is on the USPS's mind as well, and I wouldn't be surprised if UPS and DHL tries to monitor social media as well.
also, back then, the USPS did more than just deliver mail.
> Maybe worth noting that USPIS is older than the FBI. It's the oldest federal law enforcement agency.
The wikipedia page for USPIS claims that. But the wikipedia page of the US Marshalls claims that same honor. I wonder which is correct.
Supposedly USPIS goes back to 1737 (or 1772 if you don't want to count that), whereas USMS started in 1789? USPIS claims its "birth date" to be 1775, so I guess that's the latest. https://www.uspis.gov/about/history-of-uspis#1775
It is also the only agency named in the constitution. The others are all fluff. At least that’s what I was taught!
Interesting, are you sure about this? The only clause I find in the constitution mentions post offices and post roads (perhaps that's what you're thinking of?), but nothing about their security. To my knowledge federal agencies were only established by the Administrative Procedures Act after WWII (which is basically the "constitution" of federal agencies), but I'm not sure if there's other similar terminology that might be in the constitution. If someone has a link to the clause that would be interesting.
Yeah buddy. The security service is just like internal affairs for the USPS. It's actually pretty creepy inside the USPS they enter through different doors, they have catwalks with two-way mirrors, etc. The SSF and DCF or whatever they're called (been a while) are super creepy to observe. You are CONSTANTLY being watch when you work there, but unseen faces. There is a reason 'going postal' became a thing. Imagine that atmosphere!
Having worked there, you drown out the catwalks and just consider them like fancy camera monitoring. We never, ever saw law enforcement, so it was out of sight, out of mind.
Census is in the Constitution as well
Census as an activity is, though not a Census Department specifically. Though that may be a quibbling distinction.
Armed forces would be another Constitutionally mentioned function.
Pretty the sure the Census is mostly conducted by the USPS though.
Incorrect.
Department of Commerce.
Ah, good to know, and thank you. Albeit, logistically carried out in large part through the mail. Would it be safe to say that they are intertwined, and the Department of Commerce is another made up beaurocracy, and if nixed the USPS would conduct the census?
> I will say that personally I have fewer concerns about programs to monitor public content on the Internet, than programs that seek to access, monitor, and store content that people intended to be privately communicated to other people.
This distinction is disappearing quickly in the current Internet, where conversations are increasingly company-mediated and facilitated. There's no such thing as a "private" conversation on Facebook or similar hosted platforms. You might address a message to your friend, but you are sending it to Facebook, and they ultimately get to decide how private it is. It's likely a single "is_private" bit in a database!
I'm more and more defaulting to a very strict rule: Never send anything to the Internet that I intend to be private. Whether it be a forum post, a message board, an E-mail, or a chat message. Keep my private pictures off of "secure, private" cloud storage. Don't do anything on a web site that I wouldn't want talked about in my local newspaper. Consider it all public knowledge because it's one leak or subpoena away from actually being public knowledge.
Yes, but I think OP is saying that the law should protect intent. Just like with the physical mail system. It is illegal to open a letter addressed to somebody else (though, warrants can override this). But I am fine with the principle.
On the other hand, if you stick a huge banner out the front of your house, that information is fair game. Just like posting on your Twitter profile or blog. The intent was never for it to be private.
Not a correction, but I'd like to add a small precision to that because I've seen the same argument used in other contexts.
For Twitter and Facebook I tend to agree, as there is an active intent (as you say) of publication. However, I've seen people reason in the same way with respect to licence plate or face recognition: "but the information is public".
The fact that technology now allows us to treat licenceplates or faces information globally, in very cheap way, means that a fundamental new capacity is created.
I agree, the impact of automated scale is definitely worth considering.
Unfortunately, with the Internet increasingly being used to conduct business, government, education, and even religious services, that option is rapidly becoming less tractable.
(I say that as one who shares the general sentiments.)
WhatsApp (which is owned by Facebook) employs end-to-end encryption between individuals for its 1on1 and group conversations, and no one else in the world besides those parties (or possibly backup companies those parties decide to use) has access to the message contents that WhatsApp says are protected by E2EE. It uses the Signal Protocol.
Facebook has started efforts to roll out end-to-end encryption for its Messenger as well, using the same protocol as WhatsApp, which Signal blogged about: https://signal.org/blog/facebook-messenger/#:~:text=Facebook....
Posts and other content on your "wall" or "timeline" are intended to be relatively public, according to whatever privacy settings you have set up on your account, and won't be similarly encrypted; but the content will only be available to the people that you allow to see your account and post. That's more of a permission set described by a database like you describe. But you can share different posts with different groups of people you define; or participate in public or private/secret/invite only groups where content is only accessibly by those people.
Yes, that content would be accessible as plaintext by certain FB employees, just like your Gmail account's contents could be accessed by certain employees at Google. However, there are very strict policies around not accessing user content at FB by employees unless required for the function of the employee's job (e.g. investigating spamming, child pornography, and other abuse like that I would imagine; or assisting law enforcement with subpoenas or court orders for the content).
Notably WhatsApp has no ability to hand over message contents between individuals whose conversations are protected by end-to-end encryption even if it receives a court order to do so, because the encryption keys protecting that content truly live only on the user's devices, and the plaintext content never touches WhatsApp servers today. As long as you don't back up your message history outside your device in plaintext (and what WhatsApp stores on the device might be encrypted now too; I'm not sure), the only way for anyone to obtain the message history is to get their hands on your phone and the encryption keys & message history it contains. So if your phone is protected by a strong passcode and a security vendor hasn't found a way to bypass iPhone login security, as long as your iPhone is locked even the US government won't be able to get at your data.
I believe their was a court ruling that passwords to your phone are protected by the 5th Amendment against testifying against yourself, so I don't believe a court can compel you to reveal the phone password, but I'm not up to speed on the current case law. So if you lock your phone before an attacker seizes it, they can't get the contents even if the attacker is a government (unless they're willing to use physical coercion as in XKCD 538 [1], or indirect physical coercion such as ordering revelation of the password under threat of contempt of court, if that's permissible).
WhatsApp is also allowing businesses onto the platform, to use it to communicate with those customers, and some of those conversations may be regularly encrypted, not end-to-end encrypted. Those conversations are displayed differently in the UX of WhatsApp when the conversation begins, to clarify that they're not protected by E2EE. (It's arguably impractical to have real E2EE between a customer and a large business with, e.g., many customer service agents. What would that really mean? I personally think E2EE is most meaningful between individual people who personally know each other, not between people and businesses which are anonymously-defined, constantly-changing groups of people.)
I'm not a spokesperson for any company and these are my own opinions based on what I've read from public news sources.
> I will say that personally I have fewer concerns about programs to monitor public content on the Internet, than programs that seek to access, monitor, and store content that people intended to be privately communicated to other people.
You may have fewer concerns about public monitoring vs private spying, presumably because in the latter case privacy is being violated in a way that isn't the case for the former.
But both cases are nefarious, and you don't have to choose between them.
Both are examples of using public funds to abuse access to information from end users for political purposes.
Public vs Private:
Public: I can think of an example. If the USPS finds out that in a certain area of a certain city, there is a big chance to have riots "tomorrow after 10am" (protests because of X-Y-Z resason), they can alert their local teams to e.g. deliver the post at 7am instead of 11am. Yes, some operations would be impacted (e.g. noon delivery won't happen), but this will protect the staff, protect the items (letters, parcels), the vehicles, etc.
If they just hoard data to feed a bigger best (e.g. NSA) then, the data is still out there (my public blog, your public blog, HN comments, etc.) and they are up for the taking. In which case it doesn't matter if it is a federal agent carrying a NSA or a USPS badge.
I'd be surprised if they could deliver anything ahead of schedule, but I imagine they can tell people to stop what they're doing at 9am if they're in a dangerous area
14 billion dollars was spent in the 2020 election [1]. If someone wants to “nefarious”ly analyze public information for political purposes, they can easily do it with private funds.
[1] https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.cnbc.com/amp/2020/10/28/202...
>I will say that personally I have fewer concerns about programs to monitor public content on the Internet, than programs that seek to access, monitor, and store content that people intended to be privately communicated to other people.
You should be worried about both, they're honestly equivalent.
See, this is the greatest bait and switch ever perpetrated on the citizens of the United States, and I'm not sure anyone was even actively trying to do it. Time was, communication between you and someone else was fundamentally expected to stay private. This was by definition prior to Third Party Doctrine, with which the Judiciary unilaterally decided the 4th Amendment was more of a suggestion than a hard line in the sand.
Communication intermediaried through a service provider should never have been severed from personal effects and papers. If third-party metadata were treated bbased on the end; intended communication either point to point (private), multicast (confidential with expectation of privacy), or broadcast (implicitly public), we'd be in a much better place. When the Government starts vendoring out surveillance, or bakes it into departments, you know you've steered your society off the rails somewhere.
The fact we're okay with businesses acting like a cabal of gossiping grannies only legitimizes the continued erosion of private space. How long until IoT connection strength logs make it possible to surveill anywhere with enough devices and computing power?
> So it’s not that surprising that these agencies will seem to stray out of their lanes.
Like the secret service (Treasury agents) becoming the President’s bodyguards?
USPIS is actually the oldest federal law enforcement service.
That said, its present utilisation seems to specifically address cases in which other agencies, both outward-facing (CIA, NSA) and inward (FBI) are limited.
The USPIS's investigation, case, and conviction rations are quite impressive. Relatively low counts of cases, I believe, but conviction rates are extraordinarly high (~90% or so).
Documented in the FY2019 USPIS annual report: https://www.uspis.gov/wp-content/uploads/2020/02/FY-2019-ann...
And these are their stories. Dun dun.
You joke, but they actually made a TV series. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Inspectors
> "...it was the only show on commercial television paid for by a U.S. government agency, with its funding coming from the United States Postal Service asset forfeiture..."
> If Postal is monitoring broadly for threats against their systems
If, however, they are running a wide-net surveillance program under the guise of "anybody could be threatening our systems at any time, so we better monitor everyone just in case", thats a bit different sound. It's easy to say "well, we have to protect our systems" but so far there's zero evidence anything that USPS has been monitoring was threatening their system, and yet they keep the surveillance. With zero oversight or control from the people.
It does seem like they should centralize this stuff though... virtually every nationwide-jurisdiction agency will want to monitor social media posts so you would think they would centralize it in one department rather than duplicating effort. Also the argument can be made that spending too much time enforcing other agencies' laws is not spending the budget the way Congress intended.
Well... when you're posting things on social media you're publishing them to the world. That somebody is going to look at them... well I guess I don't have that much of a problem with it. If you don't want the minor details of your life recorded and put up to government scrutiny, stop making your existence a reality show.
I basically agree with "...fewer concerns about programs to monitor public content on the Internet, than programs that seek to access, monitor, and store content that people intended to be privately communicated to other people. "
a few caveats though
Scraping public data to see if some person / group / whatever is doing something the week of 4-20 is one thing, it's another to scrape the data and hold it for years or forever.
How long should something be held on to after a poster has deleted it?
I think transparency about data retention is very important - as this data can also become a tool used by others outside the scope of the original intention / need.
What is private and what is thought to be private by the majority of Americans today?
Most on HN may see differently and have a better understanding - but aside from the obvious "it's in the cloud is not your data, your data is their product to sell.. only self hosted, encrypted, one-time pad notes shared in person with no electronics around to listen in on is private" - sure..
But even beyond what many around this forum may think is common sense - I can think of many things where lines are blurred not just by ignorance but by design, and lack of awareness -
a fbook pm / chat - is that private? what if I have posts set to friends only - and someone uses a cambridge alanytica type thing where friends who do something exposes what I thought of as private to third party scrapers? Is that scraping illegal if scraping public posts is? What about browser extensions?
My private friends only photos - are they being used to train AI for fbook, clearview? are they being shared by some poll software a friend is using?
an invite only group, is that data private? does text in a description create a type of protection? What about data that is hacked and published - it's become public data - how about an ex lover who publishes what was thought to be private DMs?
I'm sure there are many more situations in which people think they are doing things privately that others could finger a reason why it's not.
stories? disappearing snaps?
If fbook keeps a log of things you've typed but then backspaced over - is that data public? is it yours? How many people think that data even exists?
So in general I kind of agree - but I think we should include things people assume are private as off limits without warrants, while specifying what data is probed, what the retention is, and what the scope of sharing could be.
The IRS has a sizeable police force as well.
If they're disinterested in private comms, it's because they're very interested in public comms. If they're wondering what the public thinks and would make improvements, great, but if they're targeting the public because what they say is too true to handle, ugh.
Lots of sentiment today that the USPS is way out of its zone of expertise in doing this -- and that is possible.
But it's worth noting that the USPS has had its own legion of postal inspectors going back to the 19th century, when they were a (comparatively) huge part of the U.S. government, and the FBI, etc. did not exist.
Some 1,200 postal inspectors are still around, and they play important roles on federal prosecutions related to mail fraud, drug shipments, etc. There's a good Wikipedia entry on it all: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Postal_Inspectio...
"When our Corps goes in as guards over the mail, that mail must be delivered," wrote Secretary of the Navy Edwin Denby. "Or there must be a Marine dead at the post of duty. There can be no compromise."
https://www.military.com/off-duty/2020/08/25/intense-rules-u...
The mail is serious business.
That was a wild read.
> Q. Suppose the thief was apparently unarmed but was running away?
> A. Call halt twice at the top of your voice, and if he does not halt, fire one warning shot; and if he does not obey this, shoot to hit him.
There was no chill during the great depression:
> Q. If I hear the command 'Hands Up,' am I justified in obeying this order?
> A. No; fall to the ground and start shooting.
No mincing of words. Something like this would never be put into writing today, as far as I understand the USMC:
Q. Is there a general plan for meeting a robbery?
A. Yes; start shooting and meet developments as they arise thereafter.
> Something like this would never be put into writing today
Because we don’t need rules like that today. America was a very different place than it is now. Those rules were there, not because they were shoot happy maniacs, or because they didn’t care about being “PC”, but because it was much more dangerous back then. It is the same reason that US soldiers stationed in Germany don’t have the same rules of engagement as soldiers in Afghanistan.
Asides from all that stuff about ordering soldiers to kill American civilians, I'm just boggled that it had a FAQ. How old is the FAQ structure? Wikipedia suggests a history going back to the 1600s, and much further if you stretch the definition to Plato.
American civilians who had made a decided effort to commit a federal felony. Also "ordering soliders to kill American civilians" attempts to color the situation in an unfavorable light, as if the soldiers had alternatives, or the situation didn't fully warrant it.
There's no reason that killing armed gangsters wasn't totally justified in this case.
They did. The letter clearly instructs soldiers to shoot fleeing people in the back if they don't stop and surrender. "Not killing the fleeing man" is what we can an "alternative."
Where's the BG copypasta quote about why soldiers shouldn't be police
The military defends federal property all the time. US mail is federal property. Is there a copypasta about blanket absolutes?
People were shocked last summer when federal agents started doing night patrols around a vandalized and firebombed federal courthouse in Portland, deterring and detaining people left and right. Not many are aware of how seriously the federal government takes protecting its properties and duties, and how lethally serious such encounters were not too many decades ago.
Except the US Capitol.
Except for the killing of Ashli Babbitt, who was fatally shot despite being unarmed.
> going back to the 19th century
18th, even. From the same Wikipedia article you shared:
> The Postal Inspection Service has the oldest origins of any federal law enforcement agency in the United States. It traces its roots back to 1772 when colonial Postmaster General Benjamin Franklin first appointed a "surveyor" to regulate and audit the mails. Thus, the Service's origins—in part—predate the Declaration of Independence, and therefore the United States itself.
Can't help thinking of W.A.S.T.E. though.
Sure, but the 19th century ended over 120 years ago. So that's kind of not relevant to how they're structured and operate today?
Not relevant? Do you somehow imagine that how things were done in the past doesn't affect "how they're structured and operate today"?
No, I think how things were done almost 120 years and 20 US administrations ago does not in any way relate to how the modern organization works, and how the current institutional knowledge is acted on by its employees (from CEO all the way down to the foot workers).
The late 19th century has so much "nothing to do" with today that it's literally irrelevant other than being a good window into how different things were, and as historical setup to then transition into "and then everything changed as a result of the great depression, with the US further burdened in the years following until the repeal of prohibition" which forced literally every government agency to change the way it worked.
Depends if we're talking how they are structured vs should be structured
I think 1,200 investigators for the entirety of the USPS's operations isn't out of line.
okay? not really related to my comment?
People forget that spying on citizens by the post office goes back hundreds of years. This doesn't make it in any way acceptable, but people shouldn't act surprised that post offices spy on citizens when it's an activity that's baked into the service from the very early days.
https://pasttenseblog.wordpress.com/2019/09/03/today-in-lond...
> The Post office was of central importance to this surveillance. The ‘Secret Office’ – an arm of what was basically a secret service, dedicated to opening post to discover plots against the government – was formed around 1653 under Cromwell’s post-Civil War republican Protectorate; but it proved so handy, the Office was continued after the restoration of the monarchy.
[...]
> Morland also recorded what he saw as the basic function of his devices and of surveillance in general: “a skilful prince ought to make a watch tower of his general post office… and there place such careful sentinels as that, by their care and diligence, he may have a constant view of all that passes.”
Samuel Morland was interesting and has some early computing devices.
https://history-computer.com/samuel-morland/
https://history-computer.com/samuel-morland-biography-histor...
https://www.headstuff.org/culture/history/terrible-people-fr...
One of the links talks about letters sealed in the Spanish manner.
https://regencyredingote.wordpress.com/2012/11/16/sealing-wa...
> It was then that the superior qualities of the new "Spanish" wax came to be highly valued. The basic formula of this new sealing compound was a blend of shellac, mastic, turpentine, chalk or gypsum, and a coloring agent, to which essential oils and/or fragrant balsams might be added to facilitate melting and impart a pleasant fragrance. This "sealing wax" could be melted to a thick viscous fluid which would readily and firmly adhere to the parchment or paper on which it was placed. While warm, it would take a clear impression of any seal that was pressed in to it. It would remain solid, even in the heat of summer, and was flexible enough to remain intact while affixed to the document on which it had been placed. However, it was extremely difficult to remove a seal made of this material and replace it after the contents of the sealed document had been read. This compound was more brittle than beeswax so it could be easily broken, thus providing clear evidence of tampering. Even if the seal could be removed unbroken, any attempt to re-affix a seal was nearly impossible, since, with such a low melting point, the image which had been impressed into it would loose its crispness, if not melt completely, if additional hot wax was used to re-attach it, yet another sign of tampering.
A total monopoly on daily mail and we get snooped.
I can't tell if this is corruption or genuine work.
the 19th century was also the time when the USPS was not having net losses of $9.2 billion per year.[1]
How about having the FBI monitoring the security instead and them notifying USPS.
[1]https://about.usps.com/newsroom/national-releases/2020/1113-....
Do you think all public services ought to be profitable? Or can we entertain the thought that our taxes help offset costs of (or directly fund) critical public services?
As an aside, I genuinely dislike seeing misinformation from the Trump/Russia era on HN.
How about not having ad hominem attacks on HN? Your dislike to seeing certain information on HN doesn't add any value to the conversation. Especially when it presumes - without evidence - that the parent comment surely has some partisan mental bias just like you yourself have.
And to your actual answer. I do believe public funds can go to fund government enterprises. Just not when any comparative private enterprise seems to figure out how to be profitable.
This is a tough issue for a government. We do have crazies out there and we do need to investigate potential dangerous groups and individuals and reel them in before they do something crazy.
On my FB feed I have seen friends and friends of friends call for armed revolt many times over the past few years. Most all of them are blowing steam and many are in their 60s or older and couldn't run a block in gym shorts, and much less if they were carrying any kind of real military gear, but they like to think they can. We all grew up with "Rambo" movies.
But some of those who's comments I've seen I don't know at all.
The ordeal at our Capital proves there's a problem that needs to be monitored. Most of those who went there were not armed or dangerous, but there were enough kooks to cause some real damage and lives were lost. And last year we had the guy who blew himself and his motorhome up on a Downtown street.
If we had another "Timothy McVeigh" event people would be howling, and if we had several they'd be freaking out and demanding something be done.
We all have good reason to be wary of "Big Brother" type surveillance but we also have to acknowledge that we have a problem with people getting crazy and shooting into crowds and blowing things up.
There's not always a good solution to a shitty situation.
FWIW, the protestors at the capitol didn't kill anyone.
Why was this downvoted? It's completely factual. Officer Sicknick passed away from natural causes (the narrative that his head was bashed in with a fire extinguisher evaporated a couple of days ago[0]). Two of the protesters had heart attacks and one apparently had a meth overdose. The only person who was killed was shot by police. If you have evidence to the contrary, please cite it.
0. https://www.politifact.com/article/2021/apr/20/update-capito...
Most people may not have heard, or don't want to hear, that the narrative collapsed.
As far as I know, the only person that actually killed anyone was the Secret Service agent that shot Ashley Babbit.
Person you're replying to didn't say that the protesters killed anyone directly.They said "lives were lost." But it is obviously highly probable that those death occurred due to their activities.
This is a dumb argument because they were at least trying to IMPLEMENT A COUP. It seems pretty clear to me that they would have assaulted and killed representatives if they would have gotten the chance which they very nearly did.
Also, don't call them "protestors". The nicest term I can think of for them would be rebels since they were in open rebellion to the United States. Some people at the capital that day were protestors, but the people who stormed the capital went far beyond protest.
I think it's worth bearing in mind a few things:
1. Coups don't have to be violent.
2. The hypothetical coupers would not have believed it to be a coup, merely reinstating the rightful president.
3. Those invading the capitol were likely mostly just doing because they could rather than because they had a concrete plan on what they'd do if they found Pence and the representatives. I expect the vast vast majority would have done nothing more than shout slogans.
4. In general, when it comes to ones Outgroups there's a strong tendency to assume the worst at every opportunity. You might want to work to counteract that tendency (if only so you can better understand said Outgroup).
Back in the day, my grandparents told me people get killed at rock concerts if they get caught in the moshpit.
This reads at a similar level of credebility. Compate the footage from the capitol with footage of Ukrain protests back in the day.
Funny "coup" where none of the plotters were armed.
No, not really. Quite a few successful coups have been essentially bloodless and relied on a combination of surprise and bluff. Napoleon's actual seizure of power was disorganized to put it mildly: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coup_of_18_Brumaire
Also, there are charges pending against people who had a stash of firearms in a hotel in Virginia, just across the Potomac, and planned to bring them over at a later stage. Firearms are largely banned in DC so the idea was to take over the Congress first and then establish a defensive perimeter.
Now, I didn't say it was a good plan.
Does incompetence and failure bear on intent? I don't think that usually flies in court.
Is it remotely plausible to believe a group of unarmed protestors were seriously attempting to gain control over the most powerful superpower the world has ever seen with their barehands? This narrative strains credulity, counselor.
It's plausible that it's what some people were personally thinking (or a better word might be "LARPing"). But for the reasons you point out, it's not realistic to suggest that the loftiness of the goal implies the danger was historically-serious, or requiring some kind of revolutionary increase of law enforcement (beyond handling protests at the capital more wisely next time).
That does seem to be the intent they announced.
> 17 charged with weapons crimes
> These include people arrested outside the Capitol grounds with weapons like guns and Molotov cocktails
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2021/02/04/us/capitol-ar...
They probably would have if they got their hands on people and they also beat several cops which could have potentially killed them. They were definitely out to hurt people and take over Congress.
> They probably would have if they got their hands on people
You cannot know this. You should be suspicious of thoughts that say your Outgroup is worse than what you have concrete evidence for. Confirmation bias is a hell of a thing.
>The ordeal at our Capital proves there's a problem that needs to be monitored.
Unlike, say, nightly riots in Portland, that require neither monitoring nor federal response of any kind?
It would be one thing if posts like the one above honestly argued for some necessary level of general surveillance in good faith. It's entirely different story, however, when they sneakily imply a certain set of hyper-partisan assumptions.
If you can't demonstrate to me that surveillance of social media is politically neutral and aims at preventing harm, rather than suppressing speech through harassment, I'd rather have no surveillance of that kind at all.
Edit:
It's bizarre that despite all these "concerns" about social media there is no investigation (that I know of) into the origins of the whole QAnon degeneracy.
The ordeal at our Capital proves there's a problem that needs to be monitored.
They were monitored. To the extent that the lead of the Proud Boys was actually supplying intel to the feds and the Status Coup youtube channel (which I think was taken off line for some Kafkaesque reason) was recording various pro-Trump people in public calling for such actions.
More monitoring is not needed. Monitoring did nothing to stop the 9-11 Saudi allies from carrying out their mission. The only thing monitoring does is to make people fear to express their thoughts online in case they get into trouble.
Out of curiosity. Why do you think that people disliking and even hating their government is necessarily a bad thing? Or is it only expressing that feeling that you have a problem with?
I think it's obviously a bad thing when they express their hate by murdering random and innocent victims. When and wherever that line is crossed it is a bad thing. There are no exceptions to that.
Alright, so to take the most obvious example, and one that might not be adjacent to the one we are talking about but is still useful, the rebellion of the 13 colonies in the late 1700s included people being killed. Not just military. Regular people died. Was that rebellion wrong?
Also bear in mind that nobody was killed by anyone at the capital except for a participant, by a police officer. Also, you didn't answer either of my questions.
"Also, you didn't answer either of my questions."
I didn't answer your questions because they are bullshit questions.
!. "Out of curiosity. Why do you think that people disliking and even hating their government is necessarily a bad thing?
I didn't even come close to saying or implying that.
2. "Or is it only expressing that feeling that you have a problem with?"
I didn't even come close to saying or implying that either.
It doesn't need to be monitored. It needs to be deescalated. The left wants to believe its blameless, but there's a massive portion of America that, per their believe foundation, disagrees with the policies they are putting in place. We live in a Democracy; the only "right" way forward is the one we all agree with, and we can't agree on anything right now.
I don't know how to deescalate it, but its beginning to feel like the most sensible solution is transferring significantly more resources and power to the States (which is precisely how our country was founded). Many states do, internally, have division, but broadly speaking California would be happier to run itself more independently of Donald Trump, as much as Mississippi would be happier to run itself more independently of Joe Biden.
It doesn't feel like this is optional; some amount of fractionalization will happen, possibly in four years, possibly in fifty, but it is inevitable. The choice in front of us is to either, ease ourselves into it using the democratic framework we have in place by significantly reducing the power of the executive branch and transferring more tax-originating resources from the federal to state & country levels, or; some form of civil war.
And, I beg you, don't form this idea of "civil war" in your mind to resemble the first one; it won't. For all the ugliness of our first Civil War, our second will be far uglier. One possibility may take the form of a second Trump-like presidency destroying the Federal faith of left-leaning states, causing the west coast to secede. Another; domestic terrorism, cyber warfare, untraceable and unstoppable flash attacks on critical infrastructure such as electricity and water, splinter military groups.
As left-leaning as I may be, we can't come out of the Trump presidency and Biden election thinking all of this is over. We can't ban Parler from AWS then wash our hands clean and say its a job well done. This rage is real, its everywhere, and there are four hundred million guns owned by civilians in America [1]. Gun control? A fairy tale. Suppression of dissenting speech? Someone didn't read 1984, or the Constitution. The only solution is to fractionalize; if people feel anger at the President, the solution isn't to install a new President, it's to make the position of the President one that isn't worthy of Anger.
The scariest part about our future as a country lies in the reality that this will never happen. We are driving full speed toward a civil war, or worse, and the immutable system we've built won't allow us to do what is necessary to avoid it.
[1] https://wamu.org/story/20/09/18/how-many-people-in-the-u-s-o...
>> It doesn't need to be monitored. It needs to be deescalated.
I used "monitored" as verb to point out we need to be aware of who is plotting extreme violent events like the one Timothy McVeigh planned and executed and prevent them whenever possible in order to deescalate a trend towards others carrying out similar events.
"Q" is a thing, and we've seen quite a few citizens fall for it. That's a problem that any government could come up against and it is the government's duty to protect it's citizens.
> there's a massive portion of America that, per their believe foundation, disagrees with the policies they are putting in place. We live in a Democracy; the only "right" way forward is the one we all agree with, and we can't agree on anything right now.
I mostly agree. Especially that the speed with which progressive policies have been adapted has alienated a lot of people. The same has happened with conservatives trying to roll back some of these policies alienating the progressives. This has weakened faith in democracy, which is rather bad.
My conclusion is that broad consensus and middle ground needs to be found. This requires having debate that has some good-faith. And requires some amount of empathy for the opposing side. How America could get back to that is hard.
I am not sure whether more state-authority would help that much. These fundamental disagreements also exists within states, and both sides care a lot about people outside their state. Democrats in California would not accept banning abortion in Arkansas. Nor would republicans in Texas be happy if Oregon bans firearm ownership. In fact, I fear that either case happening would only drive the polarization.
It would let either party vilify and generalize their opponents based on the in their view horrible things done by those parties in their states.
I work in cyber security ML engineering (open for interviews, hmu) and frequently see federal contractor firms hiring for cyber data/engineer positions for USPS. Always puzzled me.
example: https://jobs.rtx.com/job/-/-/4679/4267185376?codes=INDEED
I don't see why this is hard to understand.
Nationwide logistics aren't simple. They have to evolve with the times to modernize/automate their operations and adapt to new, unknown cyber threats.
The mail is quite important.
chill https://nvidianews.nvidia.com/news/nvidia-provides-u-s-posta...
recent NVIDIA conference talks will detail some use cases.
are you interested in federal contract jobs tho? hmu
thank you, but I dont think I qualify for federal due to visa.
What is cyber data?
My guess is that’s it is data on or relating to computing devices rather than other data (for example, sales figures at a carpet store). I’m just guessing, though. It’s a good question.
I’ve recently heard people use cyber to mean cyber security.
I feel like the key sentence in this article (edit: which is ironically no longer verbatim in this article, which I see hours later has been heavily expanded) which purports to answer the "but... why the USPS?"--is: > The agency told Yahoo News the Inspection Service collaborates with law-enforcement agencies to identify and assess threats to the Postal Service and its "overall mail processing and transportation network.
Now I'm worried they might find out that I've been using this newfangled technology called "email" for the past 25 years and I haven't licked a stamp in over a decade. Some say its only used for money laundering and drug dealing, but I think it's rather convenient and more innovative than what the government can offer.
It truly has been a long time for you, as you don't even need to lick stamps, they are sticky on their own.
oh, that may explain why I get them stuck on my tongue ...
If only some other kind of mail had become popular to replace the lost letter volume...
Can you imagine if USPS ran an email service and all of the legal protections afforded to our mailboxes and the contents of our postal communications applied just the same? The internet would be a completely different place. In a good way, I think.
Less awesome, but realistically USPS and their respective national organizations should run their DNS RBL lists. Protecting their nations against spam.
If the USPS ran email, they would legalize spam and charge by the kilobyte.
Is spam illegal now?
Can you imagine if all of that was true except that it could be run by anyone? (Sadly, we have very little -- almost zero -- legal protection for our email in the U.S.)
> which purports to answer the "but... why the USPS?"
Yes, that's the burning question I took away from this article.
Perhaps it is a hack to route around federal laws - the USPS could have exceptions (or grandfathered laws) that give it more leeway than other departments?
I'm surprised by the comments here. People seem clueless to real threats the USPS faces and are puzzled why they have inspectors.
Last year or maybe it was 2019 a delivery worker was murdered. Agg robberies of delivery workers has been going up. Breaking into mail boxes and mail theft has been going up. Using mail service to conduct fraud and other criminal transactions is going up. I'm on mobile so it's hard to get the links but just google it, not hard to find.
I'm not surprised they have inspectors. I'm surprised they think that social media surveillance is within their purview.
I hope their inspectors continue to investigate mail theft, mail fraud, and other things related to the physical delivery of mail. But I don't want them shifting into digital snooping that is totally unrelated to mail.
> But I don't want them shifting into digital snooping that is totally unrelated to mail.
I mean, the primary method for delivery of goods purchased on the Silk Road was through the USPS. And I imagine the tor sites that replaced the Silk Road have similar delivery needs.
So if the USPS isn’t going to “digitally snoop” for the illegal delivery of handguns and heroin, who will?
Delivering guns as data is a thing now, I'm sure someone is working on heroin.
You do know mail fraud is commonly initiated by online groups, many times on social media, right?
> The work involves having analysts trawl through social media sites to look for what the document describes as “inflammatory” postings and then sharing that information across government agencies.
“Analysts with the United States Postal Inspection Service (USPIS) Internet Covert Operations Program (iCOP) monitored significant activity regarding planned protests occurring internationally and domestically on March 20, 2021,” says the March 16 government bulletin
Sounds like they're focused on issues other than mail fraud.
Not true at all, any gathering of people is a prime target for shipping contraband in the mail. Not to mention how the protests could affect mail service in the area.
If that's the case, surely it would be more appropriate for a law enforcement agency such as the FBI to investigate any crimes committed against postal workers. But we aren't even talking about crimes that were committed here – we're talking about crimes that might be committed.
The postal inspection service is a law enforcement agency...? And it existed before the FBI. Moreover, all federal law enforcement trains at the same place in Georgia.
Look: https://www.uspis.gov
Matter of fact their website news section shows you some of the crazy crime they investigate. Theft of postal vehicle happened few days ago apparently.
It seems like this should be the job of the FBI, DHS or some other agency like that. The Post Office should deliver mail and packages not investigate material on the internet.
To be fair, look at it from totally the opposite direction to see their point of view.
Your workers are under threat from poorly made postal bombs that could easily blow up during processing, killing your workers. Due to the vast volume of post you process, the threat is real and non-trivial.
Do you do nothing?
I think you obviously have to do something, whether you go as far as they did is what's up for debate.
Yes, when will the USPS do something about the 0 postal workers killed from letter bombs this year, last year, the year before last, the year before last before last year, ...?
More of them are endangered by their shitbox LLV trucks catching on fire.
Bombs in packages isn't the only thing that threatens postal workers that USPS is trying to protect.
For example, look at this[0]. Two people physically attacked a postal worker after accusing her of "stealing their stimulus checks"[1].
Sure, you can say that this case had nothing to do with USPS surveillance. But it just goes to show that there are plenty of serious dangers to postal workers other than just nigh-non-existent "bomb in the mail" scenarios that you seem to be fixating on.
0. https://www.kiro7.com/news/trending/police-make-arrest-after...
1. https://news.yahoo.com/usps-worker-beaten-michigan-alleged-1...
That has nothing to do with this issue. The article is about USPS investigating online threats. Do you really think people who are going to beat USPS workers are going to post about it online and that the USPS would be better equipped than agencies whose sole purpose is to deal with these kind of things?
If you think every postal worker should have some sort of security / police going with them on their routes that is one thing, but that is not at all what this article is about.
>That has nothing to do with this issue
It addresses the comment that essentially boiled down to "why would they want this, letter bombs almost never happen", and I simply have shown other reasons for why they might want it. I wasn't addressing the article, I was addressing a specific comment.
>Do you really think people who are going to beat USPS workers are going to post about it online [...]
Yes, it does happen. People publicly post on twitter about their plans to vandalize property and such, so I don't see this scenario out of reach at all.
>[...] and that the USPS would be better equipped than agencies whose sole purpose is to deal with these kind of things?
No, but USPS would be able to use this as a clue of something brewing and make the relevant agencies aware, all while dealing with ad-hoc mitigations (e.g., if the threat seems credible on the surface, prepare tentative re-routing plans for their drivers to avoid that area, in case the agencies confirm that the threat is credible; if the agencies confirm that the threat isn't credible, everything proceeds as usual).
I agree that sometimes people do post online about committing crimes, but I do not believe USPS is better equipped than the FBI or DHS at handling it. The job of the USPS is to deliver mail. The job of the FBI is to stop crimes that will happen or find those responsible for crimes which have already been committed.
The FBI has more resources for investigating, finding, and assessing crimes. They also have additional intelligence that the USPS is not privy to. Why have an agency which has less resources and intelligence handle it? If it is a real threat the FBI can relay that information the USPS (and other agencies who operate in the area) to re-route their drivers or lock down their offices.
The USPS does not do anything so unique that it needs to a specialized investigative unit.
"In 1975, no one died, ..."
when will the USPS do something about the 0 postal workers killed from letter bombs this year
And how do you think that number became zero? Magic bomb-negating fairies?
Yes, you contact the FBI and get them to investigate, just like everyone else does when federal crimes are involved.
(Also, echoing the sibling: where are all these poorly made postal bombs you're talking about? I can't remember anything in recent and not-so-recent memory.)
A couple postal workers died about 20 years ago when someone used the U.S. mails as an anthrax-delivery mechanism. Details are here: https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/mm5239a2.htm Note that's there's also a deeper CDC analysis looking at whether mail sorting is a job with higher than usual mortality rates. (Answer: probably not).
Granted, that's a long time ago, and it doesn't happen habitually. But if you're going to have a workforce safety team (good idea), they will likely want to either actually do something to stop the threats, or at least signal to management that they aren't totally clueless
Just don't ask where that anthrax strain came from.
> Your workers are under threat from poorly made postal bombs that could easily blow up during processing
How does that threat compare to threats the post office accepts for it's workers such as being killed in traffic accidents?
You don't even have to say bombs, the article lists a great example. They are tracking protests. I think I would like to be aware if where I normally deliver mail I'm walking into a protest that might get violent.
If I turn the corner on my mail route and see an angry mob down the block, I turn around? It's not like people don't have eyes anymore.
Or you can look to see that it is scheduled for the afternoon so you deliver in the morning.
The FBI (or some other agency) can investigate these things and send out notices to government agencies operating in the area. It seems like you are advocating for every single government agency to monitor the internet for potential protests in their area? Why duplicate the work when we can get people who are experts handle it?
If there is a bomb threat why can't the FBI or DHS investigate? That is the entire purpose of those agencies.
Should every government agency have a department to investigate threats towards their employees? Why limit it to just the USPS? Why not give investigative powers to the Agency for Global Media or the Administration for Community Living? Should those employees have to risk the very "real and non-trivial" threats they face?
If this was just some sort of way of detecting bombs or anthrax or something I think most of us could get behind it. This is turning the post office into an investigative crime solving agency and not even strictly for the thing they do (mail delivery).
Agency for Global Media has their own law enforcement that investigates threats against the agency and it’s personnel. This ranges from securing HQ against protests to investigating what happens to broadcast infrastructure in war zones like Afghanistan to securing classified information.
I chose a random agency without checking what exactly they do. The specific agencies I mentioned are irrelevant to the actual points I was making.
We don't need every single agency to handle investigating threats to themself. It just doesn't make financial or practical sense. We can use the FBI, Secret Service, DHS, etc to deal with protecting the entire government and their employees. This will eliminate duplication and make it easier to share threat information.
One problem we have is the lack of information being shared with the correct agencies. This was allegedly the cause of some terrorist attacks not being stopped. If there are only a couple agencies that handle security and threat investigations instead of 100s it will already be in the hands of the correct agency. We should be striving for a streamlined process that removes duplication instead of hoping every single agency can do the job well.
We don't need more centralization. That just puts all the spoils in terms of getting corrupt individuals in positions of influence in one basket. Keeping agencies and jurisdictions divided keeps people specialized, limits the spread of taint, and ensures any that does take root is limited in scope; which is a good thing. Last thing we need is a monolithic law enforcement agency.
> Do you do nothing?
No, you coordinate with the CIA or FBI to investigate threats against the government.
Postal inspectors can hand off to other teams for investigation of affairs that might affect more than the post system-- hence this memo.
If postal workers are at risk then it's within their purview (as it has been for over 200 years) to investigate and warn local offices in addition to other government offices.
There are loads of intelligence services in America. Coup d'État has a non-exhaustive list. I'm pretty sure even the NOAA does homeland security stuff.
The postal service, as a Constitutionally-mandated requirement of the federal government (though the post itself is a private company, responsibility for ensuring there is a post and that it works is Congress's), is some very old and very serious law and enforcement.
The Postal Inspection Service traces its lineage to 1772; the FBI to 1908. USPIS being separate from the FBI is one of those quirks of American enforcement, like how the Secret Service is responsible for physical security of the President and other political figures... And financial services.
> Constitutionally-mandated requirement of the federal government
The constitution says: "The Congress shall have Power [...] To establish Post Offices and post Roads;"
This is not a constitutional mandate. It is constitutional authorization. The federal government is not obligated to fully exercise every power it is granted.
In this case, and speaking specifically around the time that the Constitution was ratified, I suspect a Congress that failed to exercise that power would have been replaced by a Congress willing to, since people liked receiving correspondence and it was fairly vital to doing any kind of long distance business.
Lol, a government will always exercise any power it is given, and that's why your laws must be overly limited in the first place.
Just see the interstate commerce clause and what's happened with that
It is not the USPS running this operation. It is the US postal inspection service, which is a legitimate law enforcement agency that mostly oversees crimes related to mail, but has long handled investigations into other types of crime including cybercrime, identity theft, and child exploitation. The title would make it seem like mail carriers are spending time looking at our social media accounts in the back of the local post office.
One thing I haven't really seen discussed (or maybe I'm just blind) is the fact that the USPS isn't a government organization quite like the others. It's supposed to be a more-private entity that competes in a market.
Feels weird to give them law enforcement powers while still putting them up against private industry as competition, couldn't they just arrest all the UPS workers or something (gross oversimplification but still)?
wasn't always that way. At one time the predecessor agency to the USPS was a cabinet-level department:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Post_Office_Depa...
There is Constitutional authority empowering Congress "To establish post offices and post roads" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Postal_Clause)
We also used to have a limited form of postal banking here:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Postal_Savings_S...
Private railroads also have police with law enforcement powers. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Railroad_police
USPS is given an explicit monopoly on letter deliveries; they do not compete in their market.
> The work involves having analysts trawl through social media sites to look for what the document describes as “inflammatory” postings
What exactly constitutes "monitoring"? This sounds like some agents spent a few hours using Twitter's built in search to look for certain keywords...
And then released a security bulletin: hey, people are saying threatening things on the Internet!
Oh so this is why they were so concerned about the post office funding in 2020.
I read that in the 60s to the 80s, a lot of civil unrest was taking place and there were so many “protest” bombings (whatever that means) that it became a almost normal in some cities (according to articles I found). This might have been a precaution against something like that, considering the current political climate in the USA?
https://time.com/4501670/bombings-of-america-burrough/
Edited to add a reference and correct a detail
Even the mail man is glowing now.
> The postmaster general is the second-highest paid U.S. government official, > based on publicly available salary information, after the President of the > United States.[13]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Postmaster_Gener...
PmG is a very powerful position.
Given the weird arrest of General Flynn by USPS and then the weird ensuing court case, this is not really surprising.
Crossing the streams, the USPIS are a Cellebrite customer:
https://www.uspis.gov/wp-content/uploads/2020/02/FY-2019-ann... (p. 35)
Still think anonymous communications platforms like Freenet, I2P and Tor are just for conspiracy theorists?
Were the 2001 "Amerithrax" letters the justification for this program? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2001_anthrax_attacks
Oh is that why so many people I don't know with no mutuals add me on Facebook? They're going to have to impersonate someone I know for that to work.
Heh and here I was worried about my weed shipments from California. Would iCop be the same organization that enforces that kind of thing?
Do others also find it strange that the postal service has their own police force?
Less strange than the Department of Education having one.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/answer-sheet/wp/2013/01/...
No, they in fact have one of the oldest police forces in the US.
Mail fraud and mail theft is a crime as old as mail.
The things that troubles me the most is abysmal record when it comes to delivery (pun intended) of fundamental services, e.g. interruptions in delivery of mail for weeks, then only partial delivery, critical documents lost, medication lost, credit cards "lost", etc., etc.
Hah, remember this story? https://apnews.com/article/1e42c1a6fd324f5784c414fcd2adbd17
> The U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives lost track of most of the guns, including two found at the scene where a U.S. Border Patrol Agent was fatally shot in the Arizona desert. The operation sparked a political backlash against the Obama administration.
> Attkisson left CBS in 2014 and is now the host of “Full Measure with Sharyl Attkisson,” a weekly Sunday news program broadcast by the conservative Sinclair Broadcast Group.
> In her lawsuit, Attkisson says that two computer forensics teams identified an unauthorized communications channel opened into her laptop was connected to an IP address belonging to the U.S. Postal Service, “indicating unauthorized surveillance.”
> Government lawyers argue that Attkisson’s lawsuit does not include any evidence that Holder and Donahoe had direct involvement in spying on her.
> “At best, plaintiffs’ complaint suggests a mere possibility that Holder and Donahoe could have participated in developing or enforcing policies concerning electronic surveillance generally; there are no allegations that they conducted or ordered the particular incursions about which plaintiffs complain,” Justice Department lawyers argue in a legal brief filed in the 4th Circuit.
The Obama administration used USPS to spy on journalists investigating Fast and Furious. It sounded ridiculous at the time -- "The USPS is spying on journalists, and not the NSA, and not the FBI, and not the CIA? Suuure."
Not so ridiculous anymore.
I'm tired of being angry about this, I've been asking for change for most of my adult life. Our constitution isn't worth anything anymore. The federal government needs to shrink. Asking nicely to not be spied on does not work.
On a more silly note, this whole scenario reminds me of this Seinfeld clip. https://youtu.be/On3cQ0sPvSY?t=46
Not too much to ask at all. Every American should be outraged.
Half of Americans, and the vast majority of powerful institutions, are just fine with this because the targets are right-wingers.
completely forgot about that story—great catch.
I'm not very certain that a nation of 350 million people can be kept stable without some amount of internal espionage.
Most human constructs of that size have espionage going on between them (for example, that's more than the population of Germany and Russia combined, and those nations are definitely spying on each other). The fact that they have a thick border drawn on the map between them and the US has thin borders drawn on its map probably implies the US should spy on itself less... But how much less?
Internal espionage has been key at several points in the history of the US for preventing internal power structures from overriding law and order (the Chicago mafia, for example). It has, obviously, also been leveraged against the rights of law-abiding citizens.
This is a truly bizarre story. I agree with others that other government agencies should run this particularly given USPS already well known financial challenges.
This is in no way related to their financial struggles.
The USPS was breaking even regularly (phenomenal considering what they do) until they were forced to save up funding for 75 years of pensions within a 10 year span. Not only that, but they have to exclusively rely on the US Treasuries to fund the retiree medial fund, so it's more expensive out of the gate.
So they're doing more for their employees, paying more for it, and are required to do so in a shorter amount of time than just about any private company out there.
I'd be surprised if this covert program cost more than 1% of what the pension fund does.
I'm aware of the pension rules and to your point I'm sure the cost is minimal. It just seems so long as they are being managed by the government in this way, they should get some "free" services elsewhere.
I'm not surprised
I'm surprised no one's mentioned GDPR, or similar extra-territorial laws.
This is a power grab by the USPS to inject themselves into the industrial surveillance complex.
It most likely tries to tie a social media profile to a physical address and provides a pen register of all the mail sent and received by that citizen along with a collection of the "inflammatory opinions".
It is unconstitutional and folks at the USPS and organizations they shared the data with should go to jail.
> to inject themselves into the industrial surveillance complex.
Haven't they been de-facto participating for decades?
They were the earliest, really, searching mail first to find information about birth control being shared and pornography (Comstock Act, 1873), then sedition. I assume that all of the first precedents for mass surveillance and data collection come from the USPS.
News flash: people read things that you make public on the Web.
There is a qualitative difference between "people reading things you make public on the web" and "a government-funded agency uses extensive technological means to read, categorize and threat-assess your statements on the net, and have the power to throw you into jail for an indeterminate length of time - or worse."
Weird, and scary.
But maybe I can kind of see it. Here's a protest. Let's say it's Proud Boys, and Antifa shows up. And here's a mail carrier out trying to deliver the mail, who drives (or worse, walks) right into the middle of it. The Post Office might have a legitimate reason for wanting to know, so they can keep their on-duty employees from harm.
Is that what's going on? Is that all that's going on? I don't know.
> Is that what's going on? Is that all that's going on? I don't know.
Doesn't sound like it. Maybe they are trying to shift money to surveillance with all the packages going around because of Covid (I.E: USPS trying to get rid of that "surplus")? Either way, it sounds crazy.
It's possible for employees of every government agency and every private company to get caught up in the middle of a protest. Should they all start their own surveillance programs?
You should try to re-word your comment so that it reads less like an "I'm just asking questions" conspiracy theory.
USPS is the new DEA
> “Analysts with the United States Postal Inspection Service (USPIS) Internet Covert Operations Program (iCOP) monitored significant activity regarding planned protests occurring internationally and domestically on March 20, 2021,” says the March 16 government bulletin, marked as “law enforcement sensitive” and distributed through the Department of Homeland Security’s fusion centers. “Locations and times have been identified for these protests, which are being distributed online across multiple social media platforms, to include right-wing leaning Parler and Telegram accounts.”
> A number of groups were expected to gather in cities around the globe on March 20 as part of a World Wide Rally for Freedom and Democracy, to protest everything from lockdown measures to 5G. “Parler users have commented about their intent to use the rallies to engage in violence. Image 3 on the right is a screenshot from Parler indicating two users discussing the event as an opportunity to engage in a ‘fight’ and to ‘do serious damage,’” says the bulletin.
> “No intelligence is available to suggest the legitimacy of these threats,” it adds.
Oh, that doesn't seem like an asymmetric allocation of resources at all. It's totally not trivially exploitable like the ticket presales in Tulsa or anything.
This "we have to respond to all potential threats, no matter how trivial" doctrine is a ridiculous waste of time and resources even in the best case. In the worst case, it overcommits to an impossible task.
I think it's reasonable to rate their competence level at "the cybers" around the same level as their ability to keep a "covert" operation off of Yahoo News.
I bet FedEx could operate a domestic intelligence agency for like a quarter of their budget.
You joke but private mail carriers don't have the same restrictions on monitoring your mail that the USPS does. They are free to open and inspect any package, as well as x-ray and other such methods, and don't need to disclose it. Except under some special circumstances, letters and parcels going through the USPS, on the other hand, need a warrant to be opened. One could easily imagine a program where private carriers report the contents of parcels sent to or from targeted individuals or even add things like listening devices or malware to items being shipped. While probably not useful for dealing with organized crime, if your goal is just general intelligence gathering or blackmail, private carriers could easily be a treasure trove.
> One could easily imagine a program where [...]
One doesn't have to imagine.
https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2015/03/cisco_shippin...
It's not complicated.
Your data (we could debate whether "data about you" is actually "your data" but that is a tangent discussion) is valuable. FedEx can collect then sell it.
International mail can be opened and inspected for customs purposes. Otherwise it makes sense that domestic mail would need a warrant to be opened.
More likely to improve targeted advertising.
I'm not sure why this is such a persistent sicking point with people. The post office regularly operates with a 1-5 billion dollar loss. Both UPS and Fedex operate with a net 1-5 billion dollar profit. That represents a theoretical min-max profit difference of about 10 to 2 billion dollar difference in any given year. In a 20 trillion dollar economy it's not even a rounding error.
The USPS is running a 'covert' program to monitor Americans' social media posts
Of course it is. Why wouldn't it? Crazy people put all kinds of crazy things in the mail. Have we so quickly forgotten the Unabomber? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ted_Kaczynski
The next time anthrax or ricin shows up in a politician's mailbox, the same people gritting their teeth about this will bark about why more wasn't done to detect and prevent it.
Why would you spend billions monitoring 300 million people when you could swab politicians' mail for anthrax?
Everyone has their tin foil hat with stuff on like this, but unless they are paying a 100 - 1000 engineers 250k-500k a year, I doubt theyve built anything useful with uptime. Maybe they could just scan a massive dataset of everyones posts, with some string searching, but still. I just dont see any entity like this being able to accomplish this task effectively.
Why do you believe that unless they're paying their developers "250k-500k a year", they wouldn't have built something useful?
Because analyzing all of social media with efficiency and effectively is really hard.
It implies that only an extremely highly paid developer can write efficient code which I think just isn't true.
I've been programming for 15 years and worked at firms of all sizes and payscale, I see a direct correlation between the two
What would "100 - 1000 engineers" even be doing?
The story starts off saying that the work's being done by analysts:
> The work involves having analysts trawl through social media sites to look for what the document describes as “inflammatory” postings and then sharing that information across government agencies.
, so it sounds more like they've got some folks browsing social-media.
Granted, a lot of the post-scanning would seem better done by bots, and stuff like sentiment-analysis could help classify posts for human inspection, so they'd probably want to hire a few engineers, but why hundreds? And why 250-500 kUSD/yr for such mundane work?
Exactly.
"> The work involves having analysts trawl through social media sites to look for what the document describes as “inflammatory” postings and then sharing that information across government agencies."
This is useless and nobody should fear it. You should fear a set of teams of highly trained technologists. Thats not what we have here
The entity's only job is to create a RFP and pick one. It's the company they hire that you have to worry about. The one thing we can count on is the government will spend the money to get what they want.