Snail-mail monitoring expands; lawyers complain of privilege violations, lack of oversight
The U.S. Postal Service approved nearly 50,000 requests last year to monitor the mail of Americans in its “mail covers” program, raising concerns about lack of oversight.
The report by the Postal Service’s inspector general suggests that the monitoring is more extensive than previously disclosed, the New York Times reports. The report, posted in May, was covered by Politico but was otherwise little noticed, the story says.
The mail covers program tracks names and return addresses from envelopes and packages before they are delivered.
The monitoring requests, made both by law enforcement and the Postal Service’s own inspections unit, were sometimes approved despite lack of proper authorization or sufficient justification, the Times says. The newspaper also noted errors in the program, including assignment of the same tracking number to different requests.
Frank Askin, a law professor at the Rutgers Constitutional Rights Clinic, told the Times he was worried about oversight. A former lawyer for the American Civil Liberties Union, he sued the FBI nearly 40 years ago over its monitoring of the mail of a 15-year-old New Jersey youth. “Postal Service employees are not judicial officers schooled in the meaning of the First Amendment,” he told the Times.
The Times story points out the potential for abuse and said the monitoring may extend to privileged attorney-client communications. In an interview with the newspaper, San Antonio defense lawyer Cynthia Orr recalled that prosecutors used mail covers to track communications between her legal team and a client accused in a pornography case. “The troubling part is that they don’t have to report the use of this tool to anyone,” Orr said.
The mail covers program is separate from the newer Mail Isolation Control and Tracking program, instituted after the anthrax attacks in 2001. Under that program, postal computers photograph the exterior of every piece of “paper mail” in the U.S., the Times reported in an earlier story. The Times says it is unclear how long those images are saved, but that the photos can assist law enforcement in retracing where mail came from.
Updated at 12:06 p.m. to add information about the Mail Isolation Control and Tracking program.
