Postal Service Mail-Tracking: Three Big Questions

Last week, the New York Times
reported there were nearly 50,000 incidents of mail
surveillance in 2013. Under the “mail cover” program, which has
been around for roughly a century, federal, state and even local
law enforcement officials can trace a suspect’s mail using data
collected from the outside of an envelope or a parcel, including
sender and recipient, addresses and where the mail entered the
postal system.

Law-enforcement officials obtain mail covers by placing a
request with the Postal Inspection
Service, who are in charge of vetting requests and asking the
Postal Service turn over the data. (Opening the mail would require
an additional step: obtaining a warrant.)

This is unsettling news for anyone who cares about privacy. The
Inspection Service, which polices the mail for kiddie porn, illegal
lotteries, and other perfidy, is not administering the program very
well. An
inspector general’s report found numerous screw-ups. About 21
percent of approved mail-cover requests were granted without
written authorization and the Inspection Service failed to review
the program annually for policy compliance. Plainly, heads need to
roll and the program needs reform.

For certain, the mail-tracking controversy underscores the
importance of independent inspectors general
and the Freedom
of Information Act. It was the USPS IG who
conducted the audit and
refused the Postal Service’s request to keep it hidden from the
public. FOIA helped the Times
pry loose additional information about the mail cover
program.

But at least three big questions remain unanswered.

The first concerns the growth of this program. Why did mail
cover approvals skyrocket from about
8,000 per year between 2002 and 2012 to 49,000 in 2013? Is the
Inspection Service, to venture a charitable hypothesis, simply
becoming more efficient at processing these requests? Are local
law-enforcement agencies catching on to this program, much as they
did with the
federally authorized asset seizure program? Or are other
factors at play?

This leads to a second question worth a public response: how
many law-enforcement requests for mail covers were denied? Knowing
this number would clarify whether the Inspection Service is
rubber-stamping these requests. Which it may well be, seeing as it
authorized a
renegade sheriff and prosecutor to use mail tracking to
investigate a politician who dared criticize them. A
former FBI agent has said the mail cover program is “so easy to
use…you don’t have to go through a judge….You just fill out a
form.”

The
IG report on this program was first released in June, and

Politico immediately ran a story on it. The New
York Times covered the topic in
July, and further revealed that USPS is digitally recording the
information of every piece of mail, sent by everyone, creating a

vast data trove. This mass data collection goes way beyond the
mail-cover program approved by federal courts in the 1978 decision

U.S. v. Choates.

Months have passed, and not a single congressional hearing has
been held on the subject. Nor has any legislation been introduced
to rein in the practice. The president has done nothing. The First
Amendment protects an individual’s
freedom to communicate and associate with others. So why are
our elected officials not doing anything about the mail-cover
program?