Postal Service is the new NSA

[sjfcontrol]

And you thought you only had to worry about the NSA. Now its the Postal Service...

http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2013/08 ... latestnews" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

[GlockDude26]

"The Mail Isolation and Tracking program was cited by the FBI on June 7 in an affidavit that was part of the investigation into who was behind threatening, ricin-tainted letters sent to Obama and Bloomberg."

1. Horse flop, they've been reading mail for years not just for "an investigation"
2. Honestly I'm surprised that no one has suceeded

[LabRat]

I have no love for the USPS.

I'm sure there are some good folks working there, but they don't work for the USPS in my area. I think the Postal Service should be chopped up and sold off as scrap.
There are better companies to do the job and would put folks to work rather than on the union bandwagon.

What I wonder is this:
If Law Enforcement wanted pictures of the mail for an investigation, wonder how long it would take the USPS to get them delivered? They can't get mail across my town in under 4 days...that's from within the same zip code.

LabRat

[VMI77]

This has been going on just about forever. The government spying is just more blatant and pervasive now. The post office used to do the same thing by hand. Western Union and other telegraph companies made extra copies of all telegrams to turn over to the government. http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline ... n/nsa.html They started after WW1 and it continued until telegrams were largely irrelevant.

The way it worked was that the NSA would set up a small little phony television tape-processing company in New York City, and one agent from the NSA would go to each of the companies after midnight and knock on a back door, and the companies would pass to them -- at first they were the hard telegrams. After computers came around they'd pass them the computer-tape journals of all the telegrams. They'd pass it to them through the back door, and he would take it to this phony television tape-processing company, put it through high-speed duplication machines and duplicate all these tape journals of all these telegrams, and then get the original data back to the companies through the back door before the shift went off in the morning.

Then they would take the duplicates and they would transfer them to NSA. They were always afraid of a plane crash, so they would put them with couriers on a train, and then they would take them to NSA headquarters at Fort Meade, [Md.]. Then that day they would take the tapes containing all these telegrams, and they'd run them through these very fast computers. At the time it was known as the harvest computer, and that's exactly what they would do. They would harvest whatever information they were looking for, whether it was an American name or a phrase or a word or an address or whatever they were looking for. ...

It was called Operation Shamrock, and again, it went on from 1945 until it was discovered by Sen. [Frank] Church's investigating committee [the Senate Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities] in 1975. That's why we have the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act [FISA], to prevent this from happening again.

It wasn't just telegrams; it was also telephone calls. There was another operation known as Operation Minaret where they did similar activity with telephone communications within the United States.

We haven't had a lawful government since....I don't know....Andrew Jackson maybe?

[JSThane]

We haven't had a lawful government since....I don't know....Andrew Jackson maybe?

That's only because the government was afraid Old Hickory'd beat 'em to death, or challenge them in a duel. Oh, wait, he did do that.

Zombie Andrew Jackson for Congress?