Government Agencies Are Secretly Going Through Your Snail Mail, Too

Apparently the National Security Agency is not the only government organization violating Americans’ privacy rights by collecting massive amounts of data. It turns out law enforcement agencies and the U.S. Postal Service are also looking through our mail. So much for the “sweet land of liberty.”

The New York Times:

In a rare public accounting of its mass surveillance program, the United States Postal Service reported that it approved nearly 50,000 requests last year from law enforcement agencies and its own internal inspection unit to secretly monitor the mail of Americans for use in criminal and national security investigations.

The number of requests, contained in a 2014 audit of the surveillance program by the Postal Service’s inspector general, shows that the surveillance program is more extensive than previously disclosed and that oversight protecting Americans from potential abuses is lax.

The audit, along with interviews and documents obtained by The New York Times under the Freedom of Information Act, offers one of the first detailed looks at the scope of the program, which has played an important role in the nation’s vast surveillance effort since the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

Read More.

—Posted by Natasha Hakimi Zapata