Leslie James
Pickering noticed something odd in his mail last September: a handwritten card,
apparently delivered by mistake, with instructions for postal workers to pay
special attention to the letters and packages sent to his home.
“Show all mail to
supv” — supervisor — “for copying prior to going out on the street,” read the
card. It included Mr. Pickering’s name, address and the type of mail that needed
to be monitored. The word “confidential” was highlighted in green.
“It was a bit of a
shock to see it,” said Mr. Pickering, who with his wife owns a small bookstore
in Buffalo. More than a decade ago, he was a spokesman for the Earth Liberation
Front, a radical environmental group labeled eco-terrorists by the Federal
Bureau of Investigation. Postal officials subsequently confirmed they were
indeed tracking Mr. Pickering’s mail but told him nothing else.
As the world focuses
on the high-tech spying of the National Security Agency, the misplaced card
offers a rare glimpse inside the seemingly low-tech but prevalent snooping of
the United States Postal Service.
Mr. Pickering was
targeted by a longtime surveillance system called mail covers, a forerunner of a
vastly more expansive effort, the Mail Isolation Control and Tracking program,
in which Postal Service computers photograph the exterior of every piece of
paper mail that is processed in the United States — about 160 billion pieces
last year. It is not known how long the government saves the images.
Together, the two
programs show that postal mail is subject to the same kind of scrutiny that the
National Security Agency has given to telephone calls and e-mail.
The mail covers
program, used to monitor Mr. Pickering, is more than a century old but is still
considered a powerful tool. At the request of law enforcement officials, postal
workers record information from the outside of letters and parcels before they
are delivered. (Opening the mail would require a warrant.) The information is
sent to the law enforcement agency that asked for it. Tens of thousands of
pieces of mail each year undergo this scrutiny.
The Mail Isolation Control and
Tracking program was created after the anthrax attacks in late 2001 that killed
five people, including two postal workers. Highly secret, it seeped into public
view last month when the F.B.I. cited it in its investigation of ricin-laced letters sent
to President Obama and Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg. It enables the Postal Service
to retrace the path of mail at the request of law enforcement. No one disputes
that it is sweeping.
“In the past, mail
covers were used when you had a reason to suspect someone of a crime,” said Mark
D. Rasch, who started a computer crimes unit in the fraud section of the
criminal division of the Justice Department and worked on several fraud cases
using mail covers. “Now it seems to be, ‘Let’s record everyone’s mail so in the
future we might go back and see who you were communicating with.’ Essentially
you’ve added mail covers on millions of Americans.”
Bruce Schneier, a
computer security expert and an author, said whether it was a postal worker
taking down information or a computer taking images, the program was still an
invasion of privacy.
“Basically they are
doing the same thing as the other programs, collecting the information on the
outside of your mail, the metadata, if you will, of names, addresses, return
addresses and postmark locations, which gives the government a pretty good map
of your contacts, even if they aren’t reading the contents,” he said.
But law enforcement
officials said mail covers and the automatic mail tracking program are
invaluable, even in an era of smartphones and e-mail.
In
a criminal complaint filed June 7 in Federal District Court for the Eastern
District of Texas, the F.B.I. said a postal investigator tracing the ricin
letters was able to narrow the search to Shannon Richardson,
an actress in New Boston, Tex., by examining information from the front and back
images of 60 pieces of mail scanned immediately before and after the tainted
letters sent to Mr. Obama and Mr. Bloomberg showing return addresses near her
home. Ms. Richardson had originally accused her husband of mailing the letters,
but investigators determined that he was at work during the time they were
mailed.
In 2007, the F.B.I.,
the Internal Revenue Service and the local police in Charlotte, N.C., used
information gleaned from the mail cover program to arrest Sallie Wamsley-Saxon
and her husband, Donald, charging both with running a prostitution ring that
took in $3 million over six years. Prosecutors said it was one of the largest
and most successful such operations in the country. Investigators also used mail
covers to help track banking activity and other businesses the couple operated
under different names.
Other agencies, including the Drug
Enforcement Administration and the Department of Health and Human Services, have
used mail covers to track drug smugglers and Medicare fraud.
“It’s a treasure
trove of information,” said James J. Wedick, a former F.B.I. agent who spent 34
years at the agency and who said he used mail covers in a number of
investigations, including one that led to the prosecution of several elected
officials in California on corruption charges. “Looking at just the outside of
letters and other mail, I can see who you bank with, who you communicate with —
all kinds of useful information that gives investigators leads that they can
then follow up on with a subpoena.”
But, he said: “It can
be easily abused because it’s so easy to use and you don’t have to go through a
judge to get the information. You just fill out a form.”
For mail cover
requests, law enforcement agencies submit a letter to the Postal Service, which
can grant or deny a request without judicial review. Law enforcement officials
say the Postal Service rarely denies a request. In other government surveillance
programs, like wiretaps, a federal judge must sign off on the requests.
The mail cover
surveillance requests are granted for about 30 days, and can be extended for up
to 120 days. There are two kinds of mail covers: those related to criminal
activity and those requested to protect national security. Criminal activity
requests average 15,000 to 20,000 per year, said law enforcement officials, who
spoke on the condition of anonymity because they are prohibited by law from
discussing them. The number of requests for antiterrorism mail covers has not
been made public.
Law enforcement
officials need warrants to open the mail, although President George W. Bush
asserted in a signing statement in 2007 that the federal government had the
authority to open mail without warrants in emergencies or in foreign
intelligence cases.
Court challenges to
mail covers have generally failed because judges have ruled that there is no
reasonable expectation of privacy for information contained on the outside of a
letter. Officials in both the Bush and Obama administrations, in fact, have used
the mail-cover court rulings to justify the N.S.A.’s surveillance programs,
saying the electronic monitoring amounts to the same thing as a mail cover.
Congress briefly conducted hearings on mail cover programs in 1976, but has not
revisited the issue.
The
program has led to sporadic reports of abuse. In May 2012, Mary Rose Wilcox, a
Maricopa County supervisor in Arizona, was awarded nearly $1 million by a
federal judge after winning a lawsuit against Sheriff Joe Arpaio. The sheriff,
known for his immigration raids,
had obtained mail covers from the Postal Service to track her mail. The judge
called the investigation into Ms. Wilcox politically motivated because she had
been a frequent critic of Mr. Arpaio’s, objecting to what she considered the
targeting of Hispanics in his immigration sweeps. The case is being appealed.
In the mid-1970s the
Church Committee, a Senate panel that documented C.I.A. abuses, faulted a
program created in the 1950s in New York that used mail covers to trace and
sometimes open mail going to the Soviet Union from the United States.
A suit brought in
1973 by a high school student in New Jersey, whose letter to the Socialist
Workers Party was traced by the F.B.I. as part of an investigation into the
group, led to a rebuke from a federal judge.
Postal officials
refused to discuss either mail covers or the Mail Isolation Control and Tracking
program.
Mr. Pickering says he
suspects that the F.B.I. requested the mail cover to monitor his mail because a
former associate said the bureau had called with questions about him. Last
month, he filed a lawsuit against the Postal Service, the F.B.I. and other
agencies, saying they were improperly withholding information.
A spokeswoman for the
F.B.I. in Buffalo declined to comment.
Mr. Pickering said
that although he was arrested two dozen times for acts of civil disobedience and
convicted of a handful of misdemeanors, he was never involved in the arson
attacks the Earth Liberation Front carried out. He said he became tired of
focusing only on environmental activism and moved back to Buffalo to finish
college, open his bookstore, Burning Books, and start a family.
“I’m no terrorist,”
he said. “I’m an activist.”
Mr. Pickering has written books
sympathetic to the liberation front, but he said his political views and past
association should not make him the target of a federal investigation. “I’m just
a guy who runs a bookstore and has a wife and a kid,” he said.
