Postal Service Audit Shows Extent of Mail Surveillance
In what experts say is the first acknowledgment of how the United States Postal Service’s mail surveillance program for national security investigations is used, the service’s internal watchdog found that inspectors failed to follow key safeguards in the gathering and handling of classified information.
The overall program, called mail covers, allows postal employees working on behalf of law enforcement agencies to record names, return addresses and other information from the outside of letters and packages before they are delivered to the home of a person suspected of criminal activity.
The information about national security mail covers, amid heated public debate over the proper limits on government surveillance, was contained in an audit conducted by the Postal Service’s inspector general last year. Although much of the information was public, sections about the national security mail covers were heavily redacted. An unredacted copy of the report was provided to a security researcher in response to a Freedom of Information Act request this year. The researcher, who goes by a single legal name, Sai, shared the report with The New York Times.
In a June 8 letter to Sai, the Postal Inspection Service — the Postal Service’s law enforcement arm — said it could not “confirm or deny the existence” of the national security mail cover program, even though it was mentioned in the audit.
“The Postal Service does not provide public comment on matters which could potentially involve national security interests,” Paul J. Krenn, a spokesman, said in an email. The Postal Inspection Service did tell the auditors that it had begun training its employees on handling classified materials.
Experts said the unredacted report was the first to provide public details, although minimal, about the national security mail covers. The number of requests appeared small, about 1,000 from 2011 to 2013, and the report did not say which federal agencies made them.
It did disclose that the F.B.I., the Internal Revenue Service, the Drug Enforcement Administration and the Department of Homeland Security were the largest overall users of mail covers. Those agencies declined to provide The Times with data on their use of mail covers in response to a Freedom of Information Act request filed last year.
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According to the audit, about 10 percent of requests did not include the dates for the period covered by surveillance. Without the dates in the files, auditors were unable to determine if the Postal Service had followed procedures for allowing law enforcement agencies to monitor mail for a specific period of time.
Additionally, 15 percent of the inspectors who handled the mail covers did not have the proper nondisclosure agreements on file for handling classified materials, records that must be maintained for 50 years. The agreements would prohibit the postal workers from discussing classified information.
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