JOHN KIRIAKOU: US Postal Service’s Attack on Privacy

June 28, 2024

Somehow, a quasi-government agency that spies on individuals with no probable cause or due process, in a haphazard manner that offers no recourse for the people being targeted, doesn’t seem constitutional.

United States Postal Service headquarters in Washington, D.C. (Coolcaesar, CC BY-SA 3.0, Wikimedia Commons)

By John Kiriakou
Special to Consortium News

I’ve written in the past about the U.S. Postal Service’s so-called Mail Cover Program.   It allows postal employees to photograph and send to federal law enforcement organizations (F.B.I., Department of Homeland Security, Secret Service, etc.) the front and back of every piece of mail the Post Office processes. 

It also retains the information digitally and provides it to any government agency that wants it — without a warrant.  I’m not an attorney, of course.  But I’m also not an idiot.  And that policy strikes me as a violation of Americans’ civil liberties.

The Mail Cover Program has been known publicly for quite some time.  In 2015, the USPS inspector general issued a report justifying its existence and reasoning that, 

“Agencies must demonstrate a reasonable basis for requesting mail covers, send hard copies of request forms to the Criminal Investigative Service Center for processing, and treat mail covers as restricted and confidential…A mail cover should not be used as a routine investigative tool. Insufficient controls over the mail cover program could hinder the Postal Inspection Service’s ability to conduct effective investigations, lead to public concerns over privacy of mail, and harm the Postal Service’s brand.”

Not only were the admonitions ignored, the Mail Cover Program actually expanded after the report’s release. Indeed, in the months after that report was issued, there were 6,000 requests for mail cover collection. Only 10 were rejected, according to the February 2019 edition of Prison Legal News (P.34-35).

(Pixabay, CC0 1.0, Public domain)

Well, there have been some recent developments.  In a May 2023 letter to the director of the Postal Service, a bipartisan group of senators urged the USPS to require a federal judge to approve requests to spy on people’s mail, rather than to just approve or deny the request internally.  (Almost none of the 158,000 requests between 2011 and 2015 or the 312,000 requests since then have been denied.)  

The senators also urged the agency to “share more details on the program,” saying that officials there had chosen to “provide this surveillance service and to keep postal customers in the dark about the fact that they have been subjected to monitoring.”

In response, Chief Postal Inspector Gary Barksdale told the senators to go fly a kite.  He argued in his response that the program “was not a large-scale surveillance apparatus” and was focused only on mail that could help police and national security agencies “carry out their missions and protect the American public.”

Personal Experience 

Let’s talk about that.  I have some personal experience with the Mail Cover Program. I served 23 months in prison for blowing the whistle on the C.I.A.’s illegal torture program. After having been locked up for two months, I decided to commission a card from a very artistically-inclined prisoner for my wife’s 40th birthday. I sent it about two weeks early, but she never received it. Finally, about four months later, the card was delivered back to me with a yellow “Return to Sender – Address Not Known” sticker on it. But underneath that sticker was a second yellow sticker. That one read, “Do Not Deliver. Hold For Supervisor. Cover Program.”

Why was I under Postal Service Surveillance? I have no idea. I had had my day in court. The case was over. But remember, the Postal Service doesn’t have to answer to anybody — my attorneys, my judge, any judge, sitting U.S. senators, even its own inspector general. It doesn’t need a warrant to spy on me (or my family) and it doesn’t have to answer to the media or to a U.S. senator interested in civil liberties and wondering why the spying was happening in the first place.

The problem is not just the sinister nature of a government agency (or quasi-government agency) spying on individuals with no probable cause or due process, although those are serious problems. It’s that the program is handled so poorly and so haphazardly that in some cases surveillance was initiated against individuals for no apparent law-enforcement reason and that surveillance was initiated by Postal Service employees not even authorized to do so. Again, there is no recourse because the people under surveillance don’t even know that any of this is happening.

Perhaps an even more disturbing aspect of the program is the fact that between 2000 and 2012, the Postal Service initiated an average of 8,000 mail cover requests per year. But in 2013, that number jumped to 49,000. 

Why? Nobody knows and the Postal Service doesn’t have to say.  The Postal Service hates that these numbers are public.  Indeed, according to the The Washington Post, postal inspectors said that releasing these details “would decrease the program’s effectiveness by alerting criminals to how the technique works.”

The question, though, is not how many cases are opened under the Mail Cover Program or even how many requests there are for the information. The real question is, “How is this constitutional?” Perhaps a secondary question is, “Why hasn’t anybody challenged the program in the courts?” In general, Americans don’t — or at least haven’t — objected to a gradual loss of civil liberties and constitutional rights. That has to stop. When even the Post Office is spying on you, you know the country is in trouble.

John Kiriakou is a former C.I.A. counterterrorism officer and a former senior investigator with the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. John became the sixth whistleblower indicted by the Obama administration under the Espionage Act—a law designed to punish spies. He served 23 months in prison as a result of his attempts to oppose the Bush administration’s torture program.

The views expressed are solely those of the author and may or may not reflect those of Consortium News.

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