The postal-spying screw-up reminds us that our Big Brother often seems to be Uncle Sammy's loopy brother Goofus

Confidential to budding spies: In general it's better not to share your "confidential" plot machinations with your investigation target.

by Ken

You've probably heard about this, from the NYT:

U.S. Postal Service Logging All Mail for Law Enforcement

By RON NIXON
Published: July 3, 2013

WASHINGTON -- 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 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, but that is only 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 snail mail is subject to the same kind of scrutiny that the National Security Agency has given to telephone calls and e-mail. . . .

One reason I haven't been able to get quite as frenzied as some people concerning the details we've learned about the NSA'a massive surveillance program is my lack of confidence in our security people's ability to make much dangerous use of that massive pile of data.

As I understand it, our intelligence problem hasn't been so much a lack of data as an insufficient ability to process the data and make meaningful connections among and use of it. Partly this is because the sheer quantity of data is overwhelms the ability of analysts to know where to begin looking, and partly it's because the intelligence is split among so many agencies that have little will or capacity to share what they know.

Remember how we learned after 9/11 that potentially important pieces of intelligence simply never were properly appreciated or properly connected. Forgive my skepticism that simply piling massive new worlds of data to the stockpile will seriously change this situation, even if you factor in the gazillions of dollars thrown into the creation of our Brave New National Security World in the wake of 9/11.

You can find out lots more information about both the mail-covers program and the automatic mail tracking program in the Times piece, along with the expected concerns voiced about the invasions of privacy involved as well as already-reported claims of abuse (and naturally claims of intelligence coups). For the record, according to the Times article, "Postal officials refused to discuss either mail covers or the Mail Isolation Control and Tracking program." Less clear is whether or how money being poured into these programs relates to the USPS's financial crisis.

Now at the risk of belaboring the obvious, one problem with the investigation of Leslie James Pickering is that it appears to have been carried out by Keystone Postal Cops. But there's another problem: the targeting of Mr. Pickering in the first place. Back to the article:

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.

With regard to the larger NSA surveillance program, what's often forgotten as comedians take their obvious shots about the government reading our mail is that in that program this is not what's happening. The so-called analysts are using "metadata" -- compendia of data about calls that, when put together, presumably reveal, well, something or other. You get the feeling that the hope here is that the computers crunching all these jillions of info bytes will know, unlike the analysts who failed to connect the dots in the pre-9/11 intelligence, where to start looking for useful patterns. But somebody still has to create those algorithms or whatever sorting techniques are being used. Somebody still has to write programs to clue the computer in to what should be regarded as "suspicious."

Which brings us back to the targeting of Mr. Pickering. Maybe if the postal Sherlock Holmeses hadn't botched their investigation, they would have turned up information that showed the monitoring of his mail was a brilliant intelligence-gathering idea. In the absence of such information, however, it looks to me awfully like the FBI is stuck back in the era of J. Edgar Hoover: seeing in the espousal of nonconforming ideas the key to unraveling the insidious conspiracies of godless Communism, or whatever has taken the place of godless Communism in the paranoid imagination.

Buffalo bookstore owner Leslie James Pickering says, "I'm no terrorist. I'm an activist."

Which brings me back to the utterly credible fear that Aryeh Neier voiced recently with regard to the NSA revelations:

Any government agency that is able to gather information through political surveillance will be tempted to use that information. After a time, the passive accumulation of data may seem insufficient and it may be used aggressively. This may take place long after the information is initially collected and may involve officials who had nothing to do with the original decision to engage in surveillance.

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