US government scanning, storing billions of pieces of mail per year
The US government is monitoring and permanently storing information on regular mail, in a vast and previously secret program known as the Mail Isolation Control and Tracking (MICT) program. According to an article in the New York Times on Thursday, images captured from over 160 billion pieces of mail per year are fed into a massive database, from which the government can construct in depth profiles of individuals, tracking their personal and political connections. ■ The MICT program parallels the National Security Agency spy programs revealed by whistleblower Edward Snowden. While these programs store phone records and collect email and other Internet activity, the MICT gathers this information on all mail senders, without any individualized suspicion of criminal activity. While a warrant is technically necessary to inspect the actual contents of the mail, in 2007 President George Bush authorized law enforcement to open mail without a warrant in exceptional cases. ■ In previous decades, under the “mail cover surveillance” program, the Postal Service granted law enforcement agencies access to mail items for 30 days based on individual requests relating to suspected criminal activity. Since 2001, this program has evolved into the MICT, which collects information indiscriminately on every piece of mail. ■ “In the past, mail covers were used when you had a reason to suspect someone of a crime,” Mark Rasch, who has worked on computer crimes for the Justice Department, told the Times. “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”