Senator Cynthia Lummis (R-WY), as well as other senators including Ron Wyden, Rand Paul, Edward Markey, Elizabeth Warren, Mike Lee, Cory Booker, and Steve Daines have sent a bi-partisan letter to the United States Postal Services and they want answers. At stake is your privacy contained in letters, shipments and other parcels that travel through the mail system each and every day.
Last week, Senator Lummis tweeted, “We cannot allow the federal government to be weaponized to violate the privacy of the people of Wyoming.”
The letter calls for “stronger protections for the privacy of Americans’ letters and packages,” according to a press release.
So how is the USPS possibly snooping through your correspondence? Even though a private citizen may not have their mail examined without a warrant under the law, there could be a way that the Senators are worried may be exploited by the postal service. The loophole, although not explicitly defined, could happen when those who send and receive packages are tracked in a process called “mail covers.”
What these covers do is allow the government to see the types of letters and correspondence private citizens are receiving.
The press release states, “While mail covers do not reveal the contents of correspondence, they can reveal deeply personal information about Americans’ political leanings, religious beliefs or causes they support.”
What the Senators are worried about is that this method of surveillance is a violation of the First Amendment of the Constitution. The First Amendment guarantees the right to freedom of speech as well as the establishment of religion. Senator Lummis and her colleagues are also claiming that the government doesn’t have the right to watch or monitor these activities, but it’s not necessarily clear what law actually defends that assumption.
“We cannot allow the federal government to be weaponized to violate the privacy of the people of Wyoming,” Lummis clearly says in a statement. “Government surveillance needs to be conducted within the guidelines of the Constitution and fully transparent to the public. Federal agencies do not have the authority to grant themselves loopholes to trample on the freedom of the people of Wyoming.”
An audit by the Office of the Inspector General has revealed that government agencies sought information on more than 100,000 mail records from 2010-2014, according to the press release.
Senator Lummis and the other politicians are demanding the USPIS reform its regulations and better protect Americans’ privacy from the mail covers. Lummis added government agencies should only conduct mail covers with a federal warrant, which is the current policy for inspecting contents of mail.
The U.S. Postal System and the United States Postal Inspection Service was founded by Benjamin Franklin back in 1775, under the Second Continental Congress, on August 7th. That is the established birth date of the United States Postal Inspection Service. The USPIS or United States Postal Inspection Service, “enforces over 200 federal statutes related to crimes that involve the postal system, its employees, and its customers,” its website states. “[Their] Postal Inspectors are federal law enforcement officers who carry firearms, make arrests, execute federal search warrants, and serve subpoenas. Over 1200 Inspectors enforce roughly 200 federal laws covering crimes that include fraudulent use of the U.S. Mail® and the postal system.”
Senator Lummis took to Twitter to express her concern. “If the government wants to look at your mail, they need to get a warrant.”
The federal inspection of mail has a long history of documented abuses committed through postal surveillance. In 1976, it was discovered that the CIA had documented 2 million pieces of mail and opened hundreds of thousands of letters from prominent activists and authors all without a warrant.
The Senators are requesting statistics on how much sealed mail is opened and inspected by USPIS and the United States Postal Service on an annual basis.
