WASHINGTON — 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.
The redacted audit
was posted in May 2014 on the website of the Postal Service’s Office of
Inspector General, even though Postal Service managers said the report
should be exempt from public disclosure because it could compromise
investigations. The inspector general disagreed.
Kevin
R. Kosar, a former analyst at the Congressional Research Service who
worked on postal issues, said he found it surprising that the Office of
Inspector General redacted the information about the national security
mail covers in the first place.
“I think it’s
symptomatic of our overclassification of information in the
government,” he said. “There is nothing here that compromises any law
enforcement activities. In fact, there is very little information.”
Privacy
advocates said the findings about the national security mail covers
were hardly surprising given that the public report last year found that
the Postal Inspection Service had failed to provide adequate oversight.
In
addition to raising privacy concerns, the audit questioned the Postal
Service’s efficiency and accuracy in handling mail cover requests. Many
requests were processed late, the audit said, which delayed
surveillance, and computer errors caused the same tracking number to be
assigned to different requests.
“I think they
should have to get warrants to get this information,” said Frank Askin,
a law professor at the Rutgers Constitutional Rights Clinic who, as a
lawyer for the American Civil Liberties Union, successfully sued the
F.B.I. nearly 40 years ago after the agency monitored the mail of a
15-year-old New Jersey student. “Law enforcement agencies shouldn’t just
be able to go to the Postal Service and ask them to track someone’s
communications. It raises serious First Amendment issues.”
The
inspector general also found that the Postal Inspection Service did not
have “sufficient controls” in place to ensure that its employees
followed the agency’s policies in handling the national security mail
covers.
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.
And the inspector general found
that in about 32 percent of cases, postal inspectors did not include, as
required, the date on which they visited facilities where mail covers
were being processed. In another 32 percent of cases, law enforcement
agencies did not return documents to the Postal Inspection Service’s
Office of Counsel, which handles the national security mail covers,
within the prescribed 60 days after a case was closed.
The
mail covers program is more than a century old, but law enforcement
officials consider it a powerful investigative tool. They say that the
program’s deceptively old-fashioned method of collecting data provides a
wealth of information about the businesses and associates of its
targets, and that it can lead to bank and property records and even to
accomplices. Opening mail requires a warrant.
The Times reported last year
that there had been abuses of the mail cover surveillance program.
Interviews and court records showed that the program had been used by a
county attorney and sheriff in Arizona to investigate a political
opponent and to monitor privileged communications between lawyers and
their clients, a practice not allowed under postal regulations. The
county attorney was later disbarred, in part because of the
investigation.
“Insufficient controls 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,” the audit concluded.
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