Not content to funnel all of our voice and electronic communications through a secret warrantless surveillance program, in utter violation of the 4th Amendment, the government also makes notes on and opens citizens’ snail mail! It’s yet another warrantless surveillance program, which you pay for, and which is used against….YOU! Without you even needing to know about it! In fact, it’s really important that you don’t know about it, because then you might censor yourself and that would ruin all the fun for these government voyeurs.
The US postal service approves more than 10,000 requests from US law enforcement each year to record names, addresses and other information from the outside of packages, according to information released through a Freedom of Information Act request.
The warrantless surveillance mail program — as it is known — requires only the approval of the US Postal Inspection Service Director, and not a judge.
I’m sure that’s very helpful in the ‘War on Terror’. The inspector has approved almost 100% of such requests since 2004. No word on who he is or why he considers an occasional request beyond the pale.
“The idea of the government tracking that amount of mail is quite alarming,” Director of the American Civil Liberties Union’s national security project Jameel Jaffer told the paper. “When you realize that (the figure) does not include national security matters, the numbers are even more alarming.”
Officials would not disclose how much mail was monitored in national security or “terror”-related investigations. Under the PATRIOT ACT, those who received letters notifying them that they were being investigated often were gagged from even reporting their being targeted.
Responding to a USA Today request for the national security-related data, “inspection service counsel Anthony Alverno wrote that even revealing the frequency of the surveillance would undermine its effectiveness “to the detriment of the government’s national security interests.”
In true authoritarian style, any information about the ‘frequency of the illegal surveillance would undermine its effectiveness’. So it appears that they want people to live and behave under the impression that they have a functioning US Constitution behind them, but in fact, our government uses our own imaginary ‘freedoms’ to entrap us in their unconstitutional surveillance.
Sometimes people who have had amputations report that they can feel phantom pains from their missing limbs. I think this is like that. We continue to behave as if we have these rights to privacy and to freedom of speech. We think we can feel them and use them. But the rights have been amputated. Unfortunately, Americans are too jacked up on consumerism and junk tv to understand what’s going on. Meanwhile, the government has analyzed what we’ve said, written, purchased, read, joined, supported, etc. to categorize individuals as dangerous or not.
Dangerous to them. Not to our fellow citizens, but to the current regime. Not dangerous through violence, but merely through resistance.
At the appointed hour, they will round up all these ‘dangerous’ people and tell the rest to obey. And that should be pretty easy because the very people they round up will be the ones paying close attention. Once they remove anyone with the capacity to lead a resistance to government tyranny, the people left will be easier to control. And at that point the free flow of information will have ceased, so anyone who was planning on getting up to speed later will be shit out of luck. There won’t be anyone to ask.
The time to pay attention is now.
There’s reason to believe more mail may be being opened, as well.
In late 2006, a signing statement issued by President Bush suggested that his office had expanded executive branch power to open mail without a warrant.
The signing statement accompanied H.R. 6407, the Postal Accountability and Enhancement Act of 2006, which reiterated a prohibition on opening first class mail without a warrant.
“In 1996, the postal regulations were altered to permit the opening of First Class mail without a warrant in narrowly defined cases where the Postal Inspector believes there is a credible threat that the package contains dangerous material like bombs,” the ACLU said in a press release at the time. “Instead of referencing the narrow exception in the postal regulations, the president’s signing statement suggests that he is assuming broader authority to open mail without a warrant.”
In January 2007, the ACLU and Center for National Security Studies filed a Freedom of Information Act request seeking information regarding any additional warrantless mail surveillance.
The goal is always the same: to destroy our civil liberties so that martial law can be implemented at will and at a time of their choosing, probably sometime this year, as a result of a false flag incident. Believe me, I hope I’m wrong. But anyone who refuses to see the writing on the wall is a fool, in my humble opinion.
