The Big Brother Thread

[Firn]

I know many Americans have a strange regard, if not dislike for their postal service and it's inefficiencies - so they may think this odd:

Link:http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/04/us...pagewanted=all

That must be some computer database, even if only retaining the photos for thirty days.

So when the US spooks want 'everything' they really want every metadata at least from US citiziens. More, if possible from the rest of the world.

“In the past, mail covers were used when you had a reason to suspect someone of a crime,” said Mark D. Rasch, the former director of the Justice Department’s computer crime unit, who worked on several fraud cases using mail covers. “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.”

Bruce Schneier, a computer security expert and an author, said whether it was a postal worker taking down information or a computer taking images, the program was still an invasion of privacy.

“Basically they are doing the same thing as the other programs, collecting the information on the outside of your mail, the metadata, if you will, of names, addresses, return addresses and postmark locations, which gives the government a pretty good map of your contacts, even if they aren’t reading the contents,” he said.

In this case it seems as if the methods of the digital age have been brought into the old analog world. Legally the path has been the reverse. Whatever floats the boats and is possible seems to get done with the legal bounderies getting streched and streched or even completely removed...

Law enforcement officials need warrants to open the mail, although President George W. Bush asserted in a signing statement in 2007 that the federal government had the authority to open mail without warrants in emergencies or foreign intelligence cases.

In such days it certainly feels like that the terrorists did indeed score some important victories against key and noble ideas of the Western World. And once again it seems that the scale of the tracking efforts opens the door for highly questionable abuses which pushes the whole thing into the spotlight and alerts also the valid targets. Imperial intelligence overstrech.