There’s a good Darknet Diaries podcast episode that interviews someone with hands on experience with this, and the efforts he went through to conceal his identity while shipping large volumes of illicit USPS packages: https://darknetdiaries.com/transcript/132/
Ultimately he was caught because he delegated the task to his cousin, who ignored his instructions and sent all the packages from the same post office.
They have been photographing every single package since anarchists were shipping bombs in the mail 100 years ago. Seems to be breaking news every few years.
I just did this and paired it with ChatGPT to send me a Discord message like "You received mail from Progressive."
Seems silly and lazy but it was a fun afternoon project
(boring aside: USPS seems to have bespoke anti-bot measures which uses WASM to sign requests, which means you have to use full browser automation to login. Of course, most people instead parse the daily emails they send you which is a totally reasonable approach as well.)
Yep, came here to say this. I don't use it often, but it's pretty handy from time to time (e.g. checking to see if an important package requiring a signature is coming that day, so I can be home or arrange for someone else to be there).
If the open-source community can read the carbon-based ink inside carbonized ancient scrolls, then there is likely no need to open normal mail to read what it says.
"These scrolls were scanned at Diamond Light Source, a particle accelerator near Oxford, England. The facility produces a parallel beam of X-rays at high flux, allowing for fast, accurate, and high-resolution imaging. The X-ray photos are turned into a 3D volume of voxels using tomographic reconstruction algorithms, resulting in a stack of slice images."
That article is really cool BTW, amazing stuff. Give it a read.
Not sure why Aaron’s comment is dead, but he’s right - at least about taking photos of your trash.
Our local council has shown pictures of people putting styrene packaging in their green waste bin, and there was a case a while ago where an elderly woman was murdered and put into a bin for collection - the truck has footage of the bin being emptied, so they could narrow down where in landfill she might be.
I think she recklessly pushed it to get rid of Ted with disregard for how much it hurt her husband. It was the right outcome but done by an evil bitch for selfish purposes that hurt her husband with no genuine regard for innocents. It wasn't some act of valor done to help people.
Your tone regarding a woman getting her husband to help turn in a terrorist definitely elicits a fuck her husband's feelings. If even one more person was murdered after the fact, the brother should have been charged as well. Seems like the only person doing the right thing was the wife.
I would rather live in a society with the odd domestic terrorist whacko than one where the government dystopically forces family members to turn one another in or else go to jail too.
I'm not against handling it but I could live with it a lot better if I handled the justice myself and dealt with the consequences of that afterward. I don't think I could ever offer a sibling, or spouse, to the kings men and feel right about it even if the 'ends' turn out right.
I would rather live in a society where a "selfish person" still has an obligation to do the right thing and turns in an insane homicidal maniac rather than one where John Doe decides he has no obligation to save people's lives because Bob the psychopath happens to be his brother.
Ted was a domestic terrorist mailing bombs across the country, how is it selfish to put that above "how much it hurt her husband"? What is a non-reckless way of pushing your husband to report an insane terrorist actively plotting to bomb more people?
The previous commenter’s claim was that she wasn’t putting that above it hurting her husband, rather that she simply acted out of her personal dislike for him. Also, why do you state “domestic terrorist” as if that automatically has a negative connotation? Further, why do you claim he was insane? Lastly, what evidence do you have that he planned to continue his bombing campaign when he informed the NYT that he would stop if they published his manifesto?
I’ve never heard this story before, but she could have reported him herself rather than persuading her husband to, as the GP claims she did. I do think it’s a little distasteful to press someone else into a moral decision you made but won’t carry out. That’d be especially true if anyone was hurt between the time she realized who it was and the time she got his brother to report him.
I don't sympathize with the violence, I sympathize with a brother being pushed into turning a family member over to be placed into supermax isolation which arguably violated the 8th amendment .
I might be able to stomach handing a brother over to the feds for execution or release to a regular high security prison but not for supermax isolation torture. That's the kind of guilt that lives with you forever, even if maybe he would face other guilt if he didn't help stop it.
They have been photographing every single letter for a while now.
And because of Moore's Law and cross-referencing databases now we can analysis it in depth.
This is networks of people they can watch. Like if your mum writes to your childhoods mate (who now you drug dealers) mum and tracking were you live and the same as any internet spying, working out if are you gay or a communist or a gay communist and cross-referencing handwriting.
They are also photographing your garbage. And can get your DNA from the sewers (although this might not have ever been used... publicly) License plate and phone tracking goes without saying.
There's no reason ShotSpotter (which can get some local voice audio) can't be matched to your podcast.
Meat world tracking is the new cool.... and it's nothing like 100 years ago.
Indeed [1] "Computer security and information privacy expert Bruce Schneier compared MICT to the mass surveillance of the National Security Agency (NSA), revealed in June 2013 by Edward Snowden. Schneier said, "Basically, [the USPS is] doing the same thing as the [NSA] 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."
The information was provided to the USPS, not law enforcement. That's why law enforcement needs to request the info via USPS. USPS is not snooping, but since law enforcement is not in the business of delivering the mail, that information has not been provided to them by the sender and is snooping. Same thing either digital metadata - parties exchange data, provider needs basic info to send, government captures info eventhough they aren't involved in the business of providing those services.
USPS' law enforcement division is absolutely doing active searches, and even investigations outside, above and beyond anything to do with mail. It's kind of wild.
I'm old enough to remember how companies all tripped over themselves trying to help the government spy on their customers after 9/11. I assume that every company that I do business with has an open pipeline to the government feeding in all the data it has about me.
My question was whether law enforcement typically requests the same data from private carriers that it does from USPS, not whether they open your mail.
> warrant before opening any sealed letter.
“There is no reasonable expectation of privacy with respect to information contained on the outside of mail matter,” Barksdale wrote.
My goodness, this is madness.
...
> In 1978, a circuit court judge said the mail covers could expose someone’s personal life “in a manner unobtainable even through surveillance of his movements,” rendering “the subject’s life an open book.”
Nothing has changed on the postal front in this regard.
If it's coming from Amazon, they don't need to bother with inspecting the package at all. They just need to subpoena Amazon and get the purchase records. The impact of mail scanning only applies to mail whose contents are not already revealed in electronic systems that the feds can more easily access.
I estimate mine is about 50% USPS, 25% UPS, and 25% Amazon's own delivery service. The proportion that's Amazon-delivered has been increasing noticeably over the past year or two.
Unless you suddenly stop and your behavioural pattern changes (to something alarming, like contacting known terrorists or spies, etc). I dont know how to feel about this sort of surveillance. On the one hand, the gov't shouldn't be able to know how you normally behave. That, to me is private information. It might be used against you.
But on the other hand, this level of surveillance can be used to catch unsaviory types. But i think i will still stick to the mantra of 'giving up freedom for security means you get neither'.
