http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/04/us/monitoring-of-snail-mail.html?hpLeslie James Pickering noticed something odd in his mail last September: A handwritten card, apparently delivered by mistake, with instructions for postal workers to pay special attention to the letters and packages sent to his home.
“Show all mail to supv” — supervisor — “for copying prior to going out on the street,” read the card. It included Mr. Pickering’s name, address and the type of mail that needed to be monitored. The word “confidential” was highlighted in green.
“It was a bit of a shock to see it,” said Mr. Pickering, who owns a small bookstore in Buffalo. More than a decade ago, he was a spokesman for the Earth Liberation Front, a radical environmental group labeled eco-terrorists by the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Postal officials subsequently confirmed they were indeed tracking Mr. Pickering’s mail but told him nothing else.
As the world focuses on the high-tech spying of the National Security Agency, the misplaced card offers a rare glimpse inside the seemingly low-tech but prevalent snooping of the United States Postal Service.
Mr. Pickering was targeted by a longtime surveillance system called mail covers, but that is only a forerunner of a vastly more expansive effort, the Mail Isolation Control and Tracking program, in which Postal Service computers photograph the exterior of every piece of paper mail that is processed in the United States — about 160 billion pieces last year. It is not known how long the government saves the images.
Haisee niin Stasille että.... :maija::lanssi:
http://activist-post-forum.947009.n3.nabble.com/How-the-Government-Uses-Citizenship-as-a-Weapon-Against-You-tp4026369.html;cid=1372756570142-64"The Obama administration has now adopted the strategy of using citizenship as a weapon," writes whistleblowing hero Edward Snowden, surprising no one who has been paying enough attention in the past few years.
We've been saying this for years now ourselves. The time is coming when the gentle prodding of the USSA imperial police state will become a naked mugging with overt threats of violence and kidnapping.
http://rinf.com/alt-news/breaking-news/cia-whistleblower-to-snowden-do-not-cooperate-with-the-fbi/47533/CIA whistleblower to Snowden: ‘Do not cooperate with the FBI’
http://www.washingtonsblog.com/2013/07/top-experts-have-warned-for-50-years-that-mass-surveillance-would-lead-to-tyranny-in-america.htmlJimmy Carter’s National Security Adviser – a key American foreign policy architect (Zbigniew Brzezinski) – wrote in 1970:
The [future] era involves the gradual appearance of a more controlled society. Such a society would be dominated by an elite, unrestrained by traditional values. Soon it will be possible to assert almost continuous surveillance over every citizen and maintain up-to-date complete files containing even the most personal information about the citizen. These files will be subject to instantaneous retrieval by the authorities.
http://rt.com/news/france-us-delay-trade-603/France wants to delay the ‘biggest bilateral trade deal in history' by 2 weeks after learning the USA was allegedly tracking economic communications of EU member states.
"It would seem wise to us to suspend them for a couple of weeks to avoid any controversy and have the time to obtain the information we've asked for," French government spokeswoman Najat Vallaud-Belkacem said Wednesday.
The trade agreement negotiations, which could potentially be a key factor in reversing the slow economic climate, are set to commence Monday in Washington DC.