Must Read: Meet Leslie James Pickering: U.S. Government target

[cali]

U.S. Postal Service Logging All Mail for Law Enforcement

Leslie 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 with his wife 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.

<snip>

Mr. Pickering was targeted by a longtime surveillance system called mail covers, 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.

<snip>

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/04/us/monitoring-of-snail-mail.html?pagewanted=all

Yep, those of us opposed to mass surveillance of American citizens are just "outrage junkies". We're in it to smear President Obama.
You know the rest.

If you're OK with this, there's something wrong.

[Nuclear Unicorn]

1. Any government

so incompetent as to mail the monitoring instructions to the target himself is a government too incompetent to be trusted with the results of any monitoring.

[galileoreloaded]

3. no shit. time to break out our unitards and helmets. herp derp.

[Pholus]

2. Good post. I imagine the records are stored electronically and even added

to other databases...

[cali]

4. from the same article

The program has led to sporadic reports of abuse. In May 2012, Mary Rose Wilcox, a Maricopa County supervisor in Arizona, was awarded nearly $1 million by a federal judge after winning a lawsuit against Sheriff Joe Arpaio. The sheriff, known for his immigration raids, had obtained mail covers from the Postal Service to track her mail. The judge called the investigation into Ms. Wilcox politically motivated because she had been a frequent critic of Mr. Arpaio’s, objecting to what she considered the targeting of Hispanics in his immigration sweeps. The case is being appealed.

gee, wonder why the program has only led to sporadic reports of abuse.

[tularetom]

5. Mr Pickering is a racist who suffers from Obama derangement syndrome

And if he's not doing anything wrong he has nothing to worry about.

And the stock market is way up and then there's health care reform and...

Oh yeah, and Bush was worse.

Did I miss anything?