SNAIL MAIL ALSO BEING MONITORED

Leslie James Pickering, a former member of a radical environmental group labeled eco-terrorists by the Federal Bureau of Investigation and called the Earth Liberation Front, told the New York Times that he found a misplaced card in his mailbox last September which indicated that the United States Postal Service was monitoring his mail.  As it turns out, there are two major programs for monitoring your mail.  The original, called Mail Covers and its successor, the Mail Isolation Control and Tracking program, photograph the front of every piece of mail that moves in the U.S. and keeps digital track of who sent it and where it was sent to.  That amounted to somewhere near 160 billion pieces of mail last year.  

Who eventually gets this information, or who has access to it and how long it is maintained and where.... are questions that the government is so far refusing to answer.  So much for the Fourth Amendment?