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CV NEWS FEED // According to The Washington Post, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), the Internal Revenue Service (IRS), the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), and other agencies had access to information from the mail of tens of thousands of private citizens.
The Post’s Drew Harwell reported Monday that the “U.S. Postal Service (USPS) has shared information from thousands of Americans’ letters and packages with law enforcement every year for the past decade.”
Harwell noted that in doing so, the USPS has been “conveying the names, addresses and other details from the outside of boxes and envelopes without requiring a court order.”
A “decade’s worth of records … in response to a congressional probe, show Postal Service officials have received more than 60,000 requests from federal agents and police officers since 2015,” Harwell added. Per these records, USPS officials “rarely say no” to the requests.
“[Ninety-seven] percent of the requests were approved, according to the data,” Harwell indicated.
Harwell wrote that in a 2015 audit, the U.S. Postal Inspection Service
said it had approved more than 158,000 requests from postal inspectors and law enforcement officials over the previous four years. The IRS, FBI and the Department of Homeland Security were among the top requesters.
In response to the Post’s report, The American Action Fund wrote on X (formerly Twitter): “The fact that government agents can spy on your mail without a warrant, without you ever knowing, is a slap in the face of the 4th Amendment.”
The American Action Fund is a project of Young Americans for Liberty, a group that advocates for limited government and Constitutional rights.
Readers can find The Washington Post’s full report here.
