Sorry Jimmy Carter, the Government Monitors Snail Mail Too

Former President Jimmy Carter said on Sunday that he uses "snail mail" to dodge the NSA. "As a matter of fact, you know, I have felt that my own communications are probably monitored," Carter told NBC's Meet the Press. "And when I want to communicate with a foreign leader privately, I type or write a letter myself, put it in the post office, and mail it."

But it turns out, the United States Postal Service isn't as secure as the 39th US president might believe. Law enforcement is tracking Americans' analog communications, too.

Perhaps Carter failed to read up on the Mail Isolation Control and Tracking program (MICT) before singing the praises of snail mail. Here's a little history: After 9/11, a brief flurry of letters containing Anthrax took the lives of five people, including two postal workers. To better track any such "terrorist" mail in the future, law enforcement asked USPS to give them access to MICT. The program's existence surfaced in June 2013, after the FBI admitted to using it in the tracking of letters containing ricin that were sent to Michael Bloomberg and President Obama.

In response, United States Postmaster General Patrick Donahoe told the Associated Press last August that MICT is used to better sort mail, ensure delivery, and otherwise maintain postal efficiency. As Donahoe noted, images are kept anywhere from a week to 30 days, and are made available upon request to law enforcement.

Moreover, MICT isn't the only method of tracking mail. In July 2013, the New York Times published an article on Leslie James Pickering, a former spokesman for the Earth Liberation Front member who was being tracked via "mail covers," the predecessor to MICT.

Pickering discovered he was being tracked when USPS accidentally sent him a handwritten card instructing postal workers to keep an eye on any mail or packages sent to his home. His former association with ELF—often described as "eco-terrorists"—was clearly enough to trigger a red flag at the post office.

In a PDF document available on Cryptome, the United States Postal Inspection Service lays out the criteria under which mail covers can be submitted and approved:

• To protect national security against foreign powers and their agents
• To locate a fugitive 
• To acquire evidence of a federal crime 
• To assist in the identification of "property, proceeds or assets forfeitable because of a violation of criminal law."

Though USPS confirmed that they were tracking Pickering's mail, they did not explain why.

Taken together, the Post Office's MICT and mail cover activities amount to a non-electronic form of government surveillance. Speaking to the Times, Security expert Bruce Schneier characterized MICT as the snail mail equivalent of the NSA's bulk metadata collection.

“Basically they are doing the same thing as the other programs, collecting the information on the outside of your mail, the metadata, if you will, of names, addresses, return addresses and postmark locations," said Schneier, adding that the government gets a "pretty good map of your contacts, even if they aren’t reading the contents."

Now, President Carter is correct in assuming that the USPS isn't opening up letters. This requires a search warrant. But, as with the electronic metadata question, the contact information that USPS can glean from letters is similar to metadata. It allows law enforcement to use that information to generate a remarkably detailed map of personal connections.

Perhaps to quell any public ire in the immediate wake of Edward Snowden's NSA leaks, Donahoe said that there is no central database for MICT information, and that storing it would cost a lot of money. But considering the government is convinced that communications surveillance is critical in the fight against terrorism (or so they continue to say), it's reasonable to think the desire to keep tabs on Americans' communications would extend beyond email, texts, phone calls, and other forms of electronic messaging.

Think on that the next time you send a letter.