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   Vol. 69/No. 22           June 6, 2005  
 
 
FBI steps up mail interception
 
BY BRIAN WILLIAMS  
The FBI is seeking broad new authority to expand its spying on mail sent through the U.S. Postal Service. A proposal under discussion by the Senate Intelligence Committee would compel postal inspectors to turn over the names, addresses, and all material appearing on the outside of letters and contents of postcards for any individuals the FBI targets for so-called terrorism investigations. The proposal would also prevent the post office from publicly disclosing the existence of these mail covers.

This proposal is part of a broader request for authority to issue “administrative subpoenas,” which would allow the FBI to seize private records from hospitals, doctors’ offices, libraries, banks, and other businesses without first getting approval from a judge.

The FBI has been conducting mail surveillance for decades for what it terms criminal and “national security” investigations. The new proposal, however, “removes discretion from the Postal Inspection Service as to how the mail covers are implemented,” Zoe Strickland, the chief privacy officer for the Postal Service, told the New York Times. The “discretion” of postal officials resulted in their conducting 14,000 mail covers in 2000, and not rejecting a single FBI request in recent years.

This issue was at the center of a lawsuit filed in 1973 by the Socialist Workers Party and Young Socialist Alliance against the FBI, CIA, Postmaster General, and other government agencies charging decades of spying, harassment, and disruption. The suit charged government agencies with mail-tampering as well as “illegal acts of blacklisting, harassment, electronic surveillance, [and] burglary.”

Noting the ongoing impact of this case, a May 21 Times article about the FBI’s plan for expanded mail surveillance powers reported, “In the mid-1970s the Church Committee, a Senate panel that documented CIA abuses, faulted a program created in the 1950s in New York that used mail covers to trace and sometimes open mail going to the Soviet Union from the United States.

“A suit brought in 1973 by a high school student in New Jersey, whose letter to the Socialist Workers Party was traced by the FBI as part of an investigation into the group, led to a rebuke from a federal judge, who found that the national security grounds for such mail covers were unconstitutionally vague.”

The federal judge referred to in this case was Thomas Griesa, appointed by former president Richard Nixon, who ruled in August 1986 in favor of the SWP and YSA. Griesa found the FBI guilty of violating the constitutional rights of the members and supporters of these organizations.

The new proposals to broaden mail surveillance seek to once again expand FBI powers to spy on and harass groups and individuals, which will include socialist organizations, trade unions, Black rights groups, and others who oppose government policies.  
 
 
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