IP: The Postal Service Has Its Eye on You (fwd)

-- Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://www.lrz.de/~ui22204/">leitl</a> ______________________________________________________________ ICBMTO : N48 10'07'' E011 33'53'' http://www.lrz.de/~ui22204 57F9CFD3: ED90 0433 EB74 E4A9 537F CFF5 86E7 629B 57F9 CFD3 ---------- Forwarded message ---------- Date: Sun, 22 Jul 2001 10:14:02 -0400 From: David Farber Reply-To: farber@cis.upenn.edu To: ip-sub-1@majordomo.pobox.com Subject: IP: The Postal Service Has Its Eye on You

Date: Sun, 22 Jul 2001 00:23:38 -0400 To: Dave Farber From: Monty Solomon Subject: The Postal Service Has Its Eye on You

THE POSTAL SERVICE HAS ITS EYE ON YOU

By John Berlau

July 14, 2001

Since 1997, the U.S. Postal Service has been conducting a customer-surveillance program, 'Under the Eagle's Eye,' and reporting innocent activity to federal law enforcement. Could you already be a victim?

http://www.moreprivacy.com/editorials/postaleye.htm <snip>

One thing that should set off alarms, the postal service says, is a customer objecting to filling out an 8105-A form that requests their date of birth, occupation and driver’s license or other government-issued ID for a purchase of money orders of $3,000 or more. If they cancel the purchase or request a smaller amount, the clerk automatically should fill out Form 8105-B, the “suspicious-activity” report. “Whatever the reason, any customer who switches from a transaction that requires an 8105-A form to one that doesn’t should earn himself or herself the honor of being described on a B form,” the training manual says. But the “suspicious” customers might just be concerned about privacy, says Solveig Singleton, a senior analyst at the Competitive Enterprise Institute. And a professional criminal likely would know that $3,000 was the reporting requirement before he walked into the post office. “I think there’s a lot of reasons that people might not want to fill out such forms; they may simply think it’s none of the post office’s business,” Singleton tells Insight. “The presumption seems to be that from the standpoint of the post office and the Bank Secrecy regulators every citizen is a suspect.” Both Singleton and Nojeim say “Under the Eagle’s Eye” unfairly targets the poor, minorities and immigrants — people outside of the traditional banking system. “A large proportion of the reports will be immigrants sending money back home,” Nojeim says. Singleton adds, “It lends itself to discrimination against people who are sort of marginally part of the ordinary banking system or who may not trust things like checks and credit cards.” <snip> For archives see: http://www.interesting-people.org/