Showing posts with label USPS. Show all posts
Showing posts with label USPS. Show all posts

Saturday, October 27, 2018

Lesson of the Florida "bomber": They don't "x-ray" the mail at any point in the system to keep bombs out

Rush Limbaugh confidently misinformed millions of his listeners this week that the USPS scans suspicious packages in order to intercept them and keep them away from the public.

For his part, radio personality Michael Savage laughably spent most of the week wondering how all these "bombs" could be "hand-delivered" all over the place supposedly without entering the postal system, because he believed fake news to that effect. It must have been a conspiracy! The van was too clean after all that driving up and down the east coast and to California and back! The stickers on the windows were too recently affixed because they weren't yet faded!

What we learned once again, however, was that the USPS only isolates suspicious packages for scanning by outside authorities. The cost of installing such scanners in every postal sorting facility would cost billions of dollars the already bankrupt USPS doesn't have. In this instance, the USPS was alerted to the package M/O by the outside authorities after the fact, after some of the "bombs" had already been delivered. The USPS was told what to look for, not the other way around. 

This affair exposes the fact that the entire USPS system remains vulnerable to penetration by serious terrorists at any time, and that a person who really intended to harm others, say with bombs, could do so as long as the intended target isn't too famous. That's why the more serious threats are the poisoners, who can still reach their intended famous targets occasionally with letters, such as Vanessa Trump. The contents of mail are not "scanned", only the fronts and backs are imaged and the images stored. That's how the authorities, once alerted to the problem in Florida, "were reviewing mail streams in and out of Florida, attempting to pinpoint locations where the parcels may have originated", as reported in the USA Today story linked below.

A real bomber in this instance would have rigged his packages to blow up as they are opened by the designated target, as when a box lid lifted on its hinge triggers a circuit with a detonator. Of course, the difficulty of getting such a package into the actual hands of famous persons with staff protecting them from such an eventuality is a thought which cannot have escaped the mind of Cesar Sayoc.

A real bomber does not stuff active devices into padded envelope mailers as Sayoc did, where they could blow-up indiscriminately under normal, rough handling, including in his own hands. A real bomber does not leave finger prints behind on his mail bombs, especially if his fingerprints are already in the crime reporting system due to many prior arrests and convictions.

It's almost as if poor Cesar Sayoc, aged 56, suddenly homeless and forced to live in his van, intended to get caught so that he could finally escape all his problems and finally get a roof over his head and three square meals a day for the rest of his life after so many years of struggling with poverty.

CNN reported here:

Bomb suspect Cesar Sayoc had been kicked out by his parents, so he has living in the van that we have seen in pictures today, according to a law enforcement official. ... Sayoc was initially somewhat cooperative, the official said. He told investigators that the pipe bombs wouldn’t have hurt anyone and that he didn’t want to hurt anyone. 


USA Today reports here:

The total number of bombs reached at least 14 Friday after more suspicious packages were recovered: one in Florida addressed to New Jersey Sen. Cory Booker, another in New York addressed to former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, a device recovered at Sen. Kamala Harris’ office in Sacramento, California, and another package that was intercepted at a mail facility in Burlingame, California, addressed to billionaire Tom Steyer.

Harris’ office says it was informed that the package was identified at a Sacramento mail facility. The FBI responded to the facility in a South Sacramento neighborhood that’s been blocked off by caution tape.

A package addressed to Clapper was recovered at a Manhattan postal facility. Like some of the previous packages, the one found in New York City on Friday had the office of Florida Democratic Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz as the return address, a photo obtained by CBS News showed. ...

The suspicious package intended for Clapper was spotted by a postal worker at the Radio City Station facility at around 8:15 a.m. The employee contacted U.S. Postal Inspection Service, and they contacted the NYPD and FBI.

NYPD Bomb Squad officers scanned the package and saw what appeared to be a pipe bomb, NYPD Deputy Commissioner for Intelligence and Counterterrorism John Miller said at a Manhattan news conference.

Wednesday, August 8, 2012

Privatizing The US Postal Service Is A Bad Idea On Mail Fraud And Privacy Grounds

Michael Hiltzik for The LA Times does a pretty good job of presenting the reasons why we shouldn't privatize the US Postal Service, but unfortunately misses an important one: mail fraud statutes come in real handy for felony convictions and long prison sentences for some of society's worst actors.

He draws this comparison on privacy:


Law enforcement can't open your mail without a judge's say-so, and any private individual who tries could face a long sojourn as an involuntary guest of the feds.

But laws governing the sanctity of your email are in their infancy. Actually, that's a gross overstatement: They're positively fetal. Government agencies may not need any warrant at all to read some of your emails. Google, Yahoo, Microsoft and anyone else whose system carries your email can read your messages at whim, with no consequences.

Read his full argument here.

Tuesday, March 20, 2012

US Postal Service Worker Links Obama To Marxist Ayers Family in Glen Ellyn, IL in 1980s

Jerome Corsi breaks down the story for WND.com here, speculating that Bill Ayers' parents were responsible for financing at least some of Barack Obama's education.

Perhaps the most interesting point of the whole story is how much damage one well-placed commie can do to a country. And I don't mean Obama, but Bill Ayers' father, who was formerly president and CEO of Com Ed, the electric utility:

"[The postman Allen] Hulton recalls that he had one conversation with Tom Ayers, who was retired as CEO and chairman of Commonwealth Edison, shortly after the Ayers family moved into their home in Glen Ellyn.

'He asked me how I liked my job, and he started into what seemed to me a Marxist viewpoint on what it is like for the working man, trying to convince me that working people like me were exploited by their employers,' Hulton remembers of the conversation.

'As an American citizen, I appreciated everything I had, and I was not at war with people who had more than I had,' [Hulton] says. 'It surprised me to hear somebody who had been president of Consolidated [sic] Edison talking in these terms.'

Hulton says he got the feeling that Tom Ayers thought he knew more about the plight of the workingman than he did."

Having lived near and worked in that area between 1989 and 1997 I can say that the postman's recollections of Glen Ellyn ring true.

What are the chances that Big Sis will give Allen Hulton an award for saying something?

Tuesday, February 14, 2012

USPS Needs To Cut $20 Billion, Plans To Close 3,830 Post Offices To Save $0.3 Billion

"That doesn't make any sense!"

As reported here by Reuters:

The Postal Service chose post offices for possible closure based primarily on revenue. Two-thirds of the 3,830 post offices slated for closure earned less than $27,500 in annual sales, postal data show. Nearly 90 percent of these post offices are located in rural areas, where shrinking populations and dwindling businesses mean the post offices simply cost more to operate than they earn. ...

The statistics show that closing all of the post offices under consideration would save about $295 million a year - about four-tenths of 1 percent of the Postal Service's annual expenses of $70 billion. ...

To match the falling demand, the agency says it needs to cut $20 billion in operating expenses by 2015. Restructuring healthcare programs, eliminating jobs, ending Saturday delivery and closing post offices are among the moves being considered, though some of these would require permission from a Congress that remains deeply divided on how to address the Postal Service's woes.

The postal service question is a matter of civil liberties: the guarantee of private communication. No cost is too high to protect it. That we don't care about it anymore just shows we are no longer a free people.

If we repealed the Davis-Bacon Act of 1931, however, the costs of postal service would plummet almost overnight, and we might be less inclined to sell our birthright for a bowl of pottage.