OUR SNAIL MAIL

ThinkProgress notes that Pres. Fredo reserves the right to open our mail, sort of when he feels like it. Even my local paper carried an article about this:


GOP senator wants explanation of warrantless-mail-search claim
(FROM: New York Daily News)
Tucson Daily Star
Tucson, Arizona Published: 01.05.2007

WASHINGTON — The Republican sponsor of a postal reform bill called Thursday on President Bush to explain why he used it to claim he can open domestic mail without a search warrant.

Sen. Susan Collins of Maine questioned Bush's controversial Dec. 20 "signing statement" in which he stated if there were an emergency he wouldn't need a warrant to open letters. The bill he signed into law that day, co-sponsored by Collins, requires search warrants for mail.

An assistant attorney general, though, wrote in a 2005 letter to Rep. Jeff Flake, R-Ariz., that warrantless mail searches "would be highly unusual." And, "even then you'd have to go to a judge after the fact and explain what you've done," Attorney General Alberto Gonzales told Flake during an April 2005 House Judiciary Committee hearing.

This seems to have been going on for some time:

Homeland Security opening private mail
Retired professor confused, angered when letter from abroad is opened
By Brock N. Meeks
Chief Washington correspondent
MSNBC
Updated: 5:55 p.m. ET Jan. 6, 2006


WASHINGTON - In the 50 years that Grant Goodman has known and corresponded with a colleague in the Philippines he never had any reason to suspect that their friendship was anything but spectacularly ordinary.

Last month Goodman, an 81-year-old retired University of Kansas history professor, received a letter from his friend in the Philippines that had been opened and resealed with a strip of dark green tape bearing the words “by Border Protection” and carrying the official Homeland Security seal.

The letter comes from a retired Filipino history professor; Goodman declined to identify her. And although the Philippines is on the U.S. government’s radar screen as a potential spawning ground for Muslim-related terrorism, Goodman said his friend is a devout Catholic and not given to supporting such causes.