The Online Library of Liberty

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• Literature of Liberty a Review of Contemporary Liberal Thought
• Editorial Staff
• Associate Editors
• Editorial
• Bibliographical Essay: Henry B. Veatch, Natural Law: Dead Or Alive?
• I: Natural Law
• “nature” and “law” In Natural Law
• The Anatomy of Natural Rights
• Egoism and Rights
• The Is/ought Chimera
• Deriving “ought” From “is”
• Facts Vs. Value-laden Whims
• Is/ought and Probable Reasons
• Does Righteous Anger Imply Rights?
• Why Be Moral?
• Truth As an Objective Value
• Was the Revolution Objectively Necessary?
• Natural Law and State of Nature
• Natural Law and the State
• Natural Rights and Anarchism
• Dworkin On Rights
• Liberalism, Rights, and Abortion
• Rights and “mercy Killing”
• Rights and the “brain Drain”
• The Natural Law Right to Work
• Grotius: Contract and Natural Law
• Rights and Communication
• II: Autonomy, Privacy, and Authority
• Bureaucracy and “the Organization Man”
• Autonomy and Anarchism
• Autonomy and Taking Responsibility
• Autonomy, Motivation, and “buck-passing”
• Schooling For Conformity
• The Schoolroom Vs. Autonomy
• Obedience to Authority
• The Meaning of Privacy
• Privacy and Autonomy
• Privacy and Consent
• The Court and Privacy
• III: The Ambiguities of Liberty
• Clarifying Freedom
• Rehabilitating Mill's “harm Principle”
• Experiencing Freedom
• Do Offers Coerce Freedom?
• The Danger of “dangerousness”
• Freedom, Motivation, and Government Programs
• Freedom Vs. Determinism
• Negative Vs. Positive Freedom
• Smith and Utilitarian Economic Freedom
• Locke, Freedom, and Tacit Consent
• Religious Freedom
• Freedom, Existentialism, and Innocent Victims
• Does Censorship Harm Freedom?
• IV: Slavery
• Slavery, Ideology, and Subordination
• Slavery and Imperialist Ideology
• Enlightenment Liberalism Vs. Slavery
• The Anatomy of a Slave Revolt
• Colonial American Slave Law
• Jefferson On Slavery
• Slavery and the Poor
• V: Planning
• Regulation and the Warfare State
• Mail, Privacy, and Social Control
• Corporate State Capitalism: Coal
• French War “planification”: Chlorates
• Bureaucracy and British Regulation
• British Foreign Policy and Stagnation
• Political Decisions and the Economy
• Government, Labor, and Multinationals
• Black Markets Vs. Regulation
• Regulation Vs. Academic Autonomy
• Government Schools and Social Control
• The Economics of Charity
• International State Planning and Inflation
• Competition and Individual Knowledge

Mail, Privacy, and Social Control

Bruce A. Lehman Timothy A. Boggs

• Staff Members of House Judiciary Subcommittee on Courts, Civil Liberties, and the Administration of Justice

“How Uncle Sam Covers the Mails.” Civil Liberties Review 4 (May/June 1977): 20–28.

Even such an apparently benign governmental monopoly as the postal service can, through regulation, serve sinister ends and violate individual privacy. The federal government has long used “mail covers” as a tool of investigation and surveillance. A “mail cover” involves the recording of information from the outside of envelopes of first class mail received by citizens.

Mail cover first appears as an investigative technique in the Postal Regulations of 1879. Its original intent was to supply information to postal inspectors about fugitives and “fraudulent schemers.” In 1948 the regulations were modified to allow a mail cover at the request of any federal executive department or agency. One of the first victims of these new mail regulations was Senator Joseph McCarthy. In 1952, the Senate Subcommittee on Privileges and Immunities covered McCarthy's mail on the allegation that he was using Senate funds for stock speculation. The adverse reaction to the invasion of McCarthy's privacy through mail cover spurred the Post Office Department in 1954 to rewrite the postal regulations. The revised regulations again restricted access to postal information to postal inspectors and law officers seeking fugitives.

More recently, the mail cover regulations were rewritten following Senator Long's Congressional Hearings titled “Invasions of Privacy by Governmental Agencies.” The new regulations did little more to restrain invasions of privacy than did the 1954 regulations.

Mail covers stirred public attention again in 1975 with a review of government surveillance techniques by the House Judiciary Subcommittee on Civil Liberties. Postal authorities, it was divulged, had granted mail covers to such agencies as a Fish and Wildlife Commission, the IRS, the FBI, the CIA, and the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. More significant was the discovery that no standards existed for regulating the use of “national security” mail covers.

A promising effort to limit mail covers is Congress's HR 214 (April 1976). This bill seeks to limit both those who can authorize or request mail covers and the duration of a mail cover. The bill also would permit mail covers to be used only in connection with investigating felonies and would require notifying the subject of the mail cover that his mail had been surveyed at the end of the cover. Because of opposition by the Justice Department to portions of HR 214, the bill was reported back to the Subcommittee.