The U.S. Postal Service has shared information from thousands of Americans’ letters and packages with law enforcement every year for the past decade, conveying the names, addresses and other details from the outside of boxes and envelopes without requiring a court order. Postal inspectors say they fulfill such requests only when mail monitoring can help find a fugitive or investigate a crime. A decade’s worth of records, provided exclusively to The Washington Post in response to a congressional probe, show Postal Service officials have received more than 60,000 requests from federal agents and police officers since 2015, and that they rarely say no. Each request can cover days or weeks of mail sent to or from a person or address, and 97 percent of the requests were approved. Postal inspectors recorded more than 312,000 letters and packages between 2015 and 2023. The surveillance technique, known as the mail covers program, has long been used by postal inspectors, but the U.S. Postal Inspection Service has traditionally declined to say how often it facilitates such requests, saying in 2015 audit that such details would decrease the program’s effectiveness by “alerting criminals” to how it works.
For that audit, the agency said it had approved more than 158,000 requests from postal inspectors and law enforcement officials over the previous four years. The IRS, FBI and the Department of Homeland Security were among the top requesters. Last year, eight senators, including Ron Wyden (D-OR), Rand Paul (R-KY) and Elizabeth Warren (D-MA.), urged the agency to require a federal judge to approve the requests and to share more details on the program, saying officials there had chosen to “provide this surveillance service and to keep postal customers in the dark about the fact they have been subjected to monitoring.” In a response this month, the chief postal inspector, Gary Barksdale, declined to change the policy but provided nearly a decade’s worth of data showing that postal inspectors, federal agencies, and state and local police forces made an average of about 6,700 requests a year, and that inspectors additionally recorded data from about another 35,000 pieces of mail a year. Barksdale told senators in June 2023 that the program was not a “large-scale surveillance apparatus” and was focused only on mail that could help police and national security agencies “carry out their missions and protect the American public.” The practice, he added, had been legally authorized since 1879, a year after the Supreme Court ruled that government officials needed a warrant before opening any sealed letter