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Discussion => Security => Topic started by: kmfkewm on February 11, 2012, 09:47 pm

Title: [intel] Cash to Buy Postage Makes You Suspect at Post Office
Post by: kmfkewm on February 11, 2012, 09:47 pm
http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1571/is_27_17/ai_76844625/

Quote
Since Insight exposed the U.S. Postal Service's customer-surveillance program "Under the Eagle's Eye" (see "Postal Service Has Its Eye on You," July 2-9), the eyes of many privacy advocates have focused like a laser on the agency. "Warning! The Post Office could report YOU as a drug dealer or terrorist," reads a press release from the Libertarian Party, which helped generate some 300,000 letters that helped defeat the government's proposed "Know Your Customer" surveillance rules for banks two years ago (see "Snoops and Spies," Feb. 22, 1999). Until the Postal Service drops its orders to postal clerks to report certain legal financial transactions as "suspicious activity," the Libertarian Party and others are urging consumers to purchase money orders, wire transfers and cash cards elsewhere.

But now Insight has learned that it's not just purchases of these financial instruments that the post office reports as suspicious. A training video and manual obtained by Insight indicate that you also could be reported as a "suspicious" customer when you put money on a postage meter, particularly if it's in cash. In the video, after a jewelry-store owner hands a postal clerk $50,000 cash to put on his postage meter, the clerk is told to report this as a suspicious transaction. Even though it may be perfectly legal, using this much cash is "strange," the video says.

But what is "strange" to privacy advocates is why the Postal Service reports postage-meter transactions at all. Treasury Department regulations that next year will apply Bank Secrecy Act provisions to sellers of money orders and other financial instruments, which the Postal Service uses to justify "Under the Eagle's Eye," say absolutely nothing about purchases of postage as a "suspicious" activity.

"If putting a lot of money on your postage meter is a sign of criminal activity, I'm afraid we're going to have to have a little talk with our own office manager," says George Getz, spokesman for the Libertarian Party, which uses a postage meter to send mass mailings. "I don't know how somebody would go about laundering money like that. It seems preposterous. Do you launder money 32 cents at a time? That's crazy."

According to the Postal Service, even transactions of a few thousand dollars in cash should arouse suspicion. "If they [customers] wanted $5,000 on their postage meter, they wouldn't pay for that in cash," says Gerry Kreienkamp, a Postal Service spokesman. "That's just not the way business is done."

But privacy advocates say it's not unusual for small retail-business owners to pay for mailings with large amounts of cash. It is normal, for instance, for restaurant or store owners who want to send out promotional mailings to go to the post office and put the cash receipts for that day on their postage meters, says Brad Jansen, deputy director of the Free Congress Foundation's Center for Technology Policy. "It would not be unusual that a retailer would, one, be using cash and, two, have to put out a great deal of postal mailings."

Kreienkamp says that "Under the Eagle's Eye" does not apply to purchases of stamps and "philatelic" items. But why, then, does the program apply to postage on meters, which is merely "electronic stamps," asks Rick Merritt, executive director of Postal Watch.

Jansen cautions that consumers should assume that any products they purchase at a post office could get them reported as a "suspicious" customer. "The intent is to make this as all-encompassing as possible," he says.