Homeland Security opening private mail

homeland security has the gestapo like job of opening mail...the border's wide open, but we've got people to open up private mail...

score one for the new freedom(t)!!!

[align=left]Homeland Security opening private mail
Retired professor confused, angered when letter from abroad is opened
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[align=left]Brock N. Meeks / MSNBC | January 7 2006
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[align=left]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.
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But now he believes that the relationship has somehow sparked the interest of the Department of Homeland Security and led the agency to place him under surveillance.

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 â??by Border Protectionâ?� and carrying the official Homeland Security seal.

â??I had no idea (Homeland Security) would open personal letters,â?� Goodman told MSNBC.com in a phone interview. â??Thatâ??s why I alerted the media. I thought it should be known publicly that this is going on,â?� he said. Goodman originally showed the letter to his own local newspaper, the Kansas-based Lawrence Journal-World.

â??I was shocked and there was a certain degree of disbelief in the beginning,â?� Goodman said when he noticed the letter had been tampered with, adding that he felt his privacy had been invaded. â??I think I must be under some kind of surveillance.â?�

Goodman is no stranger to mail snooping; as an officer during World War II he was responsible for reading all outgoing mail of the men in his command and censoring any passages that might provide clues as to his unitâ??s position. â??But we didnâ??t do it as clumsily as theyâ??ve done it, I can tell you that,â?� Goodman noted, with no small amount of irony in his voice. â??Isnâ??t it funny that this doesnâ??t appear to be any kind of surreptitious effort here,â?� he said.

The letter comes from a retired Filipino history professor; Goodman declined to identify her. And although the Philippines is on the U.S. governmentâ??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.



A spokesman for the Customs and Border Protection division said he couldnâ??t speak directly to Goodmanâ??s case but acknowledged that the agency can, will and does open mail coming to U.S. citizens that originates from a foreign country whenever itâ??s deemed necessary.
â??All mail originating outside the United States Customs territory that is to be delivered inside the U.S. Customs territory is subject to Customs examination,â?� says the CBP Web site. That includes personal correspondence. â??All mail means â??all mail,â??â?� said John Mohan, a CBP spokesman, emphasizing the point.

â??This process isnâ??t something weâ??re trying to hide,â?� Mohan said, noting the wording on the agencyâ??s Web site. â??Weâ??ve had this authority since before the Department of Homeland Security was created,â?� Mohan said.

However, Mohan declined to outline what criteria are used to determine when a piece of personal correspondence should be opened, but said, â??obviously itâ??s a security-related criteria.â?�

Mohan also declined to say how often or in what volume CBP might be opening mail. â??All I can really say is that Customs and Border Protection does undertake [opening mail] when it is determined to be necessary,â?� he said.

[align=left]Neocon Police State Spreads Disinfo and Paranoia[/align]

[align=left]Kurt Nimmo | January 8 2006[/align]


[align=left]Since when does an 81-year-old retired University of Kansas history professor, corresponding with a devout Catholic retired Filipino history professor, pose a threat to the national security of the United States? Of course, the answer is never. However, the fact the Ministry of Homeland Security opened Grant Goodmanâ??s mail has nothing to do with national security or â??al-Qaedaâ?� and it has everything to do with sending a messageâ??we live in a police state here in America, a one-time constitutional republic where the authorities can and will snoop not only your mail but your telephone, email, web destinations, credit card statement, bank transaction records, library checkout information, etc., ad nauseam. In fact, the reason this story appeared on the MSNBC website is to let you know the corporate dominated government is watching. [/align]


MSNBC is owned by two mega-corporations, General Electric and Microsoft. MSNBC is simply doing its patriotic duty reporting this intrusive underwear drawer sniffing sort of activity. GE is the worldâ??s largest corporation by market share and makes a bundle not simply manufacturing innocuous things such as light bulbs and household appliances but also stamps out jet engines for Boeing and Lockheed Martin who in turn sell military aircraft to the government so small countries may be invaded and occupied, however tenuously.

In order for this handsomely profitable process to continue ad infinitum, a police state must necessarily be erected. It stands to reason the people will eventually militate against a situation where they are fleeced every payday in order to line the deep pockets of GE and Lockheed Martin and Boeing and all the other death merchants who have a vested interest in perpetuating invasions and occupations.

It may seem MSNBC is simply reporting the news but in fact they are spreading fear and paranoiaâ??if an 81-year old guy, a retired academic writing to a Catholic colleague, can be snooped, no doubt activists and peaceniks can and are being snooped as well. None of these folks have anything to do with â??al-Qaedaâ?� and the government knows it. If the truth be told, the neocons do not consider â??al-Qaedaâ?� a threatâ??in fact, the fake terror organization was long ago commissioned as a boogeymanâ??but they do consider the activists, patriots, and peaceniks a threat. Not only are they a threat to the profit margins of GE and the death merchants, they are also a threat to the neocon plan to decimate Muslim culture and society. So, for the moment, the plan is to make all stripe of activists paranoid and, as well, troll a massive amount of data about the day-to-day doings of those the neocons consider a threat. It works pretty much the same in all police states.

Meanwhile, in the ranks of the far-flung patriot movement, a COINTELPRO-like subversion and disinformation operation is in full swing. Itâ??s an old game and works quite famously. One faction declares other factions to be either disinfo agents or dupes. For instance, last year, a certain podcaster and blogger declared I was unwittingly working for the CIA, never mind that I was passing out antiwar newspapers back in 1970 when he was in short pants (and it can be argued I fell victim to an Operation CHAOS dirty trick, but that is a story for another time).

Back in the late 60s and early 70s, the government was busy at work subverting the mostly ineffectual so-called â??New Left.â?� Itâ??s no secret the antiwar and so-called counterculture movement was financed by gatekeeper foundations and the government (for instance, in 1970 an Illinois commission report revealed that $192,000 in government money and $85,000 in Carnegie Foundation funds were paid to the Students for a Democratic Society during the fall of 1969; see Ralph Epperson, The Unseen Hand, Publius Press, Tucson, Arizona, 1985). â??They (sixties radicals) have no idea they are playing into the hands of the Establishment they claim to hate. The radicals think they are fighting the forces of the super-rich, like Rockefeller and Ford, and donâ??t realize that it is precisely such forces which are behind their own revolution, financing it, and using it for their own purposes,â?� former Communist Party member and FBI informant James Kirk told the House and Senate Security Committees (see Des Griffin, Fourth Reich of the Rich, Emissary Publications, Oregon, 1995).

Phillip Darrell Collins writes:

It is painfully clear that political activism in the United States has been rendered ineffective or, in some cases, detrimental to the activists themselves. A portion of the blame rests on the shoulders of the Establishment, which has controlled movements through elite funding. However, a larger portion of the blame must be shouldered by the activists themselves. Contaminated by Hegelian memes and trapped in dialectical snares, activists continue to help the very plutocrats they claim to hate. Only when activists learn to transcend partisan affiliations and develop some autonomous aptitude will America finally see the fruits of any political activism.

It is my experience that the patriot movement is unable to transcend its â??partisan affiliationsâ?� and is slowly imploding with plenty of help from the government (in the current context, under neocon control, from within the Pentagon and the Counterintelligence Field Activity program; for more on this, see my CIFA: The Pentagonâ??s COINTELPRO). Moreover, as a cursory examination of COINTELPRO reveals, the idea was (and is) not simply to spy on activists, but mainly to discredit and disrupt (as J. Edgar Hoover elucidated) and undermine trust and scare off potential supporters (see Brian Glick, COINTELPRO in the 60s). In regard to the 9/11 truth movement, the idea is not so much to â??scare off potential supporters,â?� but rather to make the entire movement look like a cavalcade of idiotsâ??thus the mixing of UFOlogy and theories about hologram planes in with legitimate research.

In fact, the neocon Pentagon and associated off-the-books intel and covert op organizations are running a massive psychological operation on the entire population at largeâ??from an unrelenting tidal wave of fake news about Freddy Kruger Muslims to getting folks accustomed to the emerging technocratic Panopticon state (see Charles Stross). Recent â??news stories,â?� supposedly â??leakedâ?� to the corporate media, detailing neocon snoop efforts at the NSA, are part and parcel of this massive psyop program, as is the latest tidbit revealed by the death merchant owned MSNBC on the Ministry of Homeland Security reading transcontinental mail.

As noted above, the neocons are running a â??coordinated domestic counter-insurgencyâ?� (as Glick terms it), long ago pioneered by General Frank Kitson (see my General Frank Kitson: Trail Blazing Fake Terrorism) and modified for use against domestic enemies. Kitson called for the use of â??pseudo gangs,â?� that is to say a state sponsored group used to advance an agenda, while discrediting the real opposition. Clearly, this is now happening within the patriot movement (sometimes I believe there are more disinfo agents than real patriots). If this covert program continues unabated, there will be no need for mass roundups of patriots and activists, no need for the legendary FEMA concentration camps, because the movement will implode and the activists will become a laughingstock, completely discredited and marginalized.

Howdy pisshead,

This article confirms what I already suspected,that packages and mail,crossing American borders,is looked at and sometimes opened. I had a gift of compassion,from the Nederlands siezed and got a Customs letter,then everything from Canada,got intercepted and I was finally paid a visit,by the feds and the local narco task force,the fed said that I was gittin too many gifts of compassion from Canada,and that it must cease and desist,leaving me with the warning that my po box was being watched..hmm..maybe I should have the person from Canada,send me a harmless letter,and see how that works out..it would be playing with fire tho.

Someone said,in a thread about why one shouldn't order by phone/mail,that one should only use mom dealers from overseas,but it seems to me,that they wouldn't stand much of a chance,compared to mom dealers whose products don't cross international borders.

Have a good one ....