Canada's Red Mail Box Surveillance Program

Don't know how much I can safely give up without threatening my own identity, if anything.

How I know about it: I have a temporary placement with policy integration and my supervisor is a high level manager. We talk and he sometimes tells me things he knows he probably shouldn't, that he thinks he can trust me with. What I am writing next is everything I know about it.

In Canada right now, feds (I don't know which branch they work for but it is within the policy integration department) are meeting and discussing the proposal of a bill that would essentially give police the power to do general surveillance of red mail boxes, and those who use this service. Within the meeting, dark net markets were specifically mentioned as one of the issues the bill proposal would help address.

I thought it might be important to open up discussions about this.


Comments


[9 Points] None:

Despite being utterly unfamiliar with the difference between privacy rulings regarding mail between other countries and Canada, it does seem to me this isn't yet a genuine cause for concern.

Based on your description, it sounds as if at this stage it is little more than someone in some agency is wanting to introduce legislation (which then needs to follow political procedure for adopting) of the police are allowed to sit and watch general mail activity at these boxes.

It doesn't appear to be saying that mail placed in red boxes is open to search; only that they can keep an eye out for suspicious activity. Legislation such as this does exist in other places, most notably in the USA, where the police absolutely are allowed to sit and observe people sending mail and pass along concerns to the postmaster.


[7 Points] None:

Would you mind explaining what red mail boxes are to the non-Canadian among us? I am guessing it's like the USA blue boxes which are just bins you drop mail in rather than go to the post center or put in own box to send out, but I don't know.


[1 Points] pkguirich:

How concerned should regular vendors and new ones be? This will probably have to take a few years still to pass the bill and implement it.


[1 Points] Mayniac182:

Meh, let them. Even if LE somehow monitors every post box out there, and tracks people posting a large volume of mail regularly, they'll realise it was a waste of money when they find out that most people posting mail overseas regularly run legal etsy businesses and such. Plus I'm going to assume that any smart vendor goes to multiple boxes to ship their products, instead of dumping dozens of similarly packaged letters into one box at a time.


[1 Points] crmbsp_throw:

Read through all of the responses to date.

I think there are some issues we are missing.

Many mention it would be nearly impossible to monitor all of the 900,000 locations across the country. While I agree with this, I don't think it is necessary for LE to monitor even 5% to achieve what I assume their goal is.

If their goal is to significantly reduce the number of vendors willing to risk sending drugs in the mail, I don't think they need to catch everyone. They really would just need to send a scary message. To do this, all they really need to do is catch a few.

Not all vendors follow optimal op-sec. I'd be willing to bet there is a relatively large proportion that make it fairly easy to profile their packaging, once again making it relatively easy for LE to track their packages to at least the red mail boxes that the vendor uses. Then, it would be cheap and easy to setup surveillance on these small number of boxes and catch the vendor.

All they really need to do is catch a few, once in a while, and this would probably scare many vendors away.

Likely by using optimal op-sec, making it difficult for your packaging to be profiled, a vendor would be safe.

EDIT: Currently, yes, a few are caught once in a while. But I think the general consensus (correct me if I'm wrong) is that this is mainly due to mistakes made on the part of the vendor. This is not too scary of a message to be sending. But if they can say that, through their own action, they were able to catch "so and so," that's a much scarier message.


[0 Points] professional_skier:

So would the Canada post boxes used for pickups alright?


[-1 Points] Trappy_Pandora:

Have my up vote for having the courage to bring this up. Thank you.


[-8 Points] wastedyouth999:

Government and LE increasing it's response to DNM popularity. Way to go reddit, thanks a lot!