A couple of days ago I needed to send my girlfriend, who lives in the US, a reference letter that my current landlord gave us. The reason for this being I am due to move State side for work in a little over a weeks time and my girlfriend, being awesome, is planning to go on an apartment hunting trip down to LA for me. Thus the original reference letter from my current landlord was needed so that it could be shown to any prospective new landlords.
Given my past experience with Canadian mail being quite unreliable for delivering mail in a timely manner (they once took over 2 months to deliver a small package to Ireland for me) I decided to suck it up and spend the 40 odd dollars to have the letter sent via UPS express mail. At least this way I was guaranteed that the reference letter would reach its final destination by morning the following day. The following day came and went with no sign of the letter. I started cursing UPS and their so called "guarantee" on express delivery and the fact I wasted so much money for a guarantee not kept. Today my girlfriend contacts me sometime around late afternoon on gmail's web chat to say that the letter just arrived. A day and a half later than guaranteed but I figured no biggy, at least it was still faster than sending it by regular mail, and then I was shown this...
It appears that US Customs decided my mail was of a suspicious nature and decided to open it up and then hold onto it for an extra day for scrutinizing. UPS, I judged you prematurely. All is forgiven. I mean seriously? What the fuck! They didn't even bother trying to reseal up the damn envelope properly. What if I had sensitive information in there?
Over the years with my comings and goings in and out of the US for business, holidays or whatever I've gotten pretty used to being treated like a criminal/terrorist and having any sort of privacy or my so called civil liberties shat upon. Apart from the obvious inconvenience of having my photo taken and finger prints scanned like a criminal every time I want to enter the US I've also put up with the odd instances of finding the cheap shoelace I use to secure my luggage zipper having been cut open and then upon opening up my luggage finding a lovely note by US Customs and Border Protection stating that in the interest of national security they've broken into my luggage and gone through all my shit.
I've always figured that this was just the sad times we live in and I had no choice but to just suck it up as an expected inconvenience of being a foreigner in America. But for some reason, this time around, this one small act of invasion of privacy has really irked me more so than all the other past instances. Perhaps it's because this was more unexpected than before or because the act so closely resembled the type of crap that people read about that used to go on in cold war Soviet Russia. Or maybe I'm just more annoyed about how my mail was half assed thrown back together again with no accountability to the delay caused or to the final state it was in or what could potentially have happened to the private information contained within it (which luckily this time around was just very mundane stuff).
I always thought it was a federal offence in America to open up someone else's mail. I guess these laws don't apply when someone classifies it as potentially a matter of national security.
Upon further research into the legitimacy of this, I subsequently discovered that the opening of private mail arriving from and going to foreign addresses outside of the US by US Customs and Border Protection agencies is now quite a common place practice in today's modern America. Furthermore, it's perfectly legal, for the very argument mentioned above.
So, in short, if you're sending mail to or from an address outside of the United States, to or from an address within the United States, expect that there is a very good chance your mail will be opened and scrutinized by US Customs and Border Protection before it arrives in its final destination.
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