Thread: The U.S Mail and Your Reasonable Expectation of Privacy

The mail that you send through the U.S. Postal Service is protected by the Fourth Amendment, and police have to get a warrant to open it in most cases.

If you’re using the U.S. Postal Service, send your package using First Class mail or above. Postal inspectors don’t need a search warrant to open discount (media) rate mail because it isn’t supposed to be used for personal correspondence.

You don’t have any privacy in what you write on a postcard, either. By not putting your correspondence in an envelope, you’ve knowingly exposed it, and the government can read it without a warrant.

Keep in mind that although you have privacy in the contents of your mail and packages, you don’t have any privacy in the "to" and "from" addresses printed on them. That means the police can ask the post office to report the name and address of every person you send mail to or receive mail from — this is called a "mail cover" — without getting a warrant. Mail covers are a low-tech form of "traffic analysis," which we’ll discuss in the section dealing with electronic surveillance.


A mail cover is a law enforcement investigative technique in which the US Postal Service, acting at the request of a law enforcement agency, records information from the outside of letters and parcels before they are delivered and then sends the information to the agency that requested it. The Postal Service grants mail cover surveillance requests for about 30 days and may extend them for up to 120 days.

Mail covers can be requested to investigate criminal activity or to protect national security. On average the Postal Service grants 15,000 to 20,000 criminal activity requests each year. It rarely denies a request.

Mail cover is defined by the Internal Revenue Manual as follows:

Mail cover is the process by which a non-consensual record is made of any data appearing on the outside cover of sealed or unsealed mail; or by which a record is made of the contents of any unsealed mail, as allowed by law, to obtain information to protect national security; locate a fugitive; obtain evidence of the commission or attempted commission of a crime; obtain evidence of a violation or attempted violation of a postal statute; or assist in the identification of property, proceeds, or assets forfeitable under law.

As mail cover does not involve the reading of the mail but only information on the outside of the envelope or package that could be read by anyone seeing the item anyway, it is not considered a violation of the 4th Amendment. However, there has been criticism of the practice by some, particularly due to the delay in mail the process might cause, though regulations prohibit mail cover from delaying mail.

Since 2001, the Postal Service has been effectively conducting mail covers on all American postal mail as part of the Mail Isolation Control and Tracking program.

So in your opinion...would it be safer to use UPS or FedEx instead of a government ran postal service?

Good read and great information Brother beanlicker!