Remember that pre-Kaczinsky Unabomber mug sketch? Law enforcement ink shooters pegged the swarthy saboteur as a mustachioed sweatshirter with a hood and a pair of aviator sunglasses – maybe like Tom Selleck going incognito to mail anonymous love letters to Courteney Cox.
Only the Unabomber did not mail love letters. I know. I worked across the alleyway when one of his care packages took care of a forestry lobbyist on I Street in downtown Sacramento. I walked past the bombed-out building more than a few times in the months after the blast.
To prevent similar shenanigans from exploding across the news in the future, as well as nab a number of other nasty nabobs and criminal types, the United States Postal Service has started keeping track of guys in sweatshirts, aviators and decked with fuzzy upper lips. In a manner of speaking, at least.
“[Y]our local post office has been (and is) watching you closely,” informs Insight reporter John Berlau. Customers buying money orders, making wire transfers or purchasing cash cards may be excited to find that the postal clerk is rerunning episodes of “Dragnet” in his head while indexing any “suspicious” characteristics of the customer.
“It doesn’t matter that you are not a drug dealer, terrorist or other type of criminal or the that the transaction itself was perfectly legal,” says Berlau. If you’re “suspicious,” that’s all that matters.
And what is suspicious?
A training video and manual for the “Under the Eagle’s Eye” program, which has been in effect since 1997, nails the definition of “suspicion” with alarming clarity and succinctness: “The rule of thumb is if it seems suspicious to you, then it is suspicious.” Should some customer fall within the borders of that narrow definition, the postal clerk is duty bound to fill out a “suspicious activity report.”
I’m not so sure I’m comfortable with this. Remember how the term “going postal” got started? For a while there, a few years back, it seemed like every disgruntled (which became the catchall adjective to describe any out-of-sorts employee) postal worker was walking into the office with a nervous twitch, firearm and a whopping score to settle.
These people are now deciding what’s suspicious? Pardon me if I stay outside the place and drop my packages in the mail slot outdoors. While waiting in lines that challenge the DMV and communist grocery stores, I’m sure I’ve said a number of anti-post office stuff over the years within earshot of some Maxwell Smart behind the counter with the striped blue shirt and suspicion meter running on tilt. Considering that, for a number of those years, I had a shaved head, Wyatt Earp moustache and an armful of gun magazines, I was probably a prime candidate for a write-up.
Worse, nowadays I look respectable, mostly clean-shaven and walk in with a baby carriage. Must be a front for a drug kingpin.
The absurdity of all of this is mind-boggling.
Buying a money order – even a really big one – is perfectly legal. But if the numbers puncher thinks you might be laundering drug money with them, you’re in big trouble. Never mind that you might be using the order to purchase a used car from a guy who is less than eager to take your personal check. Never mind the fact that maybe you forgot to order new checks from the bank and need a money order to pay your rent.
Even though the act itself is perfectly legal, by purchasing any postal money products, customers invite postal workers to stop playing clerk and start playing narc. Why a guy might look like an illicit druggist to a clerk is the scary part. How in the name of the Pony Express are these cash register regents supposed to finger a drug suspect?
No problem, right? They’ve seen “Cops.” They know what a drug dealer looks like. Heck, “Law and Order” is probably their favorite TV show. Great.
It’s bad enough when trained law enforcement officers get involved in profiling criminals. Now we’ve got keypad jockeys getting in on all the fun. Want to lay odds on how many completely innocent customers are going to have their names scribbled on a “suspicious activity report”?
The Postal Service doesn’t seem worried by the prospect. According to a training video for the program, “It’s better to report 10 legal transactions than to let one illegal transaction get by.” Hear that gang? In the name of law and order, we get to take one for the team – or nine to be more accurate.
“Everybody must admit that the Post Office, as a branch of Government, is an institution obviously and inevitably liable to the most prodigious abuses,” wrote New York Plaindealer columnist William Leggett in 1837.
I’ll admit it. And, I expect that many more will as well when they start finding themselves the butt of investigations based on the hunch of some suspicion-addled stamp peddler.
