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by bentcorner 4727 days ago
A mail proxy is what is needed (I have no idea if these exist today).

Put your letter inside an envelope to a mailing proxy. Mailing proxy opens your letter, and sends your recipient a letter from them.

There are more opportunities for misdirection - the mailing proxy service can internally shuffle letters around and add mailing delays to discourage external analysis.

Although, even with all that, I'm unsure of the effectiveness of this approach. It's usefulness also scales with the number of people willing to use such a service.

Does the gov't need a second warrant to open a letter-in-a-letter?

Alternatively, you could use a peer-to-peer mailing scheme - advertise your mailing address as a mailing "node". People who want to "use" you send you a letter, and inside that letter they write a letter to the intended recipient, with the sender addressed as you. When you receive such a letter, you merely open the one addressed to you, and drop the inner letter in the mailbox. Nest as many letters as you want and have your letter "hop" around the world.

4 comments

Does the gov't need a second warrant to open a letter-in-a-letter?

Interesting question; I'm guessing no, unless the interior letter contained obviously privileged material (eg 'Dear Father, I hope you are well; enclosed is a letter I received from your lawyer after you departed, which I forward to you unopened. Your Loving Son.'), in which case a warrant would probably not issue for the contents.

http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2013/06/30/us/30postal-ma...

Section I B - allows the contents of unsealed classes of mail "as allowed by law"

Section II B - "...Mail Covers do not authorize the search, seizure, or opening of any class of mail."

Section III B 6 - addresses attorney-client privilege.

None of which is responsive to the question asked above, which was about a letter that was lawfully opened pursuant to a warrant, but which contained a second, sealed letter.
Interestingly, postmasters can act as mail proxies.

A stamp collector who wants a particular cancellation stamp can send a letter to the postmaster containing a letter and a note: "Please postmark and deliver".

I have used this in the past to play small tricks on friends, and to send them mail from far-away places.

Per the article, the entire course of your letter is tracked, so this should never be used when actual privacy is desired.

Why stop at just a single-hop proxy? Just go full out onion routing. Here's a paper for an anonymous physical delivery system, named APOD, based on that model:

https://www.cs.columbia.edu/~smb/papers/APOD_PETS09.pdf

More interesting if you could make a mechanical one that would remove one envelope and forward the letter.

Then each data facility could reasonably process a few thousand letters a day, batching them for the postal service. After a few rounds of mixing, if there was significant facility-to-facility traffic, it would become impractical to find any specific letter's path.

Time for real world implementations of our high-latency packet routing algorithms?

The next step is building such a system for personal transportation pods, so nobody really knows where you're traveling ;-). However, you'll have to pack enough food to be shuffled across the country several times on underground pneumatic tubes as your personal carrier onion is unwrapped and retransmitted.