RE: Honorable Richardson Preyer, Chairman and Members of the Subcommittee on Government Information and Individual Rights Tim Ingram and Dick Barnes Staff Visit to Customs Service Mail Inspection and Mail-Opening Purpose of Inspection: Postal Service witnesses testified before the subcommittee July 28 about various irregularities in the warrantless opening of sealed letter class mail by the U.S. Customs Service. Customs is to testify September 12 concerning its mail-opening operations. This inspection enabled the staff to observe operations which are the subject of these hearings. SUMMARY Employees process vast amounts of mail at work sites which in some cases are very crowded and depressing. Record-keeping and communication seemed generally insufficient to enable employees or management to evaluate which techniques for finding contraband or drugs are successful and which aren't. Employees at the various sites disagreed on the value of various techniques. Systems for handling various categories of mail differed markedly and, if known, could be taken advantage of by senders of drugs or contraband. Customs employees frankly acknowledged that they pay no attention to certain distinctions in kinds of mail which are relevant to how the mail should be treated. Notification to some addressees that material has been seized from their mail is inadequate. SITES VISITED AND DESCRIPTION OF OPERATIONS AT EACH JFK Airport, Building #179: All incoming air mail passes through this basic sorting facility. Ordinary letter-class mail is received in bags by country. Bags from suspect countries as designated by Customs are sent to a small enclosed area where letters are screened by postal employees who are attempting to select those containing contraband, principally drugs. Nine employees, working normally in shifts of three each, inspect but do not open these letters, working principally by touch and smell. One employce may screen 30,000 letters per shift. Letters suspected of containing contraband are placed in a separate bag for transmittal to Customs. One employee who was about half-way through his shift at the time of our visit had pulled a half-dozen letters that day. The staff examined several of these and they variously did appear to contain something other than stationery: one, for example, seemed to contain a powdery substance inside a smaller flexible container. A tally sheet sent back to the employees by Customs showed that during the first 7-1/2 months of 1977, the nine had spotted 548 letters which turned out to contain contraband. There were no figures on how many letters they had sent to Customs, or how many of those Customs had actually opened. Registered mail, whether package or letter, was kept within a separate enclosed area in accordance with Postal regulations which require a strict accounting for each piece of registered mail. A Customs employee, called a segregator, sorted out packages for opening, but based his decisions almost entirely on the Customs declaration on the package. Postal employees handling the letter mail occasionally selected a suspicious letter for Customs opening, but such selection was incidental to other processing, not specifically aimed at selection as with the examination of suspect-country mail. Once a day a Customs employee comes to the registered mail enclosure, principally to open packages for duty purposes. Customs. Ordinary mail not from a suspect country is not screened for or by Incoming APO or FPO (military) mail is sent to one of two locations for screening, as described below. JFK Airport, Annex #3: Customs dog sniffing teams operate principally at this facility. Dogs work with their handlers at two adjacent conveyer belts. One belt carries incoming packages sent by air. The other conveys all incoming APO-FPO (military) letter mail sent by air except bags designated for New York City distribution [see below]. Large mail bags of letters are dumped onto the conveyer belts. The letters are mostly bundled together with rubber bands, perhaps 10-20 letters per bundle. A handler leads his dog to and fro among the passing bundles. If the dog reacts positively to a bundle, it is set aside for later examination. A dog also sniffs most of the incoming packages. Some packages sent by letter-class (the international equivalent to sending a package first class) were taken from the letter class mail by a Customs dog handler and put with the package-class packages. From 2 to 4 dogs are used on each shift. A dog normally works for about one hour before taking a half-hour break. During this break, the dog handler examines mail which the dog has indicated may contain drugs. The handler takes the designated bundle, removes the rubber bands and feels and smells each letter to try to determine what caused the dog to react. In one bundle the staff saw examined, all letters were very flat except one which had a bulge. The handler opened this letter and found 25 grams of hashish. The only bulging letter in another bundle was opened and contained several small sea shells wrapped in cotton. The handler said the dog may have been alerted to the bundle for various reasons. For example, a letter-writer may have stored his stationery near drugs with the result that the letter carried a drug odor, though it did not contain drugs. No record is kept of letters opened but in which no contraband is found. These letters are resealed and rubberstamped with a notation that they have been opened for tariff purposes. They are then returned to the mails. When drugs are found, the handler initiates a Customs Form 151, the first record of the opening and seizure. According to Customs supervisor Morris Berkowitz, perhaps 300-350 seizures a month are made at this site. Once or twice a day, a Drug Enforcement Administration agent comes to examine such forms, which describe what has been found in seized letters. The supervisor said DEA agents do not again look in the letters, but decide on the basis of the Form 151 whether to accept seizures for potential prosecution. He said perhaps 10 cases a month are accepted. In these instances, the letter and its contents are forwarded to Postal officials in the vicinity of the addressee where a controlled delivery is arranged. Letters containing drugs seized by Customs but declined by DEA are sent to the Customs facility at Varick Street, New York City (see below). General Post Office, 8th Avenue at 33rd Street, New York City: Incoming APO-FPO mail designated for New York City distribution is screened here by 10 postal employees in a manner similar to the screening done at Building 179 for mail from suspect countries. Because of varying mailsorting procedures performed by military post offices abroad, a significant proportion of the mail processed at this location is addressed to persons all over the East and in some other states, not just to persons in or near New York City. Other postal employees who sort mail form non-suspect foreign countries at this location very occasionally also refer a letter-class item to Customs. Customs operates from an enclosure adjacent to the mail-screening location. Letters referred to it by the screeners at the general post office and at building 179 are screened again by customs personnel, and most are then opened. The opening procedures are similar to those performed by the dog handlers. The Customs supervisor at this location, Michael Krawczyk, said, however, that he does not refer some items to DEA at all, based on his knowledge that DEA is not interested in small seizures of marijuana or hashish. He showed the staff a sampling of seized letters and contraband, all of which, by their bulkiness and feel, seemed to meet the reasonable-cause-to-open test. Mr. Krawczyk said he helped train postal employees on what to look for in screening mail. Customs Facility, Varick Street, New York City: Packages which have been selected by Customs segregators at JFK for tariff-purpose examination are checked and assessed here. Since some letter-class parcels are diverted to the package-class section by Customs officials as noted above, these are treated in the opening in the same manner as package-class items despite Postal policies which distinguish between the two. Customs officials said they distinguish only between letters and packages, not between the Postal Service categories of letter-class, which may include smaller packages, and package class. An enclosed seized goods storeroom is maintained at this facility. Customs officials said DEA agents come here to examine reports and determine whether to accept for possible prosecution or not. Officials at this location said DEA agents only made their decision at JFK Airport in unusual cases. This is contrary to what officials at the Customs facility at JFK said. But officials at Varick Street said that because their office was an area office and because the dog handlers reported to a regional office, the lines of communication between the two units were not direct. This facility also holds package-class items which the Department of Agriculture or Fish and Wildlife Service evaluate for compliance with laws restricting importation of plant and endangered species products. Goods are also held for other purposes, for example while the addressee obtains a license for a firearm. Military postal units abroad also directly refer suspect items to this facility for opening. Officials said that any referred items which are not addressed to the United States are not opened, however. [The Postal Service had reported that it believed the military was sending some items addressed from one overseas point to another to Customs for opening although in the normal routing, the item would not cross into Customs territory.] Bulk Mail Facility, Secaucus, New Jersey: This facility processes mail incoming by sea. Selected parcels are passed through an X-ray machine which indicates density of the contents. Officials said this machine is helpful in determining whether the contents are what they are said to be on a customs declaration but is not helpful where the contents are not stated and is impractical for processing letters. Sea mail from APOS or FPOs, and from suspect countries is screened by customs officials. Customs security official Art Dinerstein said detector dogs are occasionally brought to the facility, but he did not think they were a particularly reliable means of locating drugs. ISSUES TO BE CONSIDERED Record-keeping and communication: Neither the Postal Service screeners nor the Customs mail-openers make any record of why a letter is selected for opening unless contraband is found inside it. The Postal screeners at JFK receive periodic reports on how many letters they have furnished yielded drugs. But they get no feedback on which ones, thus there is no way for them to evaluate their specific selection techniques. Since the screeners don't keep track of how many letters they have submitted, they cannot even determine a batting average. The screeners at general post office, who work within a few yards of the Customs mail-openers, apparently have a closer working relationship and get more frequent oral reports on what has resulted from their selections. Since no records of opened letters are kept, Customs lacks an important management tool for evaluating the effectiveness of its mailopeners and its techniques for determining reasonable cause to open. Techniques for determining reasonable cause: Customs personnel have widely divergent opinions of the value of detector dogs in finding drugs. Evaluating these views is more difficult due to the lack of records discussed above. Dog handlers and their supervisors believe the dogs are very effective. Some other Customs officials believe the dogs' effectiveness wears off after about 20 minutes of work and they they are "just playing" for the rest of the hour on duty. As noted above, the dogs sometimes react to a drug odor caused by something other than drugs enclosed in an envelope. Although the detector dog and manual feel systems of mail screening are markedly different, mail passes through only one of these processes. Sorting processes tend to insure that a particular category of mail will normally always pass through the same screening technique. A knowledgeable sender of contraband could take advantage of such a pattem to increase his chances of getting forbidden matter into the country. Postal classifications: Packages entering the country in package class mail are subject to opening as a matter of routine and without a requirement that there be reasonable cause to believe contraband or duitable goods are enclosed. Such packages are not supposed to contain any correspondence, hence there is no expectation of privacy in correspondence. Smaller packages can be mailed at letter-lcass rates, the domestic equivalent of which is sending a parcel first class. Correspondence can be enclosed. As with all letter-class mail, there must be reasonable cause to open. In its sorting processes, Customs routinely lumps letter-class packages in with package class packages. Several Customs officials essentially said that a letter is a letter and a package is a package, that they don't recognize postal classifications. Customs apparently considers that the bulk of a package is by itself sufficient cause to open. Notification: When contraband is removed from a letter, and the DEA declines possible prosecution, the correspondence and envelope are sent to the addressee. A small slip is inserted which notes that contraband was removed from the letter, and includes a file number to facilitate any further |