Ode to the United States Postal Service
by Barrett Brown
The United States Postal Service (USPS) is a model government service that has sadly been losing the battle against modern times.
One of my favorite services that the USPS offers in any city in America is a service called "General Delivery."
This is rather like the old fashioned version of dodgeit.com, mailinator.com, and other one-way e-mail services. The way it works is that you address a letter to whichever name you want and mail it to:
There is generally one post office in each city responsible for General Delivery mail. In San Francisco, the physical address is:
So if any of you put some money in an envelope and mail it to:
I can then go to 101 Hyde Street, present my ID at the window (this is the only anonymity problem, although since most General Delivery postal workers look at IDs all day long, a good looking fake ID could be used fairly easily, as there is never a magnetic stripe check or anything like that) and pick up my free money.
If you think about it, there are many interesting ways that one could use this service. Say you are going on vacation to New York and you don't want to carry something on the plane. You could mail it to yourself c/o General Delivery, New York, New York.
I'll let you use your own imagination for further uses. And before you ask, yes, reasonably sized packages are acceptable too.
Now, I'm not the only "Barrett Brown" in the world, so one of my other namesakes (or someone with a fake ID) could pick up my mail or I could get their mail, unless a middle name or initial was used. Like I said, this is a legacy service of the USPS, in all probability left over from the days when everyone in town picked up their mail this way. But some security lies in the fact that there is no way to find out if someone has anything waiting at General Delivery without being told by the sender or showing up at the post office.
I discovered this service several years ago when I was homeless, and I was thrilled. Not just because I had found a way to get mail, but because I had finally found a way to maintain some database anonymity for free! As anyone who does some basic privacy research can find, there are anonymous re-mailer services and anonymous addresses in the Cayman Islands that will forward your mail to you and keep your identity secret, but usually for a hefty fee.
Now I had finally found a dead-end address, an address I could forward all my mail to, an address I could put on my bank account, an address I could put on my driver's license, and no one could use it to track me down and show up at my door!
No, not "General Delivery," but "101 Hyde Street," the physical address of the post office.
I did an experiment where I sent a letter to:
Then I went to the General Delivery window and, sure enough, I got my letter just the same as if I'd written "General Delivery" instead of the address.
So, quicker than you could say "up yours debt collectors," I put in a request to forward all of my mail there.
Next, I went to the DMV to get a new driver's license because I'd "changed my address," and six weeks later I picked it up with my post office address beautifully embossed on it, just like I lived there.
Next step was the bank. I hadn't had an account in some time (having been put on ChexSystems for seven years when I was quite young for some "accidental incidents") but my purgatory was up and I was again allowed to open an account.
All my paperwork seemed to be in order, but Uh oh!" It seems the bank's computer was smarter than the New Accounts Manger because it said I could not use "101 Hyde" as a valid address, though it thankfully didn't say why.
Hmmm, what could I do? I ended up giving them the address of a homeless shelter as my home address, which they accepted, and then "101 Hyde" as my mailing address and that worked out just fine, but I was still worried they might send something to the shelter to check up on me.
This was a job for online banking! I logged in to my new account and went to my profile information to change my address. Both my addresses were listed and I simply deleted the homeless shelter, leaving "101 Hyde" as my only address; no problem. I ordered some checks, and two weeks later I was picking them up at the General Delivery window, laughing with joy when I saw the post office as the address on my official checks.
I did some database checking, searching for myself, and sure enough all roads pointed to "101 Hyde." It was a success: everyone had lost my electronic trail.
I was happy and proud that I had once again outwitted "The Man." There would be no way to find me unless they put a full surveillance team to watch the post office for a month, and even then it would used by so many people and there were so many disguises I could use. But sadly, this is not the end of my story...
A few years went by and I got tired of going to the General Delivery window every month to pick up my mail, anonymous or not.
Especially on the 1st and the 15th of the month the lines can be very long because of all the homeless people who really need to get their mail there. So I filled out a USPS "Change of Address" form to forward my mail from 101 Hyde to my new, swanky apartment.
My form came back refused.
It seems you aren't allowed to change an address, even for an individual, from 101 Hyde street, because it's filed under some special heading. This again called for the Internet!
I went to www.usps.com (yes, the United States Postal Service has a .com these days, though it used to be .gov) and tried an online Change of Address but, again, it returned with the error that 101 Hyde was a business address and could not be changed for an individual.
A business address? Hmmm... So I filled out the form again, specifying that the Change of Address was for a business; a business named "Barrett Brown." I do business, so I don't think this was fraud. The page charged me $1 and sent me a confirmation. It had worked! What paper would not do, the online form (and money) did!
I waited expectantly for mail to come flooding into my new, swanky apartment, but nothing ever came.
I went back to the General Delivery window, showing my ID as usual, and picked up my mail. It hadn't worked after all. The USPS web page had just robbed me of a buck. But as I was picking up my mail, I noticed a new sign taped to the inside of the post office General Delivery window.
In fat, black marker it said:
Oh no!
My first thought was deep sorrow for all the homeless people who didn't have any ID, or any friends whose addresses they could use. What were they supposed to do now?
It's legal in California, in these post-9/11 days of terror, for a police officer to take you to jail for not having ID in order to establish your identity and make sure that you're not wanted.
I knew of some officers who took away street people's IDs just so they could take them to jail and keep taking them for the six weeks it takes to get an ID from the DMV. This was bad news indeed. San Francisco's war against the poor just keeps getting worse. My second thought was that I would have to keep coming back to the post office month after month for the foreseeable future, but that it was worth the price of keeping my electronic anonymity. At least for the next seven years, I'd have my checks and ID with the address still on it.
Just recently, I started receiving a few letters electronically forwarded to me from 101 Hyde... none of them addressed to me!
Were they going to start forwarding all the general delivery mail to me?! I gave the first few back to the postman, showing him that the names were different, but this didn't stop the letters from coming.
Finally, I walked some of the letters down to the post office myself, to return them and show them the error. I know from firsthand experience how important a timely letter to General Delivery can be to a homeless person, and I didn't want anyone to miss his or her mail because of me.
At the end of this small experiment, I'm saddened and a little confused.
I'm saddened that with both the bank and the post office I could do something online that I could not do in person. This shows how blindly companies and corporations are throwing services and power onto the web, without actually knowing how they work.
I'm saddened that for $1, and in the interest of "business," I could get the post office to do something that they wouldn't do for an individual for free.
Most of all, I'm confused and saddened that someone would remove the ability for a person to get an ID at General Delivery. This is a policy that clearly only hurts the homeless and those with few resources and, for this reason, it's a policy that will probably not be fought by anyone or even noticed.
The only good news I can end with is that, to date, despite the sign that has been posted for four months saying I cannot receive mail addressed to 101 Hyde, I still do on a regular basis.
As every good hacker knows, believe none of what you read and only some of what you see.