This has been submitted before, so I've had time to think about this issue. I have lived in a country (Taiwan under its previous dictatorial regime in the early 1980s) where I assumed that all my postal mail, domestic or foreign, was read by the ruling party's secret police as part of the delivery process. The postal service in Taiwan was always awesomely efficient when I lived there, with residential mail delivery twice a day all days of the week, year-round except for a brief set of holidays for Chinese New Year. Because I assumed that all my mail would be read, I set up procedures to check whether any of it was seized. My dad and I would write weekly letters to each other, numbered consecutively. The course of post between Taiwan and Minnesota in those days was a week or less, so after a while each weekly letter would take the form of including a phrase like "This is letter number 12, replying to your letter number 10, which I received on [date]" and so on. As far as I can ascertain, all the letters I wrote and all the letters addressed to me were delivered, but I assumed that they were read by the secret police.

Foreign magazines and newspapers were sometimes seized and not delivered to subscribers, usually when they included articles about domestic politics in Taiwan. (I learned to respect The Economist as a news source by observing how often it was seized in delivery, either in entirety, or with blacking out of particular articles.) Local people who could read English could pay their hard-earned money to subscribe to (rather expensive, in those days) publications like The Economist or the Asian edition of the Wall Street Journal, but they couldn't count on receiving all of what they paid for.

The dictatorship in Taiwan eventually fell, after a largely peaceful people power revolution that forced a transformation to an open political system. Along the way, people I know, including the father of one my children's godparents, were imprisoned for leading peaceful protests urging free and fair elections and a stop to censorship. Most people don't have the courage to go to prison--especially prisons like those in Taiwan at the time. But courage is what it takes to undermine a dictatorship. A successful movement for greater freedom requires great courage, and a degree of social trust among the movement participants that is not easy to find. Allow me to repeat advice I have shared here on Hacker News before. If you really want to be an idealistic but hard-headed freedom-fighter, mobilizing an effective popular movement for more freedom wherever you live, I suggest you read deeply in the publications of the Albert Einstein Institution,

http://www.aeinstein.org/downloads/

remembering that the transition from dictatorship to democracy described in those publications is an actual historical process with recent examples around the world that we can all learn from. Practice courage and practice collective action.

We have to be courageous. We also have to be grounded in facts. There is still no indication that any of my postal mail or any of my telephone calls are being listened in on by anyone in the United States. The program described in the submitted article looks at the OUTSIDE of mail pieces. I had to assume I was under continuous surveillance when I lived in Taiwan in the 1980s, and that nothing I said or did was private. I still expressed support for the freedom and democracy movement there. I was not afraid. There is even less to be afraid of today in the United States, but I will still keep speaking up for freedom, just in case.