It should have been a routine delivery: Canada Post was tasked with sending an envelope, express, from The Globe and Mail office in Toronto to my home address in London. But it arrived here with a surprise: tape indicating it had been opened by the United States Department of Homeland Security.
Why would Homeland Security – which surely has its hands full making sure the, uh, U.S. homeland is secure – have an interest in a flat envelope sent from a Canadian newspaper to its correspondent based in the United Kingdom? We're all friends, and believers in media freedoms, aren't we?
And – even if the decision to open the package was a random one – how did they get their apparently idle hands on it in the first place?
The third question proved the easiest to answer. Canada Post, of course, doesn't itself deliver mail to foreign destinations. It subcontracts the task to FedEx Corp., the U.S.-based giant.
That meant the envelope – instead of heading east across the Atlantic Ocean after it left The Globe and Mail – first headed 1,500 kilometres south to FedEx headquarters in Memphis, Tennessee. A courier sent the same day by The Globe and Mail to my colleague Paul Waldie (who also lives in England) went the same route.
Once in the United States, the letters were obviously within reach of the Department of Homeland Security and its ancillary Customs and Border Protection service. (The parcels also paused at U.K. customs in Stansted Airport, outside London, but don't appear to have been opened there.)
U.S. Customs and Border protection admitted years ago that it opens some mail. "All mail that originates outside U.S. territory, which is to be delivered inside the U.S. territory, is subject to Customs and Border Protection examination," the agency's website reads. But the courier from The Globe and Mail wasn't destined for a U.S. address.
So why open a package that was never supposed to touch U.S. soil? All we know from Homeland Security is that they use "security-related criteria" when determining which private mail to open. The department created in response to the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks on New York and Washington, D.C. has never seen fit to lay out what those criteria are.
OK then, why me? The identical package sent to Mr. Waldie – the envelopes contained our press badges for covering next months Winter Olympics in Sochi, Russia – arrived at his home unmolested. So it doesn't appear as though The Globe and Mail, or the media in general, are being targeted.
The best case – in terms of the public interest – is that Homeland Security has put me on some sort of watch list, perhaps because I've spent the past dozen years living and reporting in places like Russia, China and the Middle East (no, I don't know Edward Snowden or Glenn Greenwald). A retired University of Kansas history professor who received a letter from a friend in the Philippines with similar opened-by-Homeland-Security tape on it concluded that he was "under some kind of surveillance."
That sounds paranoid, but I find myself looking for another conclusion that makes any sense.
It could, of course, have been a random check, but that would go against the stated policy of the Customs and Border Protection Service.
That's not shocking any more, particularly in light of Mr. Snowden's revelations about the surveillance practices employed by the National Security Agency (and its "Five Eyes" partners, one of which is Canada).
But that would mean that anyone using an American courier company could have their mail opened any time by the U.S. government.
Even if they're sending a letter from Toronto to London.
@markmackinnon