When most Americans think of a data breach, they imagine hackers halfway around the world slipping through firewalls and stealing millions of records from corporate servers. But another breach — just as damaging and far more visible — is happening every day on our own streets. The U.S. Postal Inspection Service (USPIS) has the legal authority to stop it, yet for the past five years the agency has failed to act.
This breach isn’t digital. It’s physical. And it’s emptying America’s mailboxes.
Mail theft today is not simply about a few missing letters. As Professor David Maimon, Director of the Evidence-Based Cybersecurity Research Group at Georgia State University, has written, mail theft has become a large-scale compromise of sensitive information. Each piece of stolen mail — a check, a bill, a tax return, a bank statement — fuels identity theft, account takeovers, and other forms of financial fraud. In effect, these thefts are data breach events: physical intrusions into the nation’s mail stream, on par with corporate cyberattacks.
