Postal Censorship and Surveillance: A Timeline.

1775

A year before independence, the Continental Congress creates the Postal Service-not as a government agency, but as one of several new independent alternatives to the British postal system. One advantage: This allows American dissidents to communicate without the authorities intercepting their letters.

1835

Southern mobs seize and burn abolitionist material sent through the mail. The postmaster general refuses to intervene, establishing a de facto policy of permitting the censorship of such literature in the slave states.

1844

The libertarian abolitionist Lysander Spooner establishes the private American Letter Mail Co. The government reacts by outlawing it, and in 1851 the experiment ends.

1861

The Civil War begins, and both the Union and the Confederacy adopt their own forms of postal censorship. The postmaster general spends a year refusing to deliver papers deemed disloyal to the Union cause.

1873

The Comstock Act makes it illegal to knowingly mall or receive any "filthy book, pamphlet, picture, paper, letter, writing, print, or other publication of an indecent character," as well as any contraceptives, any abortifacients, or any information about acquiring or using contraceptives or abortlfacients.

1878

The Supreme Court upholds the government's right to bar "circulars concerning lotteries" from the mail-and, provided it has a warrant, to open and Inspect packages to find such material.

1944

The government Intercepts the International correspondence of tax resister Vivien Kellems--a prominent critic of the Roosevelt administration--and leaks It to columnist Drew Pearson and Rep. John M. Coffee (D-Wash.). Coffee quotes from It on the House floor while accusing Kellems of subversion.

1917

After the U.S. enters World War I, the Wilson administration cracks down on anti-war and anti-draft literature. In the case of the anarchist magazine Mother Earth, the government doesn't just bar the material from the mall-it arrests editor Emma Goldman for...