You can skip the first half of the article fairly easily if you know the background and skim the rest to get the general pictures, but it's a good read if you've got the time for it all....
You can skip the first half of the article fairly easily if you know the background and skim the rest to get the general pictures, but it's a good read if you've got the time for it all.
Personally I always thought the 'brushing scam' explanation didn't quite smell right.
Spoiler/summary
It looks like in many, possibly all, cases people had just ordered the seeds several months previously and forgotten about them.
Great article and it just goes to show how unreliable human memory is. Machine memory is so much more reliable. That said, this whole thing makes me really nervous about the security of...
Great article and it just goes to show how unreliable human memory is. Machine memory is so much more reliable.
That said, this whole thing makes me really nervous about the security of international shipping. I would not have guessed that seeds shipped from China to the US or other countries could go under the radar just by being labeled as jewelry. I’m not sure how to solve that problem, but it seems like a serious one. It’s also rather disturbing that the USDA, USPS, and other parts of the US federal government couldn’t figure out something like this.
From the article they reported that at least the USDA, FBI, DHS, CBP, and USPS were involved in some forms of investigation: How much effort they actually expended, how seriously these apparatuses...
From the article they reported that at least the USDA, FBI, DHS, CBP, and USPS were involved in some forms of investigation:
As the unexpected seed packets kept arriving at homes across the country, American officials from the FBI, the Department of Homeland Security, and other agencies reached out to their Chinese counterparts. According to the USDA’s El-Lissy, the Chinese authorities were very cooperative: “They emphasized to these companies that this is a prohibited activity and they should stop immediately.” U.S. Customs and Border Protection also upped its efforts to detect and intercept such packages. Meanwhile, the USDA led discussions with Amazon and other e-commerce platforms. Amazon announced in September that plants, plant products, and seeds could no longer be imported into the United States. Its competitor Wish did likewise, citing the “ongoing threat to U.S. consumers.”
A month after El-Lissy told me that the USDA was not able to think of any other reasons behind this event apart from brushing, I presented the agency with just such a reason: my forgotten-orders theory. I wanted to know whether the USDA had any direct evidence of brushing, or had verified that anyone had received seeds they had not ordered. The answer was no, with the proviso that the department is involved in an ongoing investigation into the seeds, in tandem with other government agencies, including Customs and Border Protection and the U.S. Postal Service.
How much effort they actually expended, how seriously these apparatuses took this issue, and what the final results of such effort are is not clear from the article, though. I would think this is the kind of thing which would be most optimally tackled with a cross-agency task-force, though. But, I don't know much about how the US federal government expends resources on such things.
In the end it wasn't a serious issue, and maybe that's why the governmental agencies and departments didn't escalate their investigations? There are ostensibly innumerable potential threats that turn out not to be serious, but actually performing that threat assessment on the candidates, especially something like this seemed to be relatively frequent and geographically distributed, seems like a good candidate. But maybe that's just hindsight?
You can skip the first half of the article fairly easily if you know the background and skim the rest to get the general pictures, but it's a good read if you've got the time for it all.
Personally I always thought the 'brushing scam' explanation didn't quite smell right.
Spoiler/summary
It looks like in many, possibly all, cases people had just ordered the seeds several months previously and forgotten about them.
Great article and it just goes to show how unreliable human memory is. Machine memory is so much more reliable.
That said, this whole thing makes me really nervous about the security of international shipping. I would not have guessed that seeds shipped from China to the US or other countries could go under the radar just by being labeled as jewelry. I’m not sure how to solve that problem, but it seems like a serious one. It’s also rather disturbing that the USDA, USPS, and other parts of the US federal government couldn’t figure out something like this.
I’m wondering if they seriously tried? It seems like it would be easy to say that something is under investigation without making it a priority.
From the article they reported that at least the USDA, FBI, DHS, CBP, and USPS were involved in some forms of investigation:
How much effort they actually expended, how seriously these apparatuses took this issue, and what the final results of such effort are is not clear from the article, though. I would think this is the kind of thing which would be most optimally tackled with a cross-agency task-force, though. But, I don't know much about how the US federal government expends resources on such things.
In the end it wasn't a serious issue, and maybe that's why the governmental agencies and departments didn't escalate their investigations? There are ostensibly innumerable potential threats that turn out not to be serious, but actually performing that threat assessment on the candidates, especially something like this seemed to be relatively frequent and geographically distributed, seems like a good candidate. But maybe that's just hindsight?