Homeland security opens history professor's mail.

Grant Goodman is an eighty-one-year-old professor emeritus of Asian history at the University of Kansas.

For years, he's had an ongoing correspondence, by snail mail, with a former professor of history at the University of the Philippines, where Goodman taught on three separate occasions.

In early December, he received a letter from her that had been tampered with.

"The bottom of the envelope had been slashed open and then retaped with green tape," says Goodman. "And it said, 'Opened by Border Protection' in great big letters. The U.S. Department of Homeland Security seal is on it, too."

A spokesman for Homeland Security told the Lawrence Journal-World, which broke the story, that "he didn't know how often the agency opened mail from abroad. And he wouldn't discuss the criteria for opening letters."

Goodman won't release the name of the former professor in the Philippines, but says she is in her mideighties and hardly a security risk.

"This is a very devout Catholic woman who goes to six o'clock mass every evening, and I don't know what they would be interested in her for," he says.

Goodman is amazed at the crudeness of Homeland Security. In his historical research, he saw many better examples.

"I know how the Japanese opened mail," he says. "In the 1930s, they were very good at it. The people whose mail they were reading didn't even know they had opened it."