Feds: Postal Service photographs every piece of mail it processes | Hacker News Reader

Feds: Postal Service photographs every piece of mail it processes

thesmokinggun.com

24 points01PH7 comments

I thought it had been common knowledge that the way handwritten mail is sorted is that it is barcoded and photographed, and then the address is keyed on by a human.

It doesn't take much imagination that these days each such address is kept, and that the three-letter agencies have a sample of everyone's handwriting, in case it is needed.

Only if the OCR couldn't process it, although the OCR has gotten a lot better so the "Remote Encoding Centers" see a lot less volume. You could always tell when your mail failed the OCR in the past because it would have a faint orange barcode printed on it -- this was used to track it through the human encoding system at the RECs.

The title is like an onion article. Of course it's photographed as it's sent--how do you think all that mail is sorted and processed?

Relevant: This NYT article from last month that profiled the mail scanning system and visual triage that is used to process the many unreadable pieces of mail that come through:

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/04/us/where-mail-with-illegib...

I guess it makes sense that every piece of mail is "photographed" at some point...in the sense that a scan is a photograph. So the act of photographing each mail isn't a surprise.

But, as opposed to the Verizon and PRISM cases, when you send a piece of snail-mail, you are literally sending it to the government to be handled, have its "metadata" read and recorded as necessary as a means for it to be sent to its destination.

On the other hand, the aggregation of data and retention of such may not be something we're all happy with, so what's the policy on that?

"when you send a piece of snail-mail, you are literally sending it to the government to be handled, have its "metadata" read and recorded as necessary as a means for it to be sent to its destination."

But I don't expect the metadata to be retained indefinitely (except if I requested special services such as tracking or proof of delivery). That has nothing to do with delivering my mail to its destination, just like the phone company retaining my personally identifiable GPS data indefinitely has nothing to do with providing phone service.

In other news, google knows the to and from address of every email sent from gmail.

More interesting to me is where did the bimbo come up with ricin? I don't think that product has a SKU at most department stores.

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