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Comment by logn | Hacker News Reader

I'm pretty sure the government is delighted by Silk Road so that they can finally justify searching all physical mail in some very advanced way. HN, you're always asking for startup ideas, why not just get totally evil and invent technology to scan physical mail at scale and hook it into PRISM? You'd stand to make at least millions if you did it right. Oh, and part of doing it right is making sure there's some alternate not-so-evil use case you can demo, like idk, automatically adding grandma's birthday cards to your facebook feed and automatically depositing her checks into your checking account.

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> I'm pretty sure the government is delighted by Silk Road so that they can finally justify searching all physical mail in some very advanced way.

Aside from the issue that SR has been running for almost 3 years now without anyone introducing such legislation - they already scan the outsides of all letters or packages indefinitely, and can easily search anytime they want to. The legal niceties aren't why drugs by mail still work, it's because the USPS alone handles literally billions of things a year and the screening problem (economical, not too high false positive, USPS does not benefit in any way) is really hard.

The government* is also trying to kill USPS by placing unreasonable pension requirements on it. Sort of hard to justify that when you actually start needing it to fight crime.

*The people elected to run it.

Considering the level of access that government agency's have it is amazing to me that they have not been more effective in clamping down on the drugs trade. Considering the amount of goods and money that is flowing; does that not leave a detectable trace? Is it really that difficult to find?

I don't have the links handy, but it's well know that mail has been photographed for years and it seems likely that PRISM or some gov database is already ingesting this information. Seems like an easy step to upgrade the camera to something that attempts to scan contents.

https://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/04/us/monitoring-of-snail-ma...

“In the past, mail covers were used when you had a reason to suspect someone of a crime,” said Mark D. Rasch, who started a computer crimes unit in the fraud section of the criminal division of the Justice Department and worked on several fraud cases using mail covers. “Now it seems to be, ‘Let’s record everyone’s mail so in the future we might go back and see who you were communicating with.’ Essentially you’ve added mail covers on millions of Americans.”

Envelopes have been photographed for years. The worry is that they'll start scanning package contents.

Just have to photograph them at higher wavelengths. 390-700nm is fine and all, but somewhere around 10nm or so should do the trick...

Perhaps there could be a market on SR for little pieces of x-ray sensitive photographic film. Customers could pay providers a slight premium to include the film in the shipment. If the customer discovers that the film was exposed, they know that they've fallen onto somebodies radar.

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