Gov photos all post envelopes

By PeraclesPlease on Wed, 07/03/2013 - 2:41pm |

For those who say there's nothing new in PRISM, well yeah, there might be new tricks in related programs.

Every letter you send is photographed. One might imagine they also use Optical Character Recognition to have digital searchable records of Date, From & To names + addresses for every one of 160 billion postal items a year.

Quite frankly I'm a bit shocked - where VOIP calls in digital form and emails and other digital content is simple to grab & search, this mail filming operation is huge and fairly manually intensive - every single item.

What's next, drones used to record a temperature fingerprint of every home, just in case? What else can surprise us?

URL:

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/04/us/monitoring-of-snail-mail.html?_r=0

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It'd be nice if they monitored every gun.

by Orion on Wed, 07/03/2013 - 6:10pm

Having studied OCR as part of my PhD research, you might be interested in knowing that the post office's use of OCR is often highlighted in survey discussions of the topic. It seems that their OCR is better at reading handwriting than most humans. (It helps that they're able to make certain assumptions about the structure of what they're reading.) It's always been presented as useful in helping mail to automatically get to where it's supposed to go, but now I think there might be another reason. The government has always been willing to spend more money on military and surveillance technology…

by Verified Atheist on Thu, 07/04/2013 - 7:06am

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