While you were in the US your snail mail (addresses) were being scanned anyway. This was pre-911.
slate.com
During the Watergate hearings in 1973, postal mail surveillance was one of the issues brought to light. The programs were stopped, but mail covers continue to this day. In a criminal case, the USPS can be authorized use mail covers: to take photos of and record the information on the outside container, envelope, or label of anything it handles, and it may record the name and address of the sender and recipient, along with the place and date of the postmark, into a database. According to a source familiar with mail covers, there are tens of thousands of mail covers performed each year.
Mail covers aren’t supposed to be exploratory, and they don’t include the contents of whatever’s inside. To obtain a mail cover, law enforcement must first submit paperwork to the Postal Inspection Service in Chicago proving that there’s a criminal investigation under way.
But the USPS is collecting similar information on almost all mail, not just mail that is subject to covers. For example, you know those barcodes on the bottoms of our envelopes? The USPS scans those using a wide field camera and takes super-high resolution photographs of the back and front of most mail pieces—again, not the stuff inside—for sorting and diagnostic purposes. It’s actually because of the USPS that we have widespread optical character recognition technology in widespread use now. Before cameras and computers, postal workers would have to sort all mail by hand, making best guesses on illegible writing and trying to keep all correspondence in the right batches. These days, multiline OCR readers let the USPS sort thousands of pieces of mail per minute.
OCR software automatically extracts the text on an envelope and imports it into a database for later sorting and analysis. After the anthrax and ricin incidents, the USPS was able to track the pieces of mail before and after the contaminated letters to narrow down the source. |
