U.S. Postal Service To Develop 'Intelligent Mail' 345
securitas writes "The President's Commission on the U.S. Postal Service's final report (PDF) has recommended that the USPS and the Department of Homeland Security develop sender identification technology for all U.S. mail. The commission said Intelligent Mail could bolster security and let consumers track the progress of all mail they send, which has been a top consumer demand in surveys. The report released July 31 reads, "Each piece of Intelligent Mail will carry a
unique, machine-readable barcode (or other indicia) that will
identify, at a minimum, the sender, the destination, and the class
of mail... Intelligent Mail will allow the
real-time tracking of individual mail pieces." Privacy advocates like the EFF and Center for Democracy & Technology are understandably concerned. The Final Recommendations are available in PDF format. More at Direct Marketers News and pro-privacy/civil liberties magazine Counterpunch."
Jamie adds: This confuses me, because I read a news story in late 2001 which matter-of-factly explained that authorities would be contacting recipients of letters which went through a particular post office around the same time as an anthrax envelope. The implication, which I haven't seen any discussion of then or since, is that records are kept of every letter's travels through every post office. Anyone know anything about that?
Update:
mec does.
HA! (Score:5, Informative)
Having worked at a post office clerk in a former life, I would say you must be kidding. I personally handled 25,000 letters a day, and I wasn't in automation, which does 50,000 letters per station per hour. You just don't have time to record any sort of information about first class mail.
What they probably meant is that they would check on letters with return addresses or was sent registered or certified. Registered, Certified and Insured mail DID get that sort of record keeping, for obvious reasons.
Or, this is different from USPS how? (Score:3, Informative)
Of corse, it costs extra. But why force everyone to pay for it?
Re:Inconvenience is overwhelming (Score:4, Informative)
Re:A possible way... (Score:2, Informative)
Sender == The person from whom the letter is sent. This is not always available, and even when it is available, there is no way to verify that it originated there.
Bottom line: Jaime's comment is really stupid. OF COURSE they have information relating to who got mail. That has nothing to do with information relating to who SENT mail.
Re:Inconvenience is overwhelming (Score:3, Informative)
Re:RFID (Score:2, Informative)
The barcode would have to indicate the class of mail (not difficult), the sender (tricky if not impossible), and the destination (definitely impossible to determine at time of sale of the stamp).
Let's assume the destination isn't a big deal and just focus on how to identify the sender. Sometimes I buy stamps in rolls of 100. I order them by mail, and I'm the only one who uses them. So that would be pretty easy for the post office to handle.
Other people have families, and typically one person buys the stamps. Maybe not a huge issue; you can still basically tell where the letter came from. Of cousre, there's no law preventing me from giving someone else a stamp, and for the stamp to identify the sender there'd pretty much have to be.
Sometimes I go to the post office and buy stamps from a vending machine. It doesn't have the hardware to identify me. How should it identify me? SSN? What about foreigners on visas? (Never mind the now-laughable concept that SSN isn't supposed to be a national ID number.)
Hotels, convenience stores, news stands... all kins of places sell stamps. So will we take that convenience away, or will we require them to collect user ID info and encode it on the stamps they sell? How will they encode it on each stamp when the stamps are pre-packaged in books or rolls? How will the government prevent tampering with such a system ("For an extra $.05/stamp, I'll identify you as John Doe from Asshat, MI.")?
Re:A possible way... (Score:3, Informative)
Tracking of Anthrax Letter Yields Clues [ucla.edu]
I also remember reading that they save the sender's information as well. It was in an anthrax story that said they went to all the curbside mailboxes where all the pieces that were close to an anthrax-related piece had been sent.
There is already s system partially in place (Score:4, Informative)
Re:I am a US Postal Employee (Score:2, Informative)
BIG Misconception - We don't give a damn about anything above the address line unless it is a business/non-person entity, or a building (by name).
You could be John Smith Jr and get mail addressed as Michael Jackson. As long as the address is correct, it goes there.
I said specifically, MOST of the problem lies with bad addressing. Granted things happen like letters getting stuck in mail trays at facilities and not being discovered for a few days, but putting mail through manual sorting because some dumbass neglected to add a St or Ave and we have to hunt down a solution is extremely time consuming.
USPS already has this (Score:4, Informative)
Ah, you don't need it there in one or two days or in a lockbox? Sorry, you can only confirm delivery with the other trackable services they offer - certified, insured, merch return receipt ("brown label"), delivery or signature confirmation (which are only offered for priority mail (which is pretty much just first class mail weighing more than 13 ounces)), etc. And again, those only update once per day.
Keep in mind that this is a government run institution, so their internal capabilities are pretty underwhelming - as such, the ability to track mail in real time (something that all private overnight couriers offer) would be far too overwhelming to the USPS. If you want to know how underwhelming, to give you an idea, last I checked our local processing and distribution facility in Anaheim Hills, there was a bank of XTs and PC286 machines whose purpose in life it was to handle the scanning of PostNET barcodes (you know, those dual-length lines you'll probably find near the address or bottom of the envelope on an article of snail mail you get if you're in the US.) Now just think, do you think that they're going to use a beowulf cluster of 286 and XT boxen to electronically store every article of mail that passes through this little rinky-dink P&DF (one fo two in Orange County, CA)? They pass tons of mail per day, they just don't have the power there, and if they're still running said boxes, do you think they're going to fix what ain't broke? This is the government we're talking about.
Said barcode, by the way, is a twelve digit code that pretty much boils down to which box the letter lands in, with an added check digit (each digit in the 11 digit portion is added together, check is n, where n is the next multiple of 10 minus the total of the added numbers). Hardly privacy invasion. Example: PO Box 62 in Fullerton 92836 would wind up being a barcode that reads "928360062626". (The total of the first eleven is 44, next mult of 10 is 50, ergo 50-44=6.)
Don't even ask how I know this shite, it's less painful.
scanners (Score:3, Informative)