

Feds: Postal Service photographs every piece of mail it processes  - 01PH
http://thesmokinggun.com/documents/woman-arrested-for-obama-bloomberg-ricin-letters-687435

======
HarryHirsch
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.

~~~
akira2501
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.

------
rayiner
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?

------
danso
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...](http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/04/us/where-mail-with-illegible-
addresses-goes-to-be-read.html?pagewanted=all)

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?

~~~
greenyoda
_" 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.

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

------
PhantomGremlin
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.

