Anthrax To Kill Snail Mail

omnirealm writes "Steven Levy over at NBC expressed his opinion that the new anthrax thread in our snail-mail is going to be a major catalyst to a general switch to e-mail as the primary means of written communication."

Comments

you're more likely to die

[mj6798]

from an infected paper cut. Pardon me while I'm not worried. And until E-mail gets the same legal standing as snail mail (complete with legally recognized notarization, authentication, and proof of delivery) we can't replace snail mail.

Re:you're more likely to die

[einhverfr]

Of course, that is exactly the danger from cutanious (sp?) anthrax-- the infected paper-cut.

I have argued that disasterous bioterrorism is truly prohibitive. This current attack is not very effective at causing large numbers of deaths BUT it is bisible and makes people very nervous. If they wanted to kill people, explosives would be much better weapons, but that is not their goal. Instead it is to intimidate many people and make them FEAR death. And to this end, this little stunt may be very infected indeed. This is why lovebug, et. al. have not caused people to switch from Outlook, but this scare might impact the USPS-- the fear is not purportionate to the risk (I still consider using Outlook to be a bigger risk than snail mail).

But although email is already my primary means of written communication, there are some times when it is not as good as an old-fassioned letter. So I am not terribly concerned except to consider snailmail to be as dangerious as email...

Re:you're more likely to die

[cwhicks]

Yes. This is the stupidest premise I've heard in a while. First off, only the people who send mail can switch to email, and why would someone sending antrax want to switch? Secondly, how would switching help unless companies say they will only accept email, and no more snail mail. That sounds like a business ending decision. There is a large amount of stuff sent between businesses that is much more conveniently done through snail mail. Every business is going to buy scanners, have everyone get their electronic signature, purchase and instruct everyone in encryption, etc? All this because four, count em, four companies have received antrax email? How many companies have received mail bombs before this? And they still use mail? Wow!
My last question is why was this article posted to begin with?

Re:you're more likely to die

[spudnic]

Not only that, but are people going to stop using UPS and FedEx also? Is their some law stating that you can only send antrax via the "official" carrier (ie, USPS)?

Re:you're more likely to die

[Raunchola]

Hi! How are you? I send you this anthrax in order to have your advice.

See you later. Thanks.

Could be a good thing.

[kmcmartin]

In the interest of authentication, perhaps this would be a good thing. If more people used digital signatures, more people would likely find it easier to begin using encryption as well. NAI might be kicking themselves over selling off its PGP division after all. How do you know if the bill you got by email is really from your VISA company, and not from Evil Eve the Eavesdropper?

Most government officials would likely right this off as paranoia, and unnecessary because *nobody* would EVER want to wiretap its citizens and steal their credit card information.

What about authentication?

[jimhill]

It's interesting that Levy thinks the end of snail mail is in sight when digital means of authentication are rarely used -- when available. Now that Sen. Gregg and his like-minded compatriots have launched another offensive on crypto software, expect the issue to get even more snarled. It takes more than "Sincerely, Jim" at the bottom of an email to make me trust its source.

I thought this was supposed to happen years ago ..

[aliebrah]

Really, the average person doesn't need to be worried about getting anthrax in the mail. I don't think its much of an issue - at least its not for me.

People forget that snail mail is still very important to having an effective communications, as in many cases it can't be beat. The quickest way to get something physical from one place to another (barring courier services) is by mail. To say that the USPS is dead because no one will want to mail stuff is not only premature and unrealistic, but also quite sensationalistic. In most cases, this one especially you can tell when someone is making stuff up to make the headlines rather than writing stuff that actually makes good sense. Having read this article, it makes very little sense at all. As much as I use computers/email, I for one would be majorly pissed if one day I found mail service was no longer there.

People say time and time again the mail is dead. But just look ... its still there and doesn't show any sign of disappearing.

With all the talk of a new police state.....

[ainsoph]

You would think that the FBI would do a lot better than this with regards to the Anthrax "crisis".

I think it is pretty damn scary that they can ignore something like this for as long as they did.

FBI did not test suspect NBC package for 2 weeks


NEW YORK: The FBI failed to test the suspicious powder sent to an NBC employee in New York for two weeks and it was a private doctor who raised the alarm over the new case of anthrax, the New York Times reported on Saturday.

The report said that the FBI was notified about the powder on September 25, picked it up a day later but did not do any laboratory tests on the powder or take skin samples from the NBC employee who handled the package.

The report said that it was only after the NBC staffer - identified as 38-year-old Erin O' Connor - developed a sore on her chest, visited several doctors and was diagnosed with skin anthrax that the powder was tested.

The powder was eventually found to be negative. New York FBI chief Barry Mawn said that it was "unfortunate" the tests were not conducted immediately. Mawn said that the FBI had investigated dozens of suspicious substances since the September 11 terrorist attacks.


Unfortunate, yes but for the first few days that this was coming up they really tried to downplay it like it was not going on. On 'Politically Incorrect' a replublican strategist said they were thinking of suing CNN for falsly creating a Anthrax scare.

Doesnt look false to me.

Someone will come up with a snail mail virus scann

[mesocyclone]

Look at the money to be made! Maybe Symantec or McAfee can come up with a "virus" scanner for Snail Mail. Clearly its needed.

Re:Crude as this sentiment is....

[dhogaza]

Like on the good 'ole USA? (There's no proof thus far that these cases are the result of any external terrorist group. It could well be a good 'ole boy here in the US pissed of at "the libral media's showing Osama bin Laden's videotaped propaganda" or the like).

Mail beats Email

[maggard]

There a couple of serious impediments to abolishing mail.

1. Universal penetration. Everyone in the USA has a postal address. Park benches are legitimate delivery addresses (yes - tested in court.) Only a fraction of the population has email or will likely have such in the near future.
2. Universal transmission. I can send a postal letter around the world and assume that the recipient will be able to recieve it. From major world capitols to off-the-map slums postal service has a reasonably good tradition of getting through. Email again requires that the recipient haave the same or some alternative last-mile system - not at all typical.
3. There are no good address-lookup or general-delivery mechanisms for email. If I want to contact Somebody at BigCorp I can look up BigCorp's address and send a letter to Somebody there, it'll generally get manually routed properly. If I know the town Somebody lives in I can often simply look them up in a ubiquitious phonebook or online and assuming they're listed and have a sufficiently unique name I've got their address. There are some services that attempt to provide this for email but they're mostly useless.
4. There's a large body of law concerning the privacy of letters, the delivery of such, etc. This is NOT the case for email. Frankly I trust the folks of the USPS to transport my mail securely & reliably far more then I do the monkeys at my ISP and the servers between me & my email's destination.
5. While there are encryption and authenticaion mechanisms for email they're about useless as far as the general population or even most businesses are concerned. Postal mail has no authentication but it does generally get delivered to the right place securely.
6. Most postal addresses are good for both letters & package deliveries, neither of which is true for email.
7. Postal mail is free to recieve and only costs the sender some change. Email requires either a computer system and ISP or access to a public facility offering this.
8. Courts don't recognize email as a delivery mechanism and certianly not for material that must be signed for.

   Frankly with 1 case of transmission of anthrax by postal mail I think the whole topic is foolish and a sad attempt by a columnist to get some attention.

What does metal music have to do with this?

[jmauro]

I mean first, metal music was forcing kids to kill themselves, then metal music was forcing kids to kill their parents. Then, Tipper Gore thought metal music was destroying America. Now, Anthrax is killing the USPS? Who'd of thought. I always thought the RIAA wanted to prevent music transfered over the internet. Now others want Anthrax transmitted over email. How weird.

In other news, Anthrax is going to change it's name to "Basket Full Of Puppies"

feh.

[motherhead]

Insane. A handful of jackasses mail a handful of poison apples and one writer has an epiphany that an America will now forsake using the postal system.

I send or respond to hundreds of emails a day, as I am sure quite a few of us do, personally I find it is the differences between email and snail mail that make it cornerstone of society.

Email lets me communicate to someone using electronic representations of words or images. Powerful stuff, certainly powerful enough to conduct business and maintain strong lines of communication with family and friends.

But snail mail allows my kids, my wife, to create something for me physically and to send it thousands of miles away for me to hold in my hands, if you ever got a perfumed letter from your woman when you have been jonesing for her for weeks, you realize why email is not a final postal solution.

Never mind that I do 60% of my shopping online and receive parcels in a timely fashion from all four corners of this country and from a couple others. Never mind that if an old acquaintance wants to contact me the odds of him finding my physical address is greater then him stumbling into my email address. Never mind that letters written by pen usually have greater value both in terms of the thought that went into them and to the appreciation of the reader.

Yeah junk mail sucks ass and needs to be addressed and destroyed. I am not saying snail mail is not silly with flaws. What I am saying is this is horseshit. We lived through the unibomber and if you are old enough you might remember that in the early seventies mail-bombs were flying around in a near epidemic. Unibomber-boy (teddy K) did not invent it. And hey look, the problem is so bad most of the kids on slash dot won't have a clue about it.

Man when bored journalists with deadlines write shitty pieces I don't get upset, I know a job is a job. But responding/reacting to it is just plain stupid.

I'm sick of this anthrax bullshit.....

[garett_spencley]

Okay, I'm very sick of the media and government trying to scare people by making them believe that they are at threat from biological and chemical weapons used by terrorists.

The fact of the matter is that biological and chemical weapons just aren't practical. They are pretty fucking dangerous, I won't argue that. But they are very impractical as weapons of mass destruction.

For example, out of the thousands of people in the subway in tokyo where a bunch of wacko's sprayed sarin gas only 12 people were killed. 12 out of thousands. A success? I say no.

You see, first of all it takes a lot of money and people with very huge educations just to produce the stuff. Then it is incredibly hard and dangerous to transport it. You run the risk of infecting yourself.

But the real reason that we aren't going to see a whole lot of these attacks is because the payload just isn't high enough. After spending millions of dollars to produce the stuff, expending a couple chemists who died in the shitty-ass lab in afghanistan producing it you've only killed a couple people. It's much cheaper, easier and kills a lot more people to just set off a bomb in some building.

But what about just making people sick? After all there was something like 5500 people pooring into the hospitals in tokyo after the sarin gass. Well what they didn't tell you is that 90% of those people were just people who panicked because they were in the subway that day and wanted to get checked out.

And don't forget that before that incident the same terrorist group had tried to use anthrax. They sprayed the shit off a building onto a group of civilians and no one was infected by it.

I read a good article about this written by a phd in microbiology. It contains many more facts that I haven't discussed. You can read it here.

--
Garett

Re:I'm sick of this anthrax bullshit.....

[dgroskind]

The fact of the matter is that biological and chemical weapons just aren't practical.

In fact, there has already been a successful biological attack on American soil. It was carried out in 1984 by a bunch of amateurs, followers of Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh, who poisoned over 700 people with botulism that they spread on salad bars in Oregon.

The 9/11 terrorists have shown themselves to be resourceful, if not practical, and ruthless enough to use biological weapons. One could have once argued, with equal logic, that hijacking airliners and crashing them into skyscrapers "was just not practical".

If news reports are to be believed, the U.S. mail has already proved to be viable way of spreading two different kinds of anthrax. The only constraint of using the mail is the thousands of dollars involved in postage for a mass mailing.

It's much cheaper, easier and kills a lot more people to just set off a bomb in some building.

On a cost per thousand basis, there's nothing cheaper than biological weapons, particularly if you use a contageous one like smallpox, as the article you cite suggests at the end. The writer of that article seems to think the fact that the terrorists themselves might be at risk is a deterent.

Although there may be some technological hurdles, the payoff both in terms of casualties and creating terror is unbeatable.

If people are complacent about the threat of biological terrorism, the terrorists have already overcome their biggest obstacle.

your reps are all spammed out

[Alien54]

At least that would mean that our representatives in government might start actually reading email.

uh, no.

Simply put the reps are all spammed out. Every single interest group in the country country can send thousands of email to a rep, complete with slightly varied names and subject lines, and content. It is a trivial programing problem to generate sentences and paragraphs out of a database with calibration for education level and other demographics. Any programmer competent in databases could set something like this up.

So the only way reps can verify that the input is legit is if it is postmarked from their district, hand written, etc.

You think you get Junk Mail? multiply what you get by a factor of a thousand or two for snail mail, especially if you live in an important district.

So the odds of them actually reading email are slim and none. Think of them being under a continous DDOS attack for the past 5+ years, if not more. They probably pick out one out of every 100 or 200 or so at random, and use that as a sample of what they get

Re:How crazy is this?

[ergo98]

Someone targets airplanes, and people stop flying. Someone targets mail, and people stop using mail. Is this kind of a response reasonable? There's a lot of knee-jerk reactions which are not necessarily effective, and the economic effects of wholesale eschewment of mail and air travel are pretty widespread.

Yet in other areas people are so incredibly complacent. People will put off travel despite an impossibly remote possibility of being a victim of travel, but they'll happily hop on the local highway without regard for hundreds of 20,000lb transports hurtling down the road at 75mph all around them, any of which could crush them to death in the slightest instant if the driver just flicked the steering wheel the tiniest bit. 41,611 people were killed in automobile accidents alone in 1999 on US roads. 430,700 people died per year between 1990 and 1994 from cigarette smoking alone. It's quite stunning really the fear that the media can drum up when we come to live with enormously costly things like the millions that die every year because of voluntarily choosing to eat Big Macs and other high saturated fat foods.

I'm not saying that dying at the hand to terrorists is comparable to voluntarily undertaken risks, but it does seem that some things are being grossly overstated, such as the risks of anthrax.

Re:Hmm....

[spudnic]

No, because it's far too easy for someone to do this:

http://home.jam.rr.com/netadmin/duh2.html

Forms of snail Mail that won't go away

[Picass0]

No matter how much you may think mail sent to you on dead trees is outdated, there are reasons the old fashoined mail is not going away for a good long time.

• Postal mail creates jobs
• packages - What's the point in all this e-commerce if nobody has anything delivered anymore?
• Utility Bills - Until some laws are changed you must be provided with an invoice for your purchase and written notification of money owed.
• Taxes - Like anything done by the government, this ones going to be done the old world way for a long time.
• Books and periodicals - Some people (myself included) prefer to read anything of great length on paper. Also there is a certain pride in owning a handsome book, admiring the cover as you put it away on a shelf, where you will never touch it again.
• registered mail - any sort of mail that requires a signature is coming to you the old fashioned way. I know, there's a million technical solutions that would make this work as digital, but your written signature is an important legal tool that people will continue to hit you over the head with forever.

If the day comes when the government says snail mail is going away, watch out. If you think Uncle Sam has opinions about your computer and the software you run now, wait until you see the regulations that will be imposed on email.

One thing that may happen as fallout is small business may get out of the private delivery business. The mail is now going to need to be x-rayed and electronically sniffed. Business such as a Mial Box Express or Joe's overnight delivery are not going to have money for the new array of equiptment that they will be told they must own.

The things that will work to reduce the amount of snail mail - Mail is about to become slower and less reliable. When a pathogen is discovered in the mail, any parcels that may have physically contacted it will need to be destroyed.

People are now uneasy to open a package or parcel they were not expecting. This will make it less likely for advertisements to continue to be sent via mail. Expect to see an increase in Spam, and a relaxation in laws that control it.

Not the end of snailmail, the end of junkmail

[Col. Panic]

Someone is only going to fear opening a package when they don't know who is sending the letter/package. We will still open letters from family and friends since we recognize the return address. Likewise, when we order things by mail we are expecting them to arrive and can be reasonably sure of their safety.

I think the columnist may have an argument when it comes to *unsolicited* snail mail. This may have an impact on public figures who regularly receive unsolicited mail from lots of people, but that could be a positive impact. Right now a written letter to one's Congress-critter is considered more effective than email, but maybe this unfortunate situation will make public officials consider email more legitimate now since they might be reluctant to receive "real" mail.

Solution: irradiate all snail-mail

[Dr. Zowie]

Irradiation of hand-written mail would sterilize anything passing through the irradiator and leave no radioactive residue. It would mean an end to sending live things (I've traded sourdough via email) and radiation sensitive items like electronic parts or film would have to be marked specially or sent another way -- but routine irradiation would make it much, much harder to sneak live anything into someone's mail.

Re:What is an "Anthrax thread"?

[budgenator]

I was an NBC, Nuclear, Biological, Chemical, Defense NCO before I retired so here goes. Note I don't know your actual needs, threat levels ect. so your milage may vary, these are My own opinions and don't reflect any org's official policies, this is not intended to be authorative info so do your own research ect.

• Spores are used because they are more hardy than active bacteria, basicaly spores are desicated bacteria. That's why 70 percent alcohol is used to disinfect stronger alcohol would dryout the bacteria and actualy make them harder to kill (anthrax spores remain viable for as long as a half century)
• To get the spores, you need to grow the bacteria, use generaly use agar, beef brooth or something simmilar (I'm not sure what you would use for anthrax, but it can't be that hard to find out)
• once you get the bacteria grown, you dry out the culture media, maybe freeze-dry or something now you have a very concetrated source of bacteria spores. typicaly this is powdered and has a color similar to the culture media a brown, tan or dried blood color depending on the original culture media
• dilute the concentrated spore powder with a carrier like talcum powder to an appropriate working strength
• dust the carrier with the powder and deliver

To defend against this:

1. publish a policy that all mail to your organisation maybe open in the mail room, set up so a random number of pieces are checked, and anything suspicious.
2. open the mail in an isolation enviroment, look at OSHA's Bloodborne pathogens standard for guidelines on doing this
3. watch-out for powders, things that are fluorecent, maybe consider spraying with luminal to detect blood, unexpected arivials or thing that are out of character; why would you get porno pics in your biz mail ect.
4. Still unsure consider using ethylene-oxide sterilization of the mail

Actualy considering the threat from natural stuff like hepitius-B Aids, and even cold-flu viruses, these proceedures may actualy save lost time expenses from natural illnesses too.

Personaly I consider that mail to people in your distribution channel to be at higher risk than other employees, because they handle thing that are in turn redistributed to others. Given the long incubation times between contact and symptoms for most things, a problem here would spread long before any one would know there is a problem. Its not that hard to get your janitor to put disinfectants in his cleaning solutions, use vacuumes with HEPA filtrations ect.

I'm a dental technician now and we have to recieve bio-hazardous material routinely and follow the osha standards at work, the result is I always catch my cold from the wife and kids first! this stuff works. If your org expereinces a lot of absenteeism due to illness, infection control training may actualy be profitable due to reduced absentee expenses