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U.S. Postal Service To Develop 'Intelligent Mail'
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.
So, I guess RFIDs will be embedded into paper at some point in the future I would think.
Life is not for the lazy.
Not sure how you are going to identify the sender AND have postboxes where anyone can post a letter.
Omnis amans amens
The stamp is now $2.47
Make sure to go out and buy special $2.10 stamps to use with your existing $0.37 ones.
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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?
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.
I didn't realize that I have a right to send anonymous mail. The practical aspects are the killer for me. If I can't just drop a letter in a mail bin then the US postal service is too restrictive for me to use. I'm not going to go to the post office, stand in line, get ID'ed just to send a letter. I can pay my bills on-line. This seems like a great way to put the USPS out of business.
The more tracking information we allow to be used, the technological conveniences we embrace, the greater the need to keep watch to make sure they are not abused. Technology is a good thing, but like fire, it must be carefully watched.
If we turn lazy and complacent, the price will be our own freedom.
The problem isn't stupid PO Employees, its the fact that PO employees are so bound down by beurocratic rules and regulations that they can't do anything outside of exactly what they're supposted to do. It's not stupid employees per se, it's stupid people at the top making the rules
My initial reaction to reading this was, 'so what?' After all, UPS and FedEx do this to their packages, and it's particularly useful for online purchases.
...
From page xvii of the report:
"Intelligent Mail could allow the Postal Service to permit mail-tracking and other in-demand services via a robust website..."
So it seems like they're going the UPS/FedEx route, and making it a useful tool for users of the postal system.
However, later on in the report (pp. 147-148):
"Intelligent Mail's Security Applications Should be Aggressively Pursued"
"Requiring all mail to identify its sender would likely have a negligible impact on most users...[they] would consider such a requirement a relatively modest concession to ensure their safety"
They're using the same flawed argument that they used in many post-9/11 dealings, including the Patriot Act. Great.
The biggest problem with mail arriving late lies with people unable to write, unable to address, and unable to even stamp mailpieces properly.
How the badly addressed mail process works in short:
Mail is brought to the General Mail Facility, where it is run through machines that attempt to read the addresses. The software isn't perfect, quite a few aren't readable to it. The digital image is sent to various Remote Encoding Sites in which people (like me) try to decipher the addresses and input them properly. The information is sent back to the GMF, barcode is printed on, and the piece goes its way. If we cannot decipher it, the image gets rejected, and the mailpiece goes to manual sorting.
Why it takes so long sometimes
A tremendous amount of people do not know how to address. They do not include directionals. They do not include street suffixes. Transposition of zip codes, or downright incorrect ones in contrast to the city destination. If you want your mail to get somewhere fast, place a Zip+4 and make sure it is correct. That is the first number we look at.
Directionals and suffixes are important. An especially frustrating case is the Kansas City metro area. Where there can be a 31st Street, Place, Avenue, Road, Circle, Court, Terrace. On top of that, North/South/East/West.
Abbreviation of streets and cities is another frustrating issue. I work in Wichita, KS. We receive images from facilities in Kansas, Nebraska, South Dakota, North Dakota, Minnesota, Illinois, Wisconsin, Iowa, Missouri, and New York. Some street in Minneapolis with a long name that is routinely abbreviated by residents is foreign to those 800 miles away. Please write the street in full.
Zip Codes. These are very important. The computers read these first. We read these first. An irritating tendancy for people in the northeast is to drop off the 0 in their 5 digit zips. This is especially true in Connecticut. Ever wonder why sometimes it really takes 7-9 days for something to go across town? Because its getting sent to Kansas City and run through the system before it gets straightened out and sent back.
Lastly, bad handwriting. Try to be careful about 5 and S, Zero and O, and 9 and 4.
Didja know that USPS uses Linux systems to do OCR on address information? It's the only serious use of Linux at USPS, mostly due to anal government service employees who barely managed to finish high school and who can't be fired due to union seniority.
Actually, USPS has been looking into a mail tracking system since just after 9/11 (I worked there on and after 9/11 for a while) and this report will just help them get funding for that system.
Really, this isn't a terribly bad thing. If you think about it, it just verifies what post office the mail came from. The information about the sender is going to be the information that the sender presented at the post office of origin for verification.... to a non-trained government employee who probably could make more cash working at mcdonalds (no bull, I have a great deal of respect for those letter carriers... out in all weather, and most get paid about $20k a year).
I also can't imagine that there will be human checks of the sender information in a lot of cases, since there are drop boxes all over the place for mail, and there's no way they can either remove those or staff them with people.
Yet another easily subvertable federal system meant to make us safer, but really just another way to spend gobs of your tax dollars on things we need less than more prisons and better schools.
Erik
Boggle.
I am waiting for the moment when it occurs to these people that it's too easy to use the USA road system for criminal or terrorist activity. Or just sidewalks, for that matter.
Thank god that they don't have any idea that computer networks exist. If they are that apprehensive about a postal system, just imagine the hysterics they'll have when they discover the Internet...
Kaa
Kaa's Law: In any sufficiently large group of people most are idiots.
I work for an organization that sends information to over 20k low income families all over the US. One of our biggest complaints here in the office is a family claiming stuff must have been "lost in the mail", so we end up spending thousands of dollars just resending the same information to them throughout the year. This system would help us keep our records up to date and cut our overall mailing costs. Plus, I suspect it might keep people in our program longer and reduce our attrition rates. I'd be curious to find out how many families we lose based solely on the fact that we don't have the right address for them or some Mail center in Arizona or Alaska seems to always 'lose' our mail.
-n-
I use to work for a company that sent tens of thousands of collection notices (outsourced). There was a postal program that they were wanting to beta for tracking mail. It wasnt real time, there was like a day delay, and I think the last point it could track was the destination P.O. but it did track the mail they sent out. The letter itself just had a little bit of extra coding in the same area they use for address change notification. (If you ever look at your mail from a large volume mailer, you'll see a #XYZXYZZ and sometimes a code after it. Those first 7 characters is the mailer, who will receive back the change of address information. The characters following is an optional user defined account number. That service is called ACS (Address Change Service). Its not much of leap after that to tag it for tracking. Anyway, the USPS does use optical scanners that can read and OCR the mail provided its automation ready. Not the greatest OCR because it can have issues with fonts. It wouldnt be a huge jump to be able to track the mail. What slows things down considerably is handwritten addresses which end up being psuedo-hand routed. If you want to avoid any tracking, my recommendation is go handwriting, I cant imagine them using the resources to retype and label every single piece of mail that doesnt hit automation standards.
Some more link whoring ...
Postal Theory: Mail Sorter Acted as Mill for Anthrax
Read down towards the bottom:
Potentially telltale mail was identified using masses of computer data recorded as each letter entering the highly automated sorting centers is scanned for an address, given identifying bar codes recording its time and place of posting, and sent on its way.
The data include digital images of almost every hand-addressed envelope, which optical scanners cannot easily read, postal officials said.
The big question is: will the post office stop delivering mail that doesn't have a valid return address?
In the time of the Unabomer, the PO stopped delivering mail that weighs over one pound and came from a collection box. Mail that weighs over one pound has to be brought in person to a post office.
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.
This sig no verb.