Slashdot Mirror
New Privacy Concerns About US Program That Can Track Snail Mail
Lashdots writes: A lawyers' group has called for greater oversight of a government program that gives state and federal law enforcement officials access to metadata from private communications for criminal investigations and national security purposes. But it's not digital: this warrantless surveillance is conducted on regular mail. "The mail cover has been in use, in some form, since the 1800s," Chief Postal Inspector Guy J. Cottrell told Congress in November. The program targets a range of criminal activity including fraud, pornography, and terrorism, but, he said, "today, the most common use of this tool is related to investigations to rid the mail of illegal drugs and illegal drug proceeds." Recent revelations that the U.S. Postal Service photographs the front and back of all mail sent through the U.S., ostensibly for sorting purposes, has, Fast Company reports, brought new scrutiny—and new legal responses—to this obscure program.
Well, it is for sorting purposes. (They've got massive machines running Linux doing OCR which replaced manual sorting, and that requires... taking pictures of the mail.)
Right, but then the USPS was claiming that they simply threw away all of the resulting data when they were done with it. That's a ridiculous claim in every way.
Whether all the pictures are also retained is a completely different story. 10 years ago, I'd have said, "No; too expensive." But storage costs have plummeted, so nowadays, maybe so.
So what? They don't have to OCR anything that has a properly printed label; they just can it for bar codes. Those pieces of mail, which are the bulk of what passes through the postal system, never has to be photographed at all because they already know where it's coming from, where it's going, what it weighs and whether the package weight was reported accurately. The scans of the remaining minority of mail could quite reasonably be saved ten years ago, especially if you were not picky about resolution. Today, it's trivial.
But the real "so what" is that they are OCRing the mail, so even if they were throwing away all of those scans, they would still reasonably be storing the metadata. Why would you ever throw that away, unless forced? It's small, and it's valuable. But moreover, one of the Snowden revelations was that they are in fact storing all of that OCR data, it all gets handed straight to the feds. Before Snowden, it was generally believed (heh heh) that this data was simply flushed, and only the fringe believed that it was handed to the feds as a matter of course. Now we know that to be the case.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
A lot of our problems today are the result of people in power fundamentally misunderstanding what Big Data is good for.
We used to assume it was impractical for the Government to keep records of everything we do in the public sphere. Those things have gone from possible to practical to inevitable, mostly due to Moore's Law.
Just because you have everything recorded, doesn't mean it's useful, though. Technologists who should know better talk about searching these records to find the "needle in the haystack", selling the vision of complete records + powerful search tools = Total Awareness.
What they conveniently skip over is:
* All records have inaccuracies
* If the inaccuracy rate is higher than the occurrence rate of what you're searching for, the search is not useful
Consider medical screening tests. If you have a test with a false positive rate of 1 in 1000, it is useless to use such a test to search for a condition that happens to 1 in 1000000 - 999 times out of a thousand, the test will say you're sick when you're fine.
Now, consider:
* The error rate of address OCR
versus
* The rate of secrets being exchanged via US Mail
Anyone in the Government who can't produce an estimate of those two numbers shouldn't be allowed anywhere near those records - it would be like giving a child a loaded gun, or a politician a Twitter account.
To a Lisp hacker, XML is S-expressions in drag.
when the automated sorting system v.2 was installed, maybe 15 or 20 years ago, the USPS at that time said that they captured pictures of all mail. doubtless it was seen as a marvel of engineering that they did all that at one fell swoop, and a big boast. the initial automation system of the 70s/80s didn't.
if this is supposed to be a new economy, how come they still want my old fashioned money?