U.S. Post Office to Enable Wholesale Surveillance of Mail

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IF YOU'RE NOT PARANOID, TH YOU'RE NOT PAYING ATTENTION!

 

 

 

U.S. Post Office to Enable Wholesale Surveillance of Mail

via Schneier on Securityby schneier on 2/21/08

The post office is launching a new barcode on first class mail that will enable the sender to track mail through the system:

With the new bar code, companies will be able to track mail delivery and know when their customers got a bill, solicitation or product, and the Postal Service will have another way of checking that mail is being delivered on time.Companies also will be given a chance to buy data collected by the post office that will give them insights into how customers respond to advertising and marketing. A company, for instance, can buy a television or newspaper ad to tout a new product, follow up with an announcement in the mail and get a sense of how well the ad is connecting with customers.

So now the government will have a database of who sends mail to whom. Of course, there's no discussion of this in the news article. IF YOU'RE NOT PARANOID, THEN YOU'RE NOT PAYING ATTENTION!