Sorting It All Out: The Long Lost Bastard Children of the United States Postal Service
by Pop Rob
Years ago, I worked as a data conversion operator for the United States Postal Service Remote Encoding Center. That may sound important if you are unfamiliar with the job, but when it comes down to it, we were simply doing data entry. At its height, my facility employed around one thousand people who all worked assorted hours, day and night, typing in ZIP Codes and addresses deemed unreadable by the sorting machines at the postal processing plants. I worked there for about five years, and something always nagged at me as I sat there night after night at my static-colored desk, keying millions of random addresses from mail pieces: "Where do these images go next?" and "Are there images of every mail piece sent saved somewhere?"
Let me back up here for a bit of history - in 1994, the USPS established the Remote Encoding Centers (or RECs) as a temporary solution to help with processing mail with unreadable addresses. When mail is processed at sorting facilities, everything is run through sorting machines that scan the face of the package or envelope with optical character readers. If the scanner is unable to read the address on the mail piece, it transmits an electronic image to a REC, where the image would then be displayed on a terminal for one of the data conversion operators to key in what they see displayed for the mail piece. Sometimes the system would ask for the specific information needed - postage type, street address, ZIP Code, etc. Then, the information is transmitted back to the processing plant where a barcode strip (usually seen on the bottom of envelopes) would be applied to the mail piece to get it to the right destination. This is similar to what happens if you have ever moved and had your mail forwarded to another location - the sorting machines check to see if there is a Change of Address (or COA) in the system, and a yellow sticker with the updated information is printed and plastered over the previous address. By 1997, the USPS had 55 RECs open across the nation with thousands of people employed for this task. However, the plan was never to keep these centers open forever. A combination of decreasing letter volume and improving scanning technology would quickly bring better readers at the plants that would reduce the need for the encoding centers. Mine was one of many that shut down in a consolidation effort back in 2007. Today, only one lone REC remains in Salt Lake City, Utah - which employs more than 1,200 workers who process around four million images a day.
In our post-9/11 world, why wouldn't our government agencies take advantage of the resource of having a record of physical correspondence sent from one person to another? The NSA has collected phone records since the dinosaurs. The entire Internet is nothing more than an elaborate market research experiment. Surely there is a vast database somewhere holding the history of what has traveled through the mail stream. A simple Google search confirmed my theory: In 2013, a New York Times interview with then Postmaster General Patrick R. Donahoe confirmed that the USPS uses imaging to photograph each envelope and package that passes through. After all, they have to be scanned to be sorted to the right location. He also verified publicly that it is practice to offer that information to law enforcement agencies if requested as part of criminal cases, but that the images were destroyed after 30 days, as it would not be cost effective or possible for someone to store images of billions of pieces of mail. Well, sure. The USPS may not have that capability - but surely interested parties have plenty of server space lying around, right?
Assisting with surveillance is a common practice for the USPS, as agencies can also make requests under the program called Mail Covers for postal employees (i.e., your local carrier and clerks) to record names, return addresses, and other information from letters and packages before delivering to the recipient in question. However, as it is still a federal offense to open someone else's mail and would require a warrant to do so, only the outside information can be recorded. As you may know, the USPS even has their own law enforcement arm known as the United States Postal Inspection Service (USPIS). While the USPIS's main objective is to protect the integrity of the mail system to prevent it from fraud or abuse, and to protect the well-being of USPS employees, they are essentially sworn federal officers who carry firearms, make arrests, and) also work alongside other agencies as needed. What does that have to do with images of the mail? Not much, but it sounds bitchin'.
There are certainly practical and legitimate reasons for keeping historical records of the mail, both on the internal USPS side as well as the law enforcement side. However, the obvious drawbacks to visual images are that if someone is going to send something harmful or suspicious, it is doubtful they are going to put their name and return address on the outside of the package. While the process of scanning the images of the mail was originated as a result of the technology used to make the sorting work, it would only make sense to utilize those same images available for alternate purposes. The concern is how can this turn into unwanted surveillance for an unsuspecting person? What if someone is sending illicit materials through the mail and is being monitored and you just so happen to by a harmless Golden Girls Season One DVD sent from them off eBay? Are you being monitored now? While none of this really makes much difference to the common everyday citizen who is not overly obsessed with privacy rights, this simply points to yet another facet of our life that is under the ever-enlarging microscope. Everything is on the record.
I would be curious to hear from the USPS today to see if they are still destroying those images after 30 days, as was reported back in 2013. My guess is no - hard drives are a dime a dozen.
Addendum
After the writing of this article, there are now reports of a new USPS service called Informed Delivery, where the scanned images attained by the Postal Service can be sent to customers to notify them of the mail being delivered to their address. This has come up in the news, as people are abusing the service to sign up for addresses that are not their own in order to know what is being sent - for potential theft of packages left unattended. This indicates a further expansion of the use of scanned images by the Postal Service, now as a customer service for recipients to access and monitor as well. Guess they found some more drive space for those images.