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While certainly useful to three letter agencies, the original reason for imaging the front of mail-pieces is for mail routing. The mail-pieces that don't have

by pwg 10y ago

While certainly useful to three letter agencies, the original reason for imaging the front of mail-pieces is for mail routing. The mail-pieces that don't have routing bar-codes in the address areas get fed to an OCR system to read the address data (with a fallback to humans for the last few that OCR can't read) so the computer system knows where to route the mail-piece. In order to read the address text via. OCR one needs an image of the front of the envelope to feed to the OCR system. This new offering is just leveraging that scanning process that has been in place for a very long time. The biggest difference might be that previously the image went from scan to OCR to deletion and instead now they've decided to replace "delete" with "store" to make this new offering feasible.

koolba 10y ago
> This new offering is just leveraging that scanning process that has been in place for a very long time. The biggest difference might be that previously the image went from scan to OCR to deletion and instead now they've decided to replace "delete" with "store" to make this new offering feasible. And with my tinfoil hat on, I'm saying it's probably driven by requests from three-letter agencies. We already know they scan the covers not just for automated processing (which as you mention wouldn't require saving the image after the OCR is complete), but to also provide it to law enforcement. If public pressure is forcing those agencies to be more forthright with what data they're collecting and storing, it conceivable for them to push that responsibility upstream. If the USPS is going to be imaging and storing everyone's mail, there's no need for other agencies to do so. They can just access it on the fly. Arguably, the government would save money with this approach as well as I'm sure all three major agencies would want a full copy the data set.

by pwg 10y ago

koolba 10y ago

> This new offering is just leveraging that scanning process that has been in place for a very long time. The biggest difference might be that previously the image went from scan to OCR to deletion and instead now they've decided to replace "delete" with "store" to make this new offering feasible. And with my tinfoil hat on, I'm saying it's probably driven by requests from three-letter agencies. We already know they scan the covers not just for automated processing (which as you mention wouldn't require saving the image after the OCR is complete), but to also provide it to law enforcement. If public pressure is forcing those agencies to be more forthright with what data they're collecting and storing, it conceivable for them to push that responsibility upstream. If the USPS is going to be imaging and storing everyone's mail, there's no need for other agencies to do so. They can just access it on the fly. Arguably, the government would save money with this approach as well as I'm sure all three major agencies would want a full copy the data set.