6 ms·

About seven years ago, I was at a sushi bar and struck up a conversation with an older gentleman sitting next to me. He told me he was a developer and created s

by chime 13y ago

About seven years ago, I was at a sushi bar and struck up a conversation with an older gentleman sitting next to me. He told me he was a developer and created systems for USPS. I am always fascinated by the technology used in large scale systems so I picked his brain for a good hour. From what I recall, he said at the key distribution centers, USPS scans every single mail (in standard envelop sizes) and in under a second, runs OCR for the destination address. Results from OCR are matched to the address database and if the match is significant, the mail is automatically diverted to the correct queue. Now here's the fun part - if OCR fails or print/handwriting is unreadable, a photograph is immediately sent to one of the hundreds of humans waiting to decipher the address and type it in (think Amazon Mechanical Turk). The humans have under 10 seconds to read, decipher, type, and submit the correct address. During this time, the letter is held up in a waiting buffer and the moment the correct address is available, it is diverted to the correct queue. I asked him if that means USPS took a photo of every single piece of mail and he said yes, they had to, otherwise nobody would ever get any mail due to the sheer volume of mail they had to manage. I asked if the photos of envelopes were saved forever and he said, well, I'm pretty sure they are but I'm not allowed to publicly admit that. I know it's a personal anecdote but that was seven years ago. I can't even imagine what they're doing now.

eli 13y ago
Better OCR (and, cynically, perhaps a higher tolerance of error to cut costs) is making the human handwriting readers obsolete. http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/04/us/where-mail-with-illegible-addresses-goes-to-be-read.html?pagewanted=all http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/04/us/where-mail-with-illegib...
- jonknee 13y ago
  And much less hand addressed mail. It's much easier to OCR a printed label.
- dchichkov 13y ago
  I wouldn't be surprised if modern domain specific OCR can give you an error rate that beats that of a time-constrained human reader.
  - taeric 13y ago
    While I agree with you at the general level, it sounds like these trained individuals are ridiculously good at what they do. Even seven years ago, to be able to take a crack at an envelope in just 10 seconds and type out the result is impressive.
    - mortehu 13y ago
      And their jobs are getting harder: "It used to be that we'd get letters that were somewhat legible but the machines weren't good enough to read them. Now we get letters and packages with the most awful handwriting you can imagine."
ck2 13y ago
Except I've never, ever heard of this used to solve a crime. Definitely never used in court or we'd hear about it but they probably wouldn't risk the constitutionality of that. So they are just collecting it for the sake of spying on everyone. Lovely.
- tokenadult 13y ago
  Except I've never, ever heard of this used to solve a crime. Reading the fine submitted article would solve that problem.
  - swamp40 13y ago
    ...by examining information from the front and back images of 60 pieces of mail scanned immediately before and after the tainted letters sent to Mr. Obama and Mr. Bloomberg showing return addresses near her [Ms. Richardson's] home. Those are some powerful tools for investigators.
- anigbrowl 13y ago
  Just because you haven't heard of it doesn't mean it doesn't happen. Here's a case from 1970: http://scholar.google.com/scholar_case?case=17761844664611904790&q=%22expectation+of+privacy%22+postal+USPS&hl=en&as_sdt=2,5 http://scholar.google.com/scholar_case?case=1776184466461190... You'll notice that early on, it mentions Ex Parte Jackson, an 1878 case which established that the contents of mail are protected by the Fourth Amendment, but that the outward form is not. Mail 'metadata' has always been fair game, just as it would be fair for a police officer to observe your comings and goings on the street without any need for a warrant. Then there's the Postal Inspection Service, which is the law enforcement agency that specializes in mail fraud (perhaps you've heard of that?) and which predates the founding of the USA. I don't mean to be rude, but the fact that you've 'never, ever heard of' something doesn't mean anything special. You don't strike me as terribly well-informed.
DanBC 13y ago
It'd be more interesting if they captured the address the package is sent to; the return address (if any); and the post mark. As I understand it postal mail is traditionally given much stronger protections than other forms of communication, especially in the US. I'd be very surprised if postal mail was being intercepted and contents were read without very strong warrants. EDIT: It does sound like a fascinating system though. All that mechanical stuff; all those different sizes; all that paper dust! Postal mail is amazing.
- HeyLaughingBoy 13y ago
  It really is. I used to do embedded software for controlling mailing machines and the technology for paper handling is amazing. You mentioned paper dust: the printer we used was based on a Canon print engine with wipers added to periodically clean off accumulated dust and ink goo. IIRC, we ran a wipe cycle every two minutes to keep it clean enough to not clog the jets. It was a real problem because the ink had to be a fast-drying composition to avoid smearing as the mailpieces stacked up. I moved on before I got to work on the sorting machines: the intricacy of that stuff is truly mindblowing for a mechanisms geek like me ;-)
AutoCorrect 13y ago
this was a Linux system, I remember reading the articles taking about it (but it's been a while)...
- reeses 13y ago
  That one was for machine-printed addresses. I had the luck to hire the lead on that project in 1997 or 1998. The interview consisted of "teach me how that works." Edit: Ah, after we worked together it looks as if he went back to pick up the hand-written addresses as well: http://www.linuxjournal.com/article/2985 http://www.linuxjournal.com/article/2985
  - jlgaddis 13y ago
    Oh man, I remember when those dual Pentium Pro 200's came out. So much awesome...
kordless 13y ago
> I can't even imagine what they're doing now. Not delivering as much mail? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Postal_Service#Revenue_decline_and_planned_cuts http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Postal_Service#Re...
IanDrake 13y ago
I'm sure with the right light frequency, x-ray or other, they can partially read mail through the envelope. Not saying they're doing it, just saying it's possible.
- mpyne 13y ago
  Well there's ways to pull the paper out without disturbing the envelope if they really wanted to go that far. As it stands what you're suggesting is at least already illegal, FWIW.
  - jlgaddis 13y ago
    > As it stands what you're suggesting is at least already illegal, FWIW. Unless a secret presidential order established a secret law (declared legal by a secret court) that made it legal (but illegal to disclose to the public), that is.
    - mpyne 13y ago
      The "secret order" you refer to is in accordance with the public law, otherwise the "secret court" you refer to wouldn't have said that it's legal. Invading the mail, on the other hand, is quite explicitly illegal.
      - nitrogen 13y ago
        An undisclosed order that is in accordance with an undisclosed nonintuitive interpretation of the public law oughtn't be legal, and regardless of conformance to the USC, seems to violate the constitution that provides the foundation for the government's existence.
        mpyne 13y ago
        Edit: I wished I'd read rayiner's sibling reply elsewhere. It explains the point I'm trying to make in a fashion that's about 100x better. ----- To the extent that revealing an E.O. doesn't endanger national security or other legitimate government purposes I agree completely that it should be public. However I don't agree that it's safe in general to rely on a given Administration's "interpretation of the law". As Snowden has pointed out, the Administration can change... you should assume that what is permissible under the law and Constitution is actually being done, if that actually worries you. So if the law says that the Government can intercept foreign communications pursuant to a trap-and-trace it's probably a good assumption to make that the Government is actually, at some point, trapping aforementioned communications. I mean, if this was working just like a normal law enforcement scheme then you'd already have to deal with the possibility that the government is tapping a communications channel pursuant to a regular Article III warrant to investigate communications of a terror cell for months at a time. Presumably this wound theoretically still accumulate enough data (and metadata) to theoretically wreck your theoretical world should a theoretical despotism come to pass. What an E.O. should do is to define where an Administration will focus its limited resources in enforcing the law. Perhaps they will decline to fully defend laws that are anti-homosexual in nature. Perhaps they will avoid aggressively going after marijuana usage (would be nice!). But even in that situation, if you cross state lines to buy weed you're still technically breaking the law and should be prepared for consequences of that; the E.O. could change tomorrow, after all. And besides all that, what if they guy making an interpretation is at a much lower level. An individual cop might make a snap decision, do you expect them all to mail you a Policy & Vision Statement each month? Even if that did, it would be hopeless to try to push the edge of 1000 different "lawful ways to enforce the law". Assume anything the law permits might be done.... and even then, it's hard enough to fully comply with all the law, even the ones that clearly fall within Constitutional guidelines.
unreal37 13y ago
I'm not surprised, and I think this is general knowledge. When I move, I tell the post office my new address. They are able to reroute my mail to me (while the new tenant gets their mail successfully). The post office reads the outsides of envelopes, and understands that mail to the same address can be treated differently. So the fact that they send digital records of all mail sent to the FBI shouldn't be a surprise. But still is, somehow.
mcphilip 13y ago
In 2006, during my senior year of college, I worked nights at the Postal Encoding Center in Beaumont, Texas. The starting pay was $15/hr and encoding is a 24/7 operation, making it a highly pursued job by college students. It's true that every piece of mail goes through OCR. If that fails, it's sent off to one of the encoding centers as you described. There wasn't a 10 second limit to encode an address, but all encoder's performance was continually monitored and those that didn't perform quickly would not get as many hours per week. There were random audits done of a sample of 10 responses; over time your accuracy was expected to be 99%. In addition to encoding scans of envelopes, there were more sophisticated systems for encoding packages and magazines. Since there is no standard place to put an address on a box or a magazine, encoders were provided with images from all sides of an item, making the encoding process have two steps: finding the address, encoding the address. As OCR improved, the number of Postal Encoding Centers was reduced. The last I heard was that the Beaumont center shut down and there are only 5 left nationwide.
RyanMcGreal 13y ago
I wonder if they fed the human-matched addresses back into the OCR system to train it to be better at reading handwriting.
discardorama 13y ago
(Using a throwaway account) I worked on the OCR systems. Fun fact: at one time, the USPS was the world's biggest user of Linux in a production setting. Their OCR boxes ran on Linux (until they were replace with SGI O2 boxes at a massive cost... but I digress). Here's the path the mail takes: it is picked up by carriers from the mail boxes. Then dump trucks bring it to the P&DCs (Processing and Distribution Centers). There are about a 1000 PDCs in the country, I think. There, mail is dumped into a massive conveyor belt, where the first machine (AFCS, or Automated Facer Canceller System) makes sure that the mail is facing the right way, and is upright. Various heuristics are used for this. Here the mail is stacked nicely into flat boxes, vertically. Postal workers then feed these boxes to the MLOCR (Multi-Line OCR) machines. These machines scan pieces at the rate of 13/second. After being scanned, the letter goes on a long loop before coming back to the beginning: this loop, about 3 seconds (not sure about this) is the latency: the reading machine has this much time to decode the address. Also at this time: a fluorescent barcode is sprayed at the back of the piece, giving it a unique ID. If the OCR machine can read the address, it is sent to a bin indexed by the first 2 digits (or so) of the ZIP code (assuming it's not local). If the OCR can't read the mail, it is sent to a separate pile. Then a program called RCR (Remote Computer Reader) kicks in: a person sitting in some remote area gets the image, enters enough information to decode the address, and the results are collected (tagged by the ID of the fluorescent barcode). After a few hours, this separate pile is run through the sorting machine again: this time, the fluorescent barcode ID is used to match the results from the human, and a real barcode is sprayed on the front and the piece is sorted as before. Now, there are variations in the above, but this is the gist of it. Fun facts: the USPS aims to handle a piece at most 7 times. And when a piece gets jammed in the machine and is torn, it gets put in a "body bag" with an apologetic note.
- specialist 13y ago
  Great info, thanks. How reliable is the mail delivery? Do you know how much mail is lost? One percent, more, less? (I believe one kind of failure is called UAA - undeliverable as addressed.) I'd love to learn more, but don't know where to start. Some of us election integrity activists are deeply concerned with the transition to vote by mail (all postal ballots, no more poll sites). One practical complaint is our assumption that 1% of all mail is lost. In a big county like mine, that's 12,000 ballots. My FOIA requests were rebuffed. Apparently the data gathering is done by third parties, so is considered proprietary. (A nice dodge, illustrating how privatization reduces government transparency and accountability.) The best information I found was looking at court cases, where USPS' customers (eg bulk mailers) dispute the UAA, and don't want to pay extra.
logicallee 13y ago
"7 years ago they were saving 100% of the information... I can't even imagine how much higher that percentage must be by now"
- chime 13y ago
  I meant, they were storing then. Who knows what they're doing now. Analyzing, creating graphs/networks, sharing historical records?

by chime 13y ago

eli 13y ago

Better OCR (and, cynically, perhaps a higher tolerance of error to cut costs) is making the human handwriting readers obsolete. http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/04/us/where-mail-with-illegible-addresses-goes-to-be-read.html?pagewanted=all http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/04/us/where-mail-with-illegib...

jonknee 13y ago
And much less hand addressed mail. It's much easier to OCR a printed label.
dchichkov 13y ago
I wouldn't be surprised if modern domain specific OCR can give you an error rate that beats that of a time-constrained human reader.
- taeric 13y ago
  While I agree with you at the general level, it sounds like these trained individuals are ridiculously good at what they do. Even seven years ago, to be able to take a crack at an envelope in just 10 seconds and type out the result is impressive.
  - mortehu 13y ago
    And their jobs are getting harder: "It used to be that we'd get letters that were somewhat legible but the machines weren't good enough to read them. Now we get letters and packages with the most awful handwriting you can imagine."

ck2 13y ago

Except I've never, ever heard of this used to solve a crime. Definitely never used in court or we'd hear about it but they probably wouldn't risk the constitutionality of that. So they are just collecting it for the sake of spying on everyone. Lovely.

tokenadult 13y ago
Except I've never, ever heard of this used to solve a crime. Reading the fine submitted article would solve that problem.
- swamp40 13y ago
  ...by examining information from the front and back images of 60 pieces of mail scanned immediately before and after the tainted letters sent to Mr. Obama and Mr. Bloomberg showing return addresses near her [Ms. Richardson's] home. Those are some powerful tools for investigators.
anigbrowl 13y ago
Just because you haven't heard of it doesn't mean it doesn't happen. Here's a case from 1970: http://scholar.google.com/scholar_case?case=17761844664611904790&q=%22expectation+of+privacy%22+postal+USPS&hl=en&as_sdt=2,5 http://scholar.google.com/scholar_case?case=1776184466461190... You'll notice that early on, it mentions Ex Parte Jackson, an 1878 case which established that the contents of mail are protected by the Fourth Amendment, but that the outward form is not. Mail 'metadata' has always been fair game, just as it would be fair for a police officer to observe your comings and goings on the street without any need for a warrant. Then there's the Postal Inspection Service, which is the law enforcement agency that specializes in mail fraud (perhaps you've heard of that?) and which predates the founding of the USA. I don't mean to be rude, but the fact that you've 'never, ever heard of' something doesn't mean anything special. You don't strike me as terribly well-informed.

DanBC 13y ago

It'd be more interesting if they captured the address the package is sent to; the return address (if any); and the post mark. As I understand it postal mail is traditionally given much stronger protections than other forms of communication, especially in the US. I'd be very surprised if postal mail was being intercepted and contents were read without very strong warrants. EDIT: It does sound like a fascinating system though. All that mechanical stuff; all those different sizes; all that paper dust! Postal mail is amazing.

HeyLaughingBoy 13y ago
It really is. I used to do embedded software for controlling mailing machines and the technology for paper handling is amazing. You mentioned paper dust: the printer we used was based on a Canon print engine with wipers added to periodically clean off accumulated dust and ink goo. IIRC, we ran a wipe cycle every two minutes to keep it clean enough to not clog the jets. It was a real problem because the ink had to be a fast-drying composition to avoid smearing as the mailpieces stacked up. I moved on before I got to work on the sorting machines: the intricacy of that stuff is truly mindblowing for a mechanisms geek like me ;-)

AutoCorrect 13y ago

this was a Linux system, I remember reading the articles taking about it (but it's been a while)...

reeses 13y ago
That one was for machine-printed addresses. I had the luck to hire the lead on that project in 1997 or 1998. The interview consisted of "teach me how that works." Edit: Ah, after we worked together it looks as if he went back to pick up the hand-written addresses as well: http://www.linuxjournal.com/article/2985 http://www.linuxjournal.com/article/2985
- jlgaddis 13y ago
  Oh man, I remember when those dual Pentium Pro 200's came out. So much awesome...

kordless 13y ago

> I can't even imagine what they're doing now. Not delivering as much mail? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Postal_Service#Revenue_decline_and_planned_cuts http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Postal_Service#Re...

IanDrake 13y ago

I'm sure with the right light frequency, x-ray or other, they can partially read mail through the envelope. Not saying they're doing it, just saying it's possible.

mpyne 13y ago
Well there's ways to pull the paper out without disturbing the envelope if they really wanted to go that far. As it stands what you're suggesting is at least already illegal, FWIW.
- jlgaddis 13y ago
  > As it stands what you're suggesting is at least already illegal, FWIW. Unless a secret presidential order established a secret law (declared legal by a secret court) that made it legal (but illegal to disclose to the public), that is.
  - mpyne 13y ago
    The "secret order" you refer to is in accordance with the public law, otherwise the "secret court" you refer to wouldn't have said that it's legal. Invading the mail, on the other hand, is quite explicitly illegal.
    - nitrogen 13y ago
      An undisclosed order that is in accordance with an undisclosed nonintuitive interpretation of the public law oughtn't be legal, and regardless of conformance to the USC, seems to violate the constitution that provides the foundation for the government's existence.
      - mpyne 13y ago
        Edit: I wished I'd read rayiner's sibling reply elsewhere. It explains the point I'm trying to make in a fashion that's about 100x better. ----- To the extent that revealing an E.O. doesn't endanger national security or other legitimate government purposes I agree completely that it should be public. However I don't agree that it's safe in general to rely on a given Administration's "interpretation of the law". As Snowden has pointed out, the Administration can change... you should assume that what is permissible under the law and Constitution is actually being done, if that actually worries you. So if the law says that the Government can intercept foreign communications pursuant to a trap-and-trace it's probably a good assumption to make that the Government is actually, at some point, trapping aforementioned communications. I mean, if this was working just like a normal law enforcement scheme then you'd already have to deal with the possibility that the government is tapping a communications channel pursuant to a regular Article III warrant to investigate communications of a terror cell for months at a time. Presumably this wound theoretically still accumulate enough data (and metadata) to theoretically wreck your theoretical world should a theoretical despotism come to pass. What an E.O. should do is to define where an Administration will focus its limited resources in enforcing the law. Perhaps they will decline to fully defend laws that are anti-homosexual in nature. Perhaps they will avoid aggressively going after marijuana usage (would be nice!). But even in that situation, if you cross state lines to buy weed you're still technically breaking the law and should be prepared for consequences of that; the E.O. could change tomorrow, after all. And besides all that, what if they guy making an interpretation is at a much lower level. An individual cop might make a snap decision, do you expect them all to mail you a Policy & Vision Statement each month? Even if that did, it would be hopeless to try to push the edge of 1000 different "lawful ways to enforce the law". Assume anything the law permits might be done.... and even then, it's hard enough to fully comply with all the law, even the ones that clearly fall within Constitutional guidelines.

unreal37 13y ago

I'm not surprised, and I think this is general knowledge. When I move, I tell the post office my new address. They are able to reroute my mail to me (while the new tenant gets their mail successfully). The post office reads the outsides of envelopes, and understands that mail to the same address can be treated differently. So the fact that they send digital records of all mail sent to the FBI shouldn't be a surprise. But still is, somehow.

mcphilip 13y ago

In 2006, during my senior year of college, I worked nights at the Postal Encoding Center in Beaumont, Texas. The starting pay was $15/hr and encoding is a 24/7 operation, making it a highly pursued job by college students. It's true that every piece of mail goes through OCR. If that fails, it's sent off to one of the encoding centers as you described. There wasn't a 10 second limit to encode an address, but all encoder's performance was continually monitored and those that didn't perform quickly would not get as many hours per week. There were random audits done of a sample of 10 responses; over time your accuracy was expected to be 99%. In addition to encoding scans of envelopes, there were more sophisticated systems for encoding packages and magazines. Since there is no standard place to put an address on a box or a magazine, encoders were provided with images from all sides of an item, making the encoding process have two steps: finding the address, encoding the address. As OCR improved, the number of Postal Encoding Centers was reduced. The last I heard was that the Beaumont center shut down and there are only 5 left nationwide.

RyanMcGreal 13y ago

I wonder if they fed the human-matched addresses back into the OCR system to train it to be better at reading handwriting.

discardorama 13y ago

(Using a throwaway account) I worked on the OCR systems. Fun fact: at one time, the USPS was the world's biggest user of Linux in a production setting. Their OCR boxes ran on Linux (until they were replace with SGI O2 boxes at a massive cost... but I digress). Here's the path the mail takes: it is picked up by carriers from the mail boxes. Then dump trucks bring it to the P&DCs (Processing and Distribution Centers). There are about a 1000 PDCs in the country, I think. There, mail is dumped into a massive conveyor belt, where the first machine (AFCS, or Automated Facer Canceller System) makes sure that the mail is facing the right way, and is upright. Various heuristics are used for this. Here the mail is stacked nicely into flat boxes, vertically. Postal workers then feed these boxes to the MLOCR (Multi-Line OCR) machines. These machines scan pieces at the rate of 13/second. After being scanned, the letter goes on a long loop before coming back to the beginning: this loop, about 3 seconds (not sure about this) is the latency: the reading machine has this much time to decode the address. Also at this time: a fluorescent barcode is sprayed at the back of the piece, giving it a unique ID. If the OCR machine can read the address, it is sent to a bin indexed by the first 2 digits (or so) of the ZIP code (assuming it's not local). If the OCR can't read the mail, it is sent to a separate pile. Then a program called RCR (Remote Computer Reader) kicks in: a person sitting in some remote area gets the image, enters enough information to decode the address, and the results are collected (tagged by the ID of the fluorescent barcode). After a few hours, this separate pile is run through the sorting machine again: this time, the fluorescent barcode ID is used to match the results from the human, and a real barcode is sprayed on the front and the piece is sorted as before. Now, there are variations in the above, but this is the gist of it. Fun facts: the USPS aims to handle a piece at most 7 times. And when a piece gets jammed in the machine and is torn, it gets put in a "body bag" with an apologetic note.

specialist 13y ago
Great info, thanks. How reliable is the mail delivery? Do you know how much mail is lost? One percent, more, less? (I believe one kind of failure is called UAA - undeliverable as addressed.) I'd love to learn more, but don't know where to start. Some of us election integrity activists are deeply concerned with the transition to vote by mail (all postal ballots, no more poll sites). One practical complaint is our assumption that 1% of all mail is lost. In a big county like mine, that's 12,000 ballots. My FOIA requests were rebuffed. Apparently the data gathering is done by third parties, so is considered proprietary. (A nice dodge, illustrating how privatization reduces government transparency and accountability.) The best information I found was looking at court cases, where USPS' customers (eg bulk mailers) dispute the UAA, and don't want to pay extra.

logicallee 13y ago

"7 years ago they were saving 100% of the information... I can't even imagine how much higher that percentage must be by now"

chime 13y ago
I meant, they were storing then. Who knows what they're doing now. Analyzing, creating graphs/networks, sharing historical records?