On Tuesday, August 7, 2018, 5:05:46 PM PDT, juan wrote:
as a side note of sorts
https://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/03/us/postal-service-confirms-photographing-...
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"But Mr. Donahoe said that the images had been used “a couple of times” by law enforcement to trace letters in criminal cases, including one involving ricin-laced letters sent to President Obama and Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg of New York. The images of letters and packages are generally stored for a week to 30 days and then destroyed, he told the A.P."
[end of quote from article]
About that article.
I think it's curious that they claim to "destroy' the images after "a week to 30 days". If there are about 1 billion mailed items each year, and it takes 50 kilobytes to store an image (wild ass guess, and assuming some compression), that would amount to 50 terabytes of data: A bit more than 4 of the largest-capacity of hard drives currently sold.
https://www.wdc.com/products/internal-storage/wd-gold-enterprise-class-hard-...
Think about it. If YOU had access to this data, would YOU erase it, if the storage only cost about $2000 per year?
Jim Bell