On Tue, Aug 7, 2018 at 5:21 PM, jim bell <jdb10987@yahoo.com> wrote:
https://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/03/us/postal-service-confirms-photographing-...
"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
It's going to be about an order of magnitude more than that - not because of the size of the images, but because they're going to OCR and index all of it, but I'm sure they're already OCRing already, because automation. The images are pretty useless without it the indexing. But still - let's say that you're off by three orders of magnitude, and it costs $2m/year to store it, that's chump change for a very good surveillance system, and if you do network graphs and frequency analyses, etc, well, now you're cooking with gas. And, USPS might (or might not) destroy the data, but they don't mention whether or not they pass it all on the some TLA or other as well as passing on to LEO's on-demand. Wouldn't put it past them... Kurt