the tor scam - Re: AP deconstructed: Why it has not happened yet, and will not

[Kurt Buff]

On Tue, Aug 7, 2018 at 5:21 PM, jim bell <jdb10987 at yahoo.com> wrote:
> https://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/03/us/postal-service-confirms-photographing-all-us-mail.html
>
> "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-drive.html?gclid=CjwKCAjwhqXbBRAREiwAucoo-yp9zBDxr1hrojtP7nXAw8Trmtx4-9N8m5DAecI3hqQeTEyGeHWYjBoCg_IQAvD_BwE
>
> 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