Does anyone think it would be a good idea for the postal service to open all letters and scan them before delivering them? To me, that’s not conceptually much different than what the NSA is doing now with electronic communication.
There are techniques for reading your mail without opening. Developed along with face recognition and the address readers.
Some may be written in the code known as “cursive”. The FBI can’t break that code.
No but the originator still has full use of the documents. They haven’t been siezed, he released them to someone else, and sending documents can be a crime all it’s own.
We are already almost there. The post office photographs every letter and package that passes through its system and keeps it on file.
Does anyone think it would be a good idea for the postal service to open all letters
They did during WW2
Last century, when I was a little kid and susceptible to occasional parental warnings such as "You can't to that or else . . " and "You could go to jail for having a police-band radio" the Post Office would routinely route packages going to or from certain addresses for "inspection," which meant physically opening a package or envelope to examine the contents. (There was a term for this, but I forget what it was called.)
In those puritanical days or yore, they were primarily on the lookout for anything of a sexual nature, e.g., pornography, sex manuals, birth-control devices or information and even forbidden literature ("Lady Chatterton's Lover" I think was one).
Commercial packages were marked with "May be opened for postal inspection" unless the sender wanted delivery in weeks rather than days.
These days, I suspect the USPS has more sophisticated means of identifying suspicious packages than prying them open.
And considering the sheer volume sent out daily, Amazon would get a pass.
Raising the bar on declaring stuff obscene, violent, anti-this-or-that has been a mixed blessing.
Sure, dirty books, magazines and videos go through the mail routinely and who knows how many young minds are corrupted by their content.
On the other hand, putting a priority on intercepting dangerous stuff that can kill people would seem a better use of limited resources in this age of perpetual warfare.
Good analogy. However if someone is a suspected terrorist, then stepped up measures of security are required.
Which of course is the whole point behind controls over surveillance.