Big Brother Going Postal?

by Zen Gardner

Unbelievable. At first I thought it was a report, then I thought it was a tongue in cheek joke. Then I found out the truth. This New York Times contributor/postal ‘counsel’ is making a serious fascist proposal in this op-ed piece. And he’s an insider.

Apparently, after announcing it had ‘lost 8.5 billion in the last year despite cutting more than 100,000 jobs’ (little hard to believe) it’s become imperative that ‘due to these “budget problems”,  and/or other beleaguing ‘efficiency’ reasons, the post office should join the phony “war on terror” and “be all the big brother ‘snitch and tell’ agent it can be’!

It may deliver in snow, rain, heat, and gloom of night, but the U.S. Postal Service can’t seem to deliver a net-positive operating budget. Even after drastically cutting personnel last year, the USPS still went $8.5 billion into the red, a budget gap that could lead to insolvency this year. But in an op-ed in Saturday’s NYT, Council to Chairman of the Postal Regulatory Commission Michael Ravnitzky proposed an interesting idea to help the Postal Service get back in the black: turn mail trucks into a data-producing nationwide sensor network.

Ravnitzky’s idea (which he’s careful to point out is his and not that of his employer) is to take the USPS’s biggest asset – it’s massive fleet of vehicles – and turn them into the most robust data collecting operation in the land. Right now each truck has a single purpose: to deliver mail. But fitted with an array of cheap sensors, mail trucks could wireless deliver real time information on weather, pollutants, traffic, road conditions, and even locate gaps in cell phone coverage and television signals.

Now that’s just a peach waiting to be picked, isn’t it? Big Sis Napoleon-itano and the New World Order should just jump at this.

The service’s thousands of delivery vehicles have only one purpose now: to transport mail. But what if they were fitted with sensors to collect and transmit information about weather or air pollutants? The trucks would go from being bulky tools of industrial-age communication to being on the cutting edge of 21st-century information-gathering and forecasting.

“After all”, it goes on, “the delivery fleet already goes to almost every home and business in America nearly every day, and it travels fixed routes along a majority of the country’s roads to get there. Data collection wouldn’t require much additional staff or resources; all it would take would be a small, cheap and unobtrusive sensor package mounted on each truck.”

This guy is the chief counsel to the chairman of the Postal Regulatory Commission! Can you believe it?

Not enough that Google trucks are scanning our homes and streets, Echelon monitors our calls, and Google tracks our email for the NSA…now we recruit the postman?

This elitist snake goes on to boast:

The key elements for the project already exist, including tiny, inexpensive G.P.S. receivers and radio uplinks, features found in today’s smart phones. The sensors would operate without distracting the drivers from their primary responsibilities.

Turning Postal Trucks into Mobile Sensor Arrays–(like recruiting our kids as spies…)

Again: Author?  Michael Ravnitzky is the chief counsel to the chairman of the Postal Regulatory Commission. What does that say to you? And he’s making this proposal publicly?