Amazing Technology

investmenttool.com technology journal

The post office discovered an amazing little bit of technology last week in the anthrax investigation. An amazing amount of data about the mail was stored in the postal sorting machines that moved the anthrax letters from Trenton, New Jersey to Washington D.C. There are several amazing aspects to this story. First, that almost nobody in the post office knew the data existed. Second is that nobody has raised a single privacy concern about this technology.

Seems that the sorting technology at the post office scans the letter, whether it be hand addressed or printed by computer. Take a look at your mail. See a lightly printed bar code on the bottom. Sorting machines prints that on.

These machines also store data on each and every letter they process. It was possible to look at this database and know every letter that passed through these machines before and after the anthrax letters were processed.

The FBI investigators have managed to track letters that passed through the sorting machines, one of which less than three hundred letters after the Leahy anthrax letter. Seems that two of these letters were delivered to homes not far away from the two mystery victims Ms. Nguyen of the Bronx and Mrs. Lundgren of Connecticut.

It is possible that the letters that were found with trace contamination contaminated other letters that the victims opened. Though this is just one of the contamination theories, it has credence. It is believable because the anthrax strain that killed all the victims was the same, whether the anthrax was found in the U.S. Capital, the Washington Brentwood facility or the post office in Connecticut. The same strain was also found in all five inhalation anthrax victims.

It might be possible to use this data to figure out which post office drop box the anthrax letter was placed in. This substantially narrows the field of possible suspects. It might even eventually lead to a suspect being arrested.

It should be noted that not every postal facility collects this much data in its sorting machines. Most larger facilities do have this technology. This means the government has a database of every piece of mail that passed through the postal system. They know who the letter was sent to and they might know the return address as well.

This could result in privacy concerns. If I send a check to an attorney, the government now has data showing that I may have retained a criminal attorney. Some bright guy might wonder why I did that.

I can understand this information being used for national security purposes. I actually have not problem with that. What is amazing is that almost nobody in the government had any idea this data existed.

Last Monday, the FBI, the Post Master General and several officials at the Post Office all told the same story. They all admitted they had no idea that the postal sorting machines stored so much data.

This is a startling admission of another failure in the government's investigation coordination. Timely use of this information could have led to surveillance of the drop boxes in Trenton, New Jersey and a quick arrest in the case. It's a good bet that who ever the anthrax terrorist was had no idea about this data. Hell, the government didn't even know about it.

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Shmuel Protter
investmenttool.com

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