Government Plans to Use Post Office Trucks to Collect Neighborhood Data

Forget the StreetView data vacuum scandal. If an idea proposed for the money hole known as the U.S. Post Office is adopted, your friendly neighborhood postal person may be soon driving a high-tech data collection vehicle that would rival anything Google put to use for the government.

“The service’s thousands of delivery vehicles have only one purpose now: to transport mail,” Michael Ravnitzky, chief counsel to the chairman of the Postal Regulatory Commission, wrote for the New York Times last week. “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.”

“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,” writes Ravnitzky.

He said outfitting the trucks would make “it significantly easier to spot a problem or anomaly” and the system “could assess road quality, catalog potholes and provide early warning of unsafe road conditions like black ice.”

Forget the prospect of weather forecasting or black ice. The federal government is far more interested in collecting data on citizens than it is on reporting road conditions. The NSA and the CIA don’t give a hoot about potholes.

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